Swans on Tea

Fastest Camera Ever Built Uses Lasers
Spoiler
The camera works by illuminating objects with a laser that emits a different infrared frequency for every single pixel, allowing them to custom-amplify a signal that would otherwise be too dim to see.

Rush Holt (physicist, congressman) on reviving the Office of Technology Assessment
Op-Ed: Reversing the Congressional Science Lobotomy
Among the 535 members of Congress, there are three physicists, one chemist, six engineers, and one microbiologist. Most members of congress avoid science at all costs, and the handful of trained scientists cannot and do not try to inject the [...]

Happy Hairball Awareness Day!
(It was on Monday. Dang)
Hairballs aren’t just for cats anymore

Inner Ear ‘Rock Slides’ Lead To Vertigo
Experts who treat dizziness estimate that about 20 percent of all dizziness is due to loose crystals — or ear rocks — in the inner ear.

Physicists can geek anything up. Analyzing the sizes of the cats in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back
The Cat in the Hat comes back and gets small
Ok, so Cat A is a little different (I will assume that is close before – or close enough). Cat B, however, doesn’t fit the pattern I [...]

The Casimir Effect and Nanomachines
In London’s terminology, the van der Waals/London/Casimir-Polder/Lifshitz interaction is a dispersion force, but it sounds far more exciting and mysterious when called “the Casimir effect” and described in terms of zero-point energy and quantum-mechanical vacuum fluctuations. Cranks find it fascinating and hucksters profit.

Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion
“Tricks work only because magicians know, at an intuitive level, how we look at the world,” says Macknik, lead author of the paper. “Even when we know we’re going to be tricked, we still can’t see it, which suggests that magicians are fooling the mind at [...]

One Hundred Questions of Importance to the Conservation of Global Biological Diversity

Using geotags on Flickr photos to create maps and identify popular tourist areas.
Gallery: Flickr users make accidental maps

Skulls in the Stars: Mr. Faraday goes wild — with atomic speculation! (1844)
There’s discussion of hard impenetrable spheres, but no, it’s not a “spring break” exposé. Just good old physics.

Shock doc’s new electrifying party trick
The project, which Dr Peter Terren calls the Modern Thinker, involves passing about 200,000 volts of electricity over his body, a routine that transforms him into a human sparkler for all of 15 seconds.
Tesla Downunder

Scientists give a hand(edness) to the search for alien life
“If the surface had just a collection of random chiral molecules, half would go left, half right,” Germer says. “But life’s self-assembly means they all would go one way. It’s hard to imagine a planet’s surface exhibiting handedness without the presence of self assembly, which is [...]