Finding Art Fakes through Computer Analysis

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a 16th-century painter from the Netherlands known for his landscape paintings populated by peasants (though you may also be familiar with his version of the Tower of Babel). He also produced dozens of drawings and prints. In the early 1990s, though, several Alpine drawi...
January 05, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

Ten Movies We Loved From the 2000s

The last decade has been a pretty good one for science in the movies (though there are exceptions, as we'll see tomorrow). Here are 10 movies we enjoyed: A Beautiful Mind (2001): This is the nearly-true story of John Nash, the mathematician who won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work i...
December 16, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Picture of the Week—A Fractal in 3-D

There is something we find beautiful about fractals, those curious geometric structures with repeating shapes that seem to go on for infinity (see video below). Perhaps it is because these mathematical oddities remind us of nature; river networks, ferns and Romanesco broccoli are all examples of na...
December 04, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

A Decade of Great Moments in Science

Has it really been 10 years since we were all panicking about the Y2K bug? Yes, it's the end of another decade, and as with any good publication, we're going to overload you with lists as we pause to reflect. What's first? The 10 greatest moments in science, in ascending order:10. Hurricane Katrina...
December 01, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Can Computers Decipher a 5,000-Year-Old Language?

A computer scientist is helping to uncover the secrets of the inscribed symbols of the Indus
July 20, 2009 | By David Zax

Robot Babies

Can scientists build a machine that learns as it goes and plays well with others?
July 2009 | By Abigail Tucker

Catching a Wave, Powering an Electrical Grid?

Electrical engineer Annette von Jouanne is pioneering an ingenious way to generate clean, renewable electricity from the sea
July 2009 | By Elizabeth Rusch

Using Math to Examine Iran’s Election Results

Statisticians and political scientists have been having a field day with the results from the Iranian elections earlier this month. Was the election rigged? We may never know, but there is enough buried in the math to make us think that it might have been so. Even then, though, there is also enough...
June 25, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

A Caricature of a Female Scientist

I hadn’t intended on writing about my Saturday excursion to the theater, even though the play, Legacy of Light, was about two female scientists; the play’s run ended on Sunday. However, I’m so disappointed, and I have to tell you why.The play follows two women: French mathematician and physicist Ém...
June 16, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Girls CAN Do Math (Duh)

In 2005, when then-president of Harvard (and current Obama advisor) Larry Summers posited that biological differences might be one reason why women have not been as successful as men in math and science careers, he was only the latest man to make that suggestion. Back in 1887, George Romanes declar...
June 04, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Crocheting a Coral Reef

I had no idea that crochet was best way to model hyperbolic geometry. To be honest, I hadn’t even heard about hyperbolic geometry until I watched the video below, a TEDtalk given this past February by science writer Margaret Wertheim. Her project—crocheting a coral reef—began in 2005 and was inspir...
May 13, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Learning About Magnets, Electricity and Acceleration at the Amusement Park

After mentioning the Six Flags America Roller Coaster Design Contest earlier this month, I received an invitation to Physics Day at the amusement park. I had to convince my boss I didn’t intend to ride roller coasters all day (unlikely, since I get queasy riding backwards on the Metro), but then I ...
April 27, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Female Scientists Aren't THAT Rare

Tuesday on the Freakonomics blog, Stephen Dubner posed the following question from a reader:I am an economics teacher from Alaska. I can personally list my top 10 favorite actors, top 10 favorite living writers, top 10 favorite rock groups, and even my top 10 living economists and top 10 entreprene...
April 02, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Booting Up a Computer Pioneer’s 200-Year-Old Design

Charles Babbage, the grandfather of the computer, envisioned a calculating machine that was never built, until now
April 02, 2009 | By Aleta George

Happy Pi Day!

In honor of Pi Day, 3/14/2009, I present the first 2009 digits of Pi:3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648...
March 14, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Under the Radar with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The five-pound RQ-14A takes high-tech reconnaissance to new heights
March 2009 | By Owen Edwards

Dispatch from AAAS--Origami and Objects that Cannot Exist

This weekend, blog overseer Laura and I are writing from the AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago. The press briefing began with four scientists gazing upwards. This would normally be odd, but when the scientists are all experts in origami and the ceiling looks like folded paper, not so much. "We're just...
February 15, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Does Rugby Predict Pope's Doom?

As I was paging through a special Sport section in a December issue of the British Medical Journal (the source of Tuesday’s post on noisy golf clubs), two words caught my eye: papal rugby.Those words were part of a larger phrase (the special and general theories of papal rugby) that makes no more s...
January 08, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Why Is Minnesota's Recount Doomed?

My friend Charles Seife is a connoisseur of counterintuitive numbers problems. He wrote an op-ed for yesterday's New York Times about the recount in Minnesota, which seems like it ought to be a simple problem but isn't:Throw in the weirdo ballots with lizard people, stray marks and indecipherable d...
December 05, 2008 | By Laura Helmuth

Diamonds on Demand

Lab-grown gemstones are now practically indistinguishable from mined diamonds. Scientists and engineers see a world of possibilities
June 2008 | By Ulrich Boser

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