I Can Do Science Me

Bored? WoW no longer wowing you? run out of quests in Everquest? Second Life constantly crashing? Then why not do a bit of gentle galaxy spotting. There are millions of galaxies out there and still the best technology for identifying them is the human eye and brain in conjunction, more fun than looking at badly composed pictures on flickr and with the potential to give a warm glow of a job well done, please sign up for Galaxy Zoo



It's useful it's adding to the sum of knowledge and you don't have to wear one of those silly yellow tee-shirts.

HT to The Register.

Linkage and Learnage

Or Elementary my dear particle. As you may know I like to consider myself, basically, at heart, a scientist. I didn't get my degree but that's another story. Although I now slave away at the coalface of government contracting I still like to keep my finger on the pulse of what is going on out there in the world of hard science.

There are some fantastic science blogs and pods out there, for astronomy I've bigged this up before but Astronomy Cast is an excellent non mathematical discussion about our current understanding of the universe. Not only that their podcast archives are developing into a resource for anyone who wanted to know more than the popular science level but didn't want to/have the time to learn with the mathematics included.

Over the last few weeks I've begun to discover the rational thinking/sceptical blogisphere out there, it's a refreshing change after reading some of the brain melting numptiness of the American fundamentalist blogs that I read for the shear WTFness of them (no links I don't want you to damage your brains). If you are not already reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre you should be, also highly recommended is Respectful Insolence.

But to the proper linkage - via Cosmic Variance - The Hunt for the Higgs Boson

Good News About That Awful Poo Lady

That Awful Poo Lady has been forced to stop using the title Dr in her advertising by the Advertising Standards Authority on the basis that it was misleading. After all calling yourself "Dr" implies that you have a great deal of knowledge and understanding of the subject you talking about instead of fuck all. A nation, well the bits of the nation that cares about such things rejoices.

Read all about it on Dr Ben Goldacre's Bad Science Blog

I Hope You Will Be Wearing Sunglasses

I hope you will be wearing sunglasses at about 20:00 GMT today because at that point the Earth will be at its closest approach to the Sun. A whopping 2.5 million kilometres closer (roughly) than our average distance so you might want to make sure that you are packing sunscreen too. ;-)

Photo/Image provided courtesy of the Naval Research Laboratory."

More info here

Chilling

This film shows the distribution of Cesium 137 bearing clouds over Europe in the days after of the Chernobyl disaster. I was living in the states at the time, in the senior year at high school. I had class mates who had relatives in Ukraine. This being the bad old days before the perestroika, fall of the soviet communist regime and the breakup of the soviet union so their families were desperately trying to contact their relatives only to find when they finally got through that their families that they didn't know anything about the explosion.

One of the subjects I was doing at high school was physics, the teacher immediately changed tack so that we could study the causes of the explosion and rigged up the school's Geiger counter so that it was measuring the radiation of the air. Of course being so far away there was no perceptible change over the time that he monitored it. It was quite a scary time mostly because of the lack of information coming out of the Soviet Union, not knowing what was true and what wasn't or whether there were more reactors ready to go off like this.

Nuclear power is back in news as it is being touted as the only way to provide all our power requirements if we are to reduce carbon emissions. But it is so expensive, has a huge footprint in terms of time and when it goes wrong it contaminates land for centuries. Maybe the electric windmills and other renewable sources can't replace oil, gas and coal yet so we do need to have a nuclear power station building programme but we will need to be so so cautious in order to avoid future 3 Mile Islands, Windscales and Chernobyls.

Get Yer Free Darwin Here

If you are British you will no doubt have heard of this on the news already, but those rather fine chaps at Cambridge University have been really busy with the scanner machines recently so that we the general public can have free access to the work of Charles Darwin, certainly one of the most important scientific men of the last 250 year.

Because You Are Worth It

And now the science part.



Stunningly simple and effective this old film shows the difference between large and small.

As seen on Ben Goldacre's Bad Science Blog