I’m proud to announce my journalistic debut this Monday, a news report on a study which claimed to show that transcendental meditation decreases the risk of death due to heart disease. On Wednesday, my article earned a (mostly) positive nod from Paul Raeburn of the Knight Science Journalism tracker, a blog that “peer reviews” science reporting on the web.
Mr. Raeburn wondered why news outlets didn’t give this study very much attention, considering how dramatic–more to the point, how publicly funded–its results were. He also criticized what little coverage there was for being too credulous and not asking a few obvious methodological questions. I know this is old news now, but since I was one of the reporters who dropped the yoga ball (so to speak) with this story, I’ll try to clear up a few facts that were lost in Monday’s deadline shuffle. Info that wasn’t previously reported is in bold.
(You may want to read my original article and the study’s press release to get a few basic details. Don’t worry, both are short.)
(more…)
NASA's L-CHEESE spacecraft, a state-of-the-art space exploration vehicle made from unleavened dough.
On Friday morning, scientists will finally have an answer to a question that has plagued mankind for millenia: is the Moon made of cheese?
Many experts say that finding the fermented dairy delicacy is the first pre-requisite to future colonization of Earth’s natural satellite.
This is why NASA launched the LCHEESE mission, which will culminate tomorrow morning when a spacecraft propels a 2-ton saltine cracker into a frigid crater on the south pole of the moon. In the tremendous explosion that results, scientists hope to detect the spectroscopic signature of at least 10 kinds of semi-soft cheese.
“It’s too soon to tell what’ll come up, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed,” said a senior NASA official. “It might be a cloud of dust, or some pieces of pork paté. But what we’re really hoping for is a nice triple-cream brie, and maybe, just maybe, with a few slivers of manchego mixed in.”
After LCHEESE, NASA’s next step will be operation KMILK, a probe that will search for traces of milk ice hidden in lunar craters, according to the official. “Thirst will be a big problem for our astronauts. Cheese is well and good, but astronauts won’t be able to enjoy colonizing the Moon if there’s nothing to wash it down with.”
More info about LCHEESE can be found here
For those of you who don’t already know this IRL, I have now made the switch from being a science writing intern in Boston to a social media intern in Washington, DC. My new employer is Science Magazine, or more specifically, Science’s online news division called ScienceNOW.
Since my job consists of monitoring Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere all day, I’ve been on top of the science news cycle (i.e. surfing the web) even more than usual. Today has been a good day for wacky news, so I’ll start with the least surprising and work my way up.
4. Water droplets with opposing charges repel each other, as seen in the movie above. Read that again if you’re not surprised. I said opposites REPEL. Remember in high school, when you were taught that opposites attract? Well, not always. And the reason has to do with a complicated bit of physics that you can read more about at ScienceNOW. The weirdest science news after the jump…
From today’s NYTimes, on using glass as a construction material:
For flat glass, heat tempering…took advantage of one property of glass — that when it cools slowly it becomes denser. By rapidly cooling the exterior of a sheet (usually with air), the surface stays less dense.
This is about the process of “tempering” glass to make it stronger. To understand glass tempering, think of a steak curling up when you cook it because the outside of the meat puckers up (i.e. gets denser than the inside). Tempered glass is the opposite of a steak — slow cooling makes the interior denser than the outside. But because glass can’t curl like steak does, the outside surface simply stays flat under a constant compressing force. This makes the glass stronger.
Because tempering essentially creates an internal tug-of-war in the glass, it can react in interesting ways when the glass does break.
Tempered glass may take longer to crack, but it can still break. Because surface compression must be balanced by interior tension, when tempered glass does break it forms many more smaller pieces than untempered glass
An awesome example of this happens when you drop molten glass into water, to make a raindrop-shaped bead of glass called “Prince Rupert’s Drop.” The water cools the outside of the glass very quickly, making this the ultimate example of tempered glass. The drop is unbelievably strong, easily withstanding a vice grip and blows from a hammer. But it has a fatal and spectacular weakness, as seen in the two videos below: (more…)
I’ve taken up an old hobby again: rambling about moral philosophy. Science writer John Bohannon (creator of the “Dance Your PhD” competition) started a blog about bioethics, and I’ll be contributing posts and comments there.
The blog, called “The Electric Monk,” is a collaboration between bloggers from around the country who are interested in the ethical problems posed by advances in medicine and science. If you’re in a serious mood, check out my response to a recent post, “What is wrong with incest?” after the jump. (more…)