Swans on Tea

Entanglement in the Macro World
By linking the electrical currents of two superconductors large enough to be seen with the naked eye, researchers have extended the domain of observable quantum effects. Billions of flowing electrons in the superconductors can collectively exhibit a weird quantum property called entanglement, usually confined to the realm of tiny particles, scientists [...]

The List of N Things
Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure—figuring out what in high school we’d have called its “outline.” Not explicitly, of course, but someone who really understands an article probably has something in his brain afterward that corresponds to such an outline. In a list of n [...]

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: How Science Reporting Works

The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get
(1): The longstanding facts
…
In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news [...]

What’s luck got to do with it? The maths of gambling
He wasn’t on a lucky streak, he was using his knowledge of mathematics to understand, and beat, the odds.
“Beat the odds” isn’t quite as bad as “defies the laws of physics,” I think. But exploiting knowledge of the odds to win isn’t beating the [...]

Low-Budget Fusion Reactor Could Generate Energy within a Decade
Could. If it, you know, actually works.
The biggest challenge with the design will likely be showing that the technique actually works; no one has ever demonstrated that spheromaks can be compressed enough – while maintaining their donut shape – to create fusion.
D’oh!

Tyrannosaurus rex ‘picked on baby dinosaurs and ate them whole’
Research into the predatory habits and diet of the biggest of the dinosaurs has concluded that T.rex and other members of its carnivorous theropod family preferred to dine on juveniles, preferably small enough to eat whole.
It shatters the notion that the giant battled with animals of [...]

“Filming in the lab” is the recent them at PhD comics, and this one grabs the essence. (Or you can start at the beginning, if you’re one of the type that needs to do that.)
I’ve been filmed in the lab and interviewed on TV once, and I’ve observed my colleagues being filmed and interviewed. [...]

Fingerprints and Grip – Wrong vs Incomplete
I saw the headline to one version of the linked story (Fingerprint grip theory rejected) a few days back. I didn’t delve too deeply into it, and this thought had not occurred to me:
What struck me, and what the article did not mention, is that glass is [...]

Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News
It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.
[…]
Among those articles were gems [...]

why you should honor thy scientists
[I]t’s not just zealots who will equate scientific methodology with theistic dogmatism. In an attempt to appear completely objective and beyond any charge of bias, some writers will give equal importance to every opinion with seemingly no regard for whether it’s right or wrong. They think that by giving a [...]

Via gg I see that there is a new vertex on the bologohedron, The X-Change Files
The X-Change Files explores the intersections of science and entertainment, regularly taking a look at the ways in which science is portrayed in film and television. Given that science is often the basis for provocative and compelling storylines, we’ll also [...]