I had a lengthy Facebook discussion with some of my friends from physics regarding this. The conclusion was that this comic assumes that there are absolute spatial coordinates which are sun-centric. However, in reality, the (more or less) inertial frame of the Earth is no less absolute than the sun-centric system, so there is no […]
Many people know (or at least, think they know) that we are lighter in the morning than at night. But HOW? Are we magically converting matter into weightless energy? Does it all evaporate away as water? Veritasium found this puzzling and decided to look it up and set the science straight on this. He’s a […]
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is a real superhero to science nerds everywhere — and now, he’s helping another superhero find his home! Tyson has determined that the planet Krypton is 27.1 light-years away in the southern constellation Corvus. And in the upcoming issue of Action Comics Superman #14, Tyson makes an appearance to help Superman […]
So the gender debate rages on. Buzzfeed recently posted an article that summarised the results of a research project led by sociologist Eliane Ecklund. The survey involved asking 3,455 physicists, from graduates through to tenured professors, asking them as to why women were so underrepresented in their field. They had to select one of the […]
Thanks to electromagnetic induction, cooking food on a levitating aluminium plate is something that can be done. Now how cool is that? At the Palais de la Decouverte in Paris, they showed me this experiment where a 1kg aluminium plate is levitated above a large coil of wire that is being supplied with 800A of […]
This cosmological simulation follows the development of a single disk galaxy over about 13.5 billion years, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present time. Colors indicate old stars (red), young stars (white and bright blue) and the distribution of gas density (pale blue); the view is 300,000 light-years across. The simulation ran on […]
Gravity. The stars in day. Thoughts. The human genome. Time. Atoms. So much of what really matters in the world is impossible to see. A stunning animation of John Lloyd’s classic TEDTalk from 2009, which will make you question what you actually know. [TEDEducation]
If you are mathematically challenged, your so-called pain should no longer be vilified – you actually do feel it! At least, as you’re psyching yourself up to sit in that chair in the exam hall to do it. Previous research has indicated that there is such a thing as “math anxiety” – that is, an […]