tingilinde

honoring a discoverer

The Royal Society honors Jocelyn Bell Burnell on the anniversary of her discovery of pulsars. A Nobel Prize came from it, but it went to her advisor instead of her - one of the most blatant injustices in the history of the Prize (and there are many). 

 

how does science work?

A review of a book that just went on my list.

a tip of the hat to Greg

 

imaging at the dawn of modern science

Very fascinating if you're into the history of science.

 

 

joan feynman

A very nice obituary.

snip

...

While there, her pioneering work on Earth’s magnetosphere led to her research into auroras, which her brother had introduced her to when she was a girl. He had woken her up one night and taken her away from the city lights to a golf course to show her the aurora borealis.

“He said, ‘Nobody knows how it happens,’” she recalled. “And I thought that was very, very interesting, so I ended up studying auroras.”

She was so excited by what she was learning at Lamont that her first impulse was to tell Richard about it.

But she worried that if she did, he might make the key discovery about the origin of auroras before she could, according to a chapter about her in a collection of essays called “A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention” (2013). So she offered her brother a deal.

“I said, ‘Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us,’” she said. “‘I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the universe.’ And he said, OK!”

...

 

 

a nasty accident

I posted a link to this great piece from The New Yorker when it came out, but it's worth a re-read in light of the 75th anniversaries of the nuclear bombings of Japan.

snip

...

A guard who was stationed in the room to keep an eye on the precious plutonium had little knowledge of what Slotin was doing. But when the core started to glow and people started yelling, he promptly ran out the door and up a nearby hill. Subsequent calculations put the total number of fission reactions at about three quadrillion—a million times smaller than the first atomic bombs, but still enough to send out a significant burst of radioactivity. This radioactivity excited the electrons in the air, which, as they slipped back into an unexcited state, emitted high-energy photons—the blue flash.

...

 

leo szilard

One of the monumental physicists.  It's remarkable how many great physicists and mathematicians came from Hungry...

a curious structure

devils corkscrews

snip

...

One of the most unusual fossils ever to be found are strange tall structures recovered across Nebraska, primarily in the state’s northwestern badlands and in neighboring parts of Wyoming. Known locally as Devil’s Corkscrews, each structure is the infilling of a left- or right-handed spiral or helix that can extend up to seven feet into the ground. At the deep end of the spiral, a tunnel extends sideways and up at an angle. These structures became exposed by weathering of the soft rock enclosing them on the sides of bluffs or ravines. They mainly occur in the fine-grained sandstones of the Harrison Formation, which dates from the Miocene epoch and are about 20 to 23 million years old

....

 

 

the first solar eclipse photo

Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski took the first successful photograph of a total solar eclipse on July 28, 1851.  A 6cm refractor was attached to a 15.8cm heliometer for the 84 second exposure.

 

other worldly minds

“There is a rumor in America that there are two intelligent races on Earth: Humans and Hungarians” — Isaac Asimov

The Martians of Budapest

a tip of the hat to Alan

 

frederick banting and insulin

In the form of an Irish sea shanty. This particular tune is from Stan Rogers - a much beloved Canadian folk singer who died in an airplane crash. Frederik Banting was also Canadian.