Swans on Tea

General Kenobi, years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle to explain what a hologram is, and isn’t.
I only watched a few minutes of CNN’s election coverage before becoming ill (figuratively) and switching off the TV, so I messed where he called their [...]

Oh, wait. It’s just the time-honored (sorry, honoured) tradition of writing a headline that has the opposite implication than the actual story.
Call for creationism in science
Professor Michael Reiss says that if pupils have strongly-held beliefs about creationism these should be explored.
Rather than dismissing creationism as a “misconception”, he says it should be seen [...]

This month’s Physical Review Focus: Nanoparticles Stick a Perfect Landing
They found that for speeds less than 1.2 kilometers per second, the nanoparticle bounces off the surface like a basketball. But at higher speeds, some of the nanoparticle undergoes a phase transition to a compressed state called β-tin, where each atom bonds to six neighbors. [...]

Tank Fish at Partially Clips

I notice that the answers are posted for the “Presidential Physics quiz” in the NY Times (original quiz wording) and, well, blech. Sorta. I’ve read decent things about the Physics for Future Presidents book, but I don’t want this to be the example for “how to quiz presidents and justify the answers.”
QUESTION 1. [...]

Ran across the tube containing Standards in Science Blogging and My Inbox. I’m interested in standards of science blogging, so I gave it a read. The author almost gets it right when talking about the right way and wrong way to support your argument.
There is a right way and a wrong way to [...]

Today’s xkcd is about quantum teleportation, but the problem isn’t that journalists write the “same disappointed story” whenever quantum teleportation is being reported. It’s that they still report that teleportation is somehow connected to moving matter around, whether they’ve been waved off about it or not; the latter would be because they didn’t vet [...]

Giving your new results away too soon
[W]here do you announce your results first: in the title? In the abstract? In the introduction? Or, in the results paragraph? If you wait to long your paper will become a whodunit and readers will get bored and stop reading your paper. If the clue of your paper is [...]

Cryptophysicists
One major difference between cryptophysicists and cryptozooligists is that the public is generally able to perceive that the latter are outside the mainstream. Everyone knows from daily experience that there probably aren’t yeti or sea monsters hanging around. Modern physics is abstracted enough from everyday lives and intuition, though, that many people, including some journalists, [...]

A pretty cool experiment that puts a lower bound on a speed of entanglement has been performed. The experimenters entangled photons, separated them, and then made their measurements.
Physicist Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland split off pairs of quantum-entangled photons and sent them from the university’s campus [...]

Zapperz has a short post on an article that appeared in the NY Times, chumming the waters of fear about radiation from granite countertops. I see that Chad has promised and delivered a bit of a rant, pointing out that popular media could and should do science. The problem is that they don’t [...]

Dealing with Uncertainty at Backreaction, in the context of “science is never 100% certain” and how this plays out with public perception.
There are times when this seems to be a no-win scenario: if you fail to address the uncertainty and have to make any changes to your conclusions, you lose credibility, but if you [...]