In 2007, a young woman with no prior experience in astronomy made a discovery that led to dozens of astronomers using billions of dollars of equipment to figure out the solution to the mystery. The young woman, named Hanny, and the object — whimsically named the Voorwerp — wound up becoming a fantastic demonstration of how citizen science works, and how it can lead to a greater understanding of the Universe.

My friend Pamela Gay, an astronomer and educator, spearheaded an effort to get this story out to the folks who need it most: kids! She and her team created a comic book based on Hanny’s story, called "Hanny and the Mystery of the Voorwerp" – you can learn more about it at that link. The comic book (a panel is shown above) will be premiered at Dragon*Con this weekend, but you can pre-order a copy for $5. If you’re an educator, or are looking to get your kids interested in science, you should check it out.

It’s a cute story, but also an important one. You don’t need a big fancy degree or even years of experience to make a big discovery. Sometimes what you need is a bright, curious mind, and the desire to explore.

This image is stunning. And not just because, well, it’s all explodey and stuff:

[Click to explodenate.]

The three panels show a 1986 test of a Tomahawk cruise missile. The missile traveled 640 km (400 mile) low over the terrain to detonate above the target, a decommissioned fighter plane. It’s pretty clear the test was a success.

But what caught my eye immediately was the middle panel. Let me zoom it for you:

[Click to hugely embiggen!]

[Note: added noon PDT Friday: There's a lot of discussion in the comments below on both the veracity of this test and my interpretation. I've been on travel the past couple of days, finishing up some Bad Universe stuff, so I haven't been able to look into this. So I admit I might be wrong, but won't know one way or another until I can sit and look into this. Stay Tuned.]

Now look carefully there. When the missile exploded, the expanding debris cloud from the vaporized weapon was probably moving faster than the speed of sound. Even so, in this second picture you can see none of it had touched the plane yet when the shot was snapped.

Yet look at the plane: it’s on fire. How can that be?
(more…)

Cool news, math dorks: my friend Jennifer Ouellette’s new book The Calculus Diaries comes out today!

I’ve known Jennifer for a couple of years now. She helms the Science and Entertainment Exchange (trying to get better science into movies), she spoke (wonderfully) at TAM 7, she was at SETIcon and Comic Con, and I also know her through her husband, cosmologist Sean Carroll — he blogs for the Hive Overmind at Cosmic Variance. Jennifer writes the Cocktail Party Physics blog and for the Discovery Channel blogs, too… and I am not ashamed to admit I have a wild crush on her avatar, Jen-Luc Piquant. So I was really excited to get my hands on an advance copy of her book, especially since I knew she could handle the topic well.

It was everything I had hoped for. Yeah, look, I know: it’s a book about calculus. But it just so happens to be a really good book about calculus! It’s not equations and homework — well, OK, there are equations — it’s really stories and fun and personal tales punctuated with how calculus gives us insight into the backstory. I know a bit of math, but didn’t know that calculus can be used to describe the Dutch tulip boom of the 17th century, or why you may not need to worry about a zombie horde (because by the time you know it’s happening, it’s too late to do anything about it except start getting used to shambling and eating brains).

Jennifer uses her great writing style to make these ideas easy to read and fun to think about. I suspect that if you like my blog, you’ll like this book. If math terrifies you then you can skip over the equations (though honestly, you’re missing out), and if you like the math you’ll love the way it gets applied here.

All in all, I recommend it. If you hurry, you can still read it on the beach during these last days of summer… or get her to sign it at Dragon*Con next week!

P.S. There’s a Facebook page for it, too.

Crispian Jago makes completely transparent attempts to get linked from blogs. The thing is, he keeps doing spectacular stuff!

This time it’s a metro-subway-style map showing scientists of the past 400 or so years. It’s wonderfully detailed! Here it is shrunk enough to fit on my meager 610-pixel wide blog:

[Click to unsubwaynate and get the 2Mb 4500 x 2700 pixel version.]

Each color track route represent a field of science – brown is chemistry, red is theoretical physical and quantum mechanics, and so on – and the time is concentric, with the 16th Century in the middle, and current time on the outside. Just like a subway map where there are transfer points, some people span more than one discipline, and you can see that as two circles connecting different tracks. Stephen Hawking, for example, is astronomy and physics. Here’s a zoom:
(more…)

When I posted the awesome video of a fire tornado last week, I had only heard rumors of such things. Apparently, they’re more common than I thought.

Here’s another amazing video, and this one is even better: it’s longer, and you can see the rotating smoke cloud around the column of fire!

This really is a fantastic demonstration of how microscale weather works. Imagine: a fire starts. As the air is heated above the fire, it rises, and the upward motion can be very strong. This leaves a lower pressure spot at the fire, and the air from outside the fire rushes in to fill the gap. The air is very turbulent, and as the inward-moving air from one side hits air coming in from the other, swirls can form. These get amplified by the constant gale of air, and rotation on a larger scale can get started and sustained. The whirlwind gets pumped by the hot air rising, and the next thing you know you’ve got a full-blown tornado of fire.
(more…)

American authors, journalists, and bloggers can breathe a sigh of relief: with broad bipartisan support, a short time ago President Obama signed a bill into law that makes sure that the awful and regressive libel laws in the UK cannot be enforced here in the United States.

I’ve written about this issue many times; skeptic and journalist Simon Singh was sued for libel by a UK chiropractors group for saying they "happily promote bogus remedies". In the UK, when sued, you have to prove the claim is false, the opposite of the way it works in most of the rest of the world, including the US. It should be up to the prosecution to prove the claim is true. So in the UK this puts undue burden on the person accused, an almost guilty-until-proven-innocent situation.
(more…)

I’ve been posting a lot of extreme close-ups of the Moon, but sometimes you can learn something by taking a step back.

For example, I imagine if I went out in the street and asked people what shape the Moon’s orbit was, they’d say it was a circle (or, given recent poll results, they’d say it was Muslim). In fact, however, the Moon’s orbit is decidedly elliptical. When it’s closest to Earth — the point called perigee — it’s roughly 360,000 kilometers (223,000 miles) away^*, and when it’s at its farthest point — apogee — it’s at a distance of about 405,000 km (251,000 miles).

That’s a difference of about 10% — not enough to tell by eye, but certainly enough to see in a picture… like this one, by the Greek amateur astronomer Anthony Ayiomamitis:

[Click to emperigeenate.]

Amazing, isn’t it? The Moon is noticeably different! He took those images at full Moon, but seven months apart, when the Moon was at perigee (last January) and apogee (just a few days ago as I write this). It’s part of a project he does every year, and it’s pretty cool. He was able to get these images within a few moments of the exact times of apogee and perigee.

You might wonder how the Moon can be at apogee when it’s full one time, and perigee at another time it’s full. (more…)