Views Archive
The Barton Letters
There were some remarkable letters sent last Thursday by Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY) of the Committee on Energy and Commerce that raise questions about the intimidation of scientists who have found the twentieth century to…
L.A. Times's Experimental Journalism
Chris Anderson at The Long Tail has an interesting entry on why the L.A. Times’s bloggish experiment with participatory journalism went so wrong. For those not following the story, Michael Kinsley (the founding editor of Slate, now the L.A. Times’s…
Ernst Mayr on Aliens
Ernst Mayr, the greatest evolutionary theorist of the 20th century, died last February at the age of 100. Andrew Madden, our obituaries editor (yes, we have one) wrote a very nice tribute to his life and work in the July…
Does Design Matter?
What’s going on with Design when the use of publishing platforms to create websites and blogs is so prevalent? I’m not just talking about sticking photos in here or there (Hart, in his response to a question of whether or…
MIT Scientists Create New Matter
From the MIT News office: CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – MIT scientists have brought a supercool end to a heated race among physicists: They have become the first to create a new type of matter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature…
MIT Physicists Create Superfluid from Fermions
Physicists classify all elementary particles as either bosons (which have an integer quantum spin) or fermions (which have a half-integer spin). Ten years ago, researchers at the University of Colorado and MIT cooled bosons to temperatures so low that they…
Oil Chaos
A day after the Chinese government proposed to take over a major U.S. oil company, as Middle Eastern oil entities pump oil as fast as they can, as western refineries are stretched to their limits, and as record oil prices…
Iranian Text Messaging & the Masses
Iranian authorities are concerned over the populace’s use of text messages to bad-mouth politicians – and hard-line presidential hopeful Mahmood Ahmadinejad sent an ominous message to those using SMS when he said he had the names and addresses of people…
Kilby and Keeling
There are two important deaths in today’s news, both are of men who contributed greatly to their scientific fields. The first is Jack Kilby, co-inventor of the integrated chip. The best obituary I’ve read is by T.R. Reid of the…
Yes, Jason, Where Are They?
A few days ago, my boss, Jason Pontin (and editor in chief of Technology Review) posted a blog about the Drake Equation. The post was interesting, and started (as this topic often does) a good discussion. (Ed. note: The fact…