Swans on Tea

I’m sorry, this is abuse. You want 12A, next door.
Day of reckoning for doomsday lawsuit
Basically the decision came down to an issue of jurisdiction: Wagner and a co-plantiff made their claim under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). But NEPA only applies to “major federal actions,” and the judge said that the US contribution [...]

One of the questions one asks when trapping atoms in a magneto-optic trap (MOT) is “What shall we do with the atoms?” You often have an idea before you do the trapping — it’s not like we’re trophy hunters, trapping just to have something on the wall. Trapping in and of itself hasn’t [...]

The Moon that went up a Hill but came down a planet over at Bad Astronomy
[Y]ou have to look at something called the Hill sphere. Basically, it’s the volume of space around an object where the gravity of that object dominates over the gravity of a more massive but distant object around which the first [...]

Stealing bases - head or feet first?

Oh, wait, that was Thunderdome.
The Baikonur Cosmodrome at The Big Picture
When NASA’s last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space [...]

Journey to the Center of the Neutron
A neutron contains three quarks, and nuclear physicists don’t completely understand how these move within the particle. Last year, an analysis revealed a negative charge at the center of the neutron, and now an article in the Rapid Communications section of the September Physical Review C attributes this negative [...]

Chad’s got a post up about how Baseball Statistics Are Crap. I’ve got a different beef.
(There are, certainly, a lot of dubious statistics in baseball. I just don’t agree that things are as bad as Chad says but maybe it’s just that I’m used to the idiosyncrasies. I do understand the infield [...]

I’ve been adopted by three high school groups (so far). Last time I did this, there was a list of questions, so I got a head start on answering the ones I thought might be asked. The answers seem to have tunneled into the ether, however, but since questions about career path are [...]

Why government MUST invest in fundamental research
Basic research is not a place where “the market” tends to show interest.
Problem number one is that it typically takes 20-30 years - in best case scenario to see “returns” on fundamental discoveries. Often discoveries pave the way to other discoveries, and so forth, which eventually trickle down to [...]

Physics for Future Presidents apparently doesn’t include reflections.

Pick a lock. For fun. (It’s legal too)
The quick answer is no, we are not safe. The lockpicking community has managed to “tear down,” as they say, every single lock it has gotten its hands on except one, the Finnish Abloy Protec. And yeah, they are working hard on that one.
So now that we have [...]

“Jet Man” Yves Rossy Crosses English Channel Like a Human Rocket
Yves Rossy, aka Jet Man, zoomed into the record books this morning, flying across the English Channel strapped to a single jet-powered wing, with only a helmet and flight suit for protection.
No mention of whether he was able to catch the roadrunner.