Don Hancock, the watchdog: Hancock is famously ascetic, receiving a salary of $9,000 a year for his work. He is a religious man, the son of a minister, and is active in the University Heights United Methodist Church, which is within walking distance of the modest university district apartment where he lives. “We’re all children …
I still do write about science now and then: In an unused alcove at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Stanford physicist Giorgio Gratta and his colleagues have built a high-tech lab to try to measure the weight of what scientists call “the little neutral one,” one of the most mysterious of the tiny subatomic particles …
David Glenn had a fascinating piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education last week about the struggle by academic economists to be relevant in the current fiscal crisis: [N]ow that the dust is beginning to settle in Washington, many academic economists have the gnawing feeling that during moments of crisis, they don’t have much ability …
Lab May Be Nuke Center Federal officials will unveil a proposal today to make Los Alamos National Laboratory the nation’s center for nuclear weapons plutonium research, consolidating work now done at other sites around the country. The proposal, to be unveiled at a news conference in Oak Ridge, Tenn., lays out a road map for …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Plutonium Edition’ »
From my favorite Rocky Mountain rock-banger: I suppose I could have called a cab. But I’m a geologist. Cabs are for econ majors.
Great video by Mark Betancourt on the threat to the deserts of Southern Arizona posed by invasive buffelgrass: more info
The science communication minefield. (And a shout out to Dot Earth readers who somehow found their way here on this fine summer afternoon – it’s nice out today! Quit the keyboard and go out and play!)
stuff I wrote elsewhere: You will see them most any evening these days in Chris Witt’s Albuquerque backyard: the darting, diving, buzzing hummingbird and the aloof nighthawk, feasting on insects in the dim distance. If you were building the bird family tree, you would have no reason to think the two were close kin. But …
The folks at the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre have a paper in the June 17 EOS (sorry, couldn’t find it on line) about their use of web traffic spikes to quickly locate and learn about earthquakes. Swarms of web users quickly turn to the web after a quake, they write, and the location information gleaned from …
Nate Silver, a statistcis guy better known for his baseball work, has turned his skills to the world of politics. (h/t Dan McKay, who is also the one who turned me on to Silver’s baseball stuff)