anthotny | 4 years ago | on: Sci-Fi Author Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress
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anthotny | 6 years ago | on: Moondust Could Cloud Our Lunar Ambitions
Apollo 17’s Eugene Cernan, “upon returning from his last moonwalk, vowed, ‘I ain't going to do much more dusting after I leave here. Ever.’”
anthotny | 8 years ago | on: How the Voyager space probe's golden record was made
There's also a form for crowdsourcing a new Golden Record for 2017: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-would-you-explain...
anthotny | 8 years ago | on: How Gravitational Waves Were Discovered (2016)
Physicists at LIGO just announced another detection of gravitational waves: https://www.wired.com/2017/06/physicists-find-another-gravit...
Resurfacing this piece about the original discovery.
anthotny | 9 years ago | on: Predatory Journals Recruit Fake Editor
There’s some nice additional background info in this New Yorker article (which, full disclosure, I edited): http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/paging-dr-fraud-the-f...
anthotny | 9 years ago | on: What’s Lurking in Your Showerhead
But couldn't that just be the pipes in your building? The water comes from the Catskills, and when it leaves there, at least, it's extremely clean.
anthotny | 9 years ago | on: What’s Lurking in Your Showerhead
The presence of crustaceans has nothing to do with cleanliness. New York City also has famously good water, and it has crustaceans: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/nyregion/the-waters-fine-b...
anthotny | 9 years ago | on: Did Oil Kill the Dinosaurs?
Well, saving ourselves from the sooty part of death by asteroid, but not the acid-rain part. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
anthotny | 9 years ago | on: Did Oil Kill the Dinosaurs?
You could skip down to the paragraph beginning “Now, a paper just published in Scientific Reports…”
It’s only waffle if you know it already!
anthotny | 10 years ago | on: Gravitational Waves Exist: The Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them
The waves are produced by mass accelerating through spacetime, so in theory everything produces them—you, me, a black hole, a neutron star. As physicists learn to tune their instruments, more sources of the waves will be within reach. But you're right: the odds of detecting a signal this strong and clear right off the bat were low. If LIGO hadn't happened to be on when the waves reached it, after 1.3 billion years of traveling through the cosmos, they would've been missed completely. So this was a mix of extraordinary science and extraordinary good luck.
anthotny | 10 years ago | on: Gravitational Waves Exist: The Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them
As the end of the article discusses, this means that scientists have a whole new way of observing the universe. What we saw before was mostly along the EM spectrum—radio waves, visible light, etc. This is a way of looking at distortions in the actual fabric of spacetime.
Hard to say what the practical applications will be, but it's akin to asking Galileo what the practical applications of a telescope are. There probably aren't any if you're a 17th-century merchant or something, but a few decades down the line…
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“These are people who are obsessed with maximizing their impact on the world, she says, but who aren't sure they're going about it the right way. They ask her how they can foresee the repercussions of the things they will do. 'How would the inventors of glitter have imagined that they would poison manatees?' she asked. 'You feel this kind of paralysis.'”