Science in the Obama era
Jae C. Hong / AP fileBarack Obama wears safety glasses as he tours the Chrysler Stamping Plant in Sterling Heights, Mich., during the presidential primary campaign.The economy and foreign policy may be higher on President-elect Barack Obama's to-do list, but science and technology issues are on the radar screen as well. Among the top tasks: taking the ideology out of scientific issues, and doing more about what Obama has called a "planet in peril."...(read more)
Scientific smorgasbord on the Web
Nat'l Geographic: 'Star Trek' shield may protect astronauts Slashdot: Does God exist? LHC forces odds lower Science Not Fiction: Michael Crichton's legacy Nature: The case of the missing lemmings ...(read more)
The lighter side of the election
Scientific American: Liberals vs. conservatives on humor TierneyLab at N.Y. Times: Take the political joke test NYC Resistor: Blue-light special (via Boing Boing) The Onion: Voting machines elect one of their own ...(read more)
3-D delights from Mars
NASA / JPLThis 3-D image places a computer-generated rover in the midst of Spirit's surroundings on Mars as it rolls off its platform on Jan. 15, 2004. Click on the image for a larger version, and look through red-blue glasses for the 3-D effect.When he was a kid, Jim Bell loved to look at rockets and astronauts through his 3-D Viewmaster toy. He grew up to become a planetary scientist at Cornell University rather than a toymaker - but he still revels in 3-D space scenes, as the leader of the panoramic camera imaging team for NASA's Mars rover missions.Following up on his previous picture book, "Postcards From Mars," Bell offers more than 60 of his all-time favorite stereo images from the rovers in "Mars 3-D," a weirdly wonderful volume that comes with built-in geek glasses....(read more)
Triumph of the telescope
Caltech / Palomar ObservatoryStars whirl over the 200-inch Hale Telescope's dome in a time-exposure photo.Astronomer George Ellery Hale's decades-long drive to build bigger and bigger telescopes is the stuff that operas are made of. The epic brought him in contact with the richest and smartest people of a century ago ... forced him to struggle against petty jealousies and personal demons ... and led him to grand achievements that some thought were impossible."The Journey to Palomar," a PBS documentary premiering tonight, touches upon all those operatic elements while keeping its focus squarely on the quest's deeper meaning: In the first half of the 20th century, telescope-building was the biggest science around."This was the equivalent of a moonshot in that time period," historian Kevin Starr explains during the 90-minute documentary....(read more)