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Ten Science Stories You Should Have Read
Is your office rather empty this week? Looking for something to read to fill the time? How about some great science and nature stories from Smithsonian? Here are my ten favorites from the past year:The Truth About Lions (January): Staff writer Abigail Tucker visits Craig Packer, who has been runnin...
December 28, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Cats Defy Gravity to Take a Sip
The 1940 documentary short "Quicker'n a Wink" fascinated people with its slow-motion imagery of things like the beating of a hummingbird's wings; it won a 1941 Academy Award. One of the revelations from the movie was that a cat curls its tongue backwards into a "J" when it goes to take a drink of l...
November 12, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Replace the Kilogram!
Here's an easy question: What is a kilogram?A. 1000 gramsB. a standard unit of mass (often ignored in the United States)C. a platinum-iridium cylinder kept in a vault in Sèvres, FranceD. all of the aboveThe answer is D, of course. And that's a problem for the scientists in charge of the science of ...
November 03, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Looking for Neutrinos, Nature's Ghost Particles
To study some of the most elusive particles, physicists have built detectors in abandoned mines, tunnels and Antarctic ice
November 2010 |
By Ann Finkbeiner
Comedians Discussing Chaos Theory? Only on British TV
One of the things I love about visiting the U.K. is British television. Specifically what my friend calls "quiz shows." That's not quite the right name for them, though, because they usually consist of a panel (or two) of comedians discussing anything from current events to music to natural history...
October 25, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Many Faces of Carbon
Yesterday the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that this year's Nobel Prize in Physics will go to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene." Graphene is one of many allotropes, or forms, of the element carbon. Car...
October 06, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Science Expressed in Dance
Graduate students spend years researching sometimes obscure topics, writing page after page of text, and then bundling it into a huge dissertation before they can receive a Ph.D. And then someone asks them to express all that work and discovery in dance.Science has asked that three times now, and t...
September 20, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Science of Football
A roundup of how scientists explain America's most popular sport
September 09, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Calculus Diaries
Though I was a very good at math in school, I usually found the subject incredibly boring, so much so that I often slept through class (teachers didn't mind as long as I aced the exams). The one exception was a college math course for biologists that gave us real-world problems like figuring out th...
August 31, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Saturn’s Polar Hexagon
This is definitely one of our solar system's weirder features: a hexagon that circles the north pole of Saturn (image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona). The shape isn't carved into the planet's surface; it's a constant feature in the atmosphere. It has puzzled scientists since it was first sp...
April 09, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe
At the South Pole, astronomers try to unravel a force greater than gravity that will determine the fate of the cosmos
April 2010 |
By Richard Panek
Flowers in an Unexpected Place
The winners of the 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge—an annual contest sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science—were announced last week. The image above, "Flower Power" from Russell Taylor, Briana K. Whitaker and Briana L. Carstens of th...
February 26, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Science of the Olympics
I've always been a fan of the Winter Olympics, but a bout with the flu in 2002 that kept me at home watching TV for a week made me an addict. But it's not just about watching hours of skiing and skating. There's science, too, and it seems to be everywhere this year. Here are some good resources and...
February 17, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Black Hole Rap
I've been reading all the news about the Large Hadron Collider for months, but apparently I missed the most important bit about the LHC: the project has its very own rapper, ATLAS e-News science writer Katherine McAlpine, a.k.a. "AlpineKat." Her Large Hadron Rap went viral, with more than 5.5 milli...
January 25, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Pizza Tossing Physics Gives Insight to Mini Motors
Who would have thought there would be a link between pizza tossing and miniature motors?“At first it started from a conversation I had with a colleague, Dr. Heidi Forde from medicine here at Monash University,” James Friend, coauthor of the study, told PhysOrg.com. “She couldn't understand how our ...
January 06, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Nine Science Stories You Should Have Read This Year
It's also been a good year for science stories in Smithsonian magazine, including our special issue, Exploring the Frontiers of Science. Here are nine you should read if you haven't already:Gene Therapy in a New Light: A husband-and-wife team's experimental genetic treatment for blindness is renewi...
December 30, 2009 |
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
Fun with Science Games
Since it's Monday and none of us really wants to settle in and work yet, I thought I'd share some of my favorite science-themed (and science-ish) computer games with you:The Eyeballing Game: How well do you perceive shapes? Can you find the center of a circle or complete a parallelogram? The better...
August 31, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
An Honor and a Party for Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking, the renowned theoretical physicist from Great Britain, was one of two scientists among yesterday's recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Here's what President Obama had to say about Hawking:Professor Stephen Hawking was a brilliant man and a mediocre student when he lost...
August 13, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
An Explanation for the Missing Sunspots
I bet that most of you don’t know that the sunspots are missing. That’s okay. I’m sure many people don’t realize that the sun is more than just a ball of fire: it has a complex internal structure, features that vary based on multi-year cycles, and it can create solar storms that knock out power and...
June 18, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
