Psych of Science: Hello World
Hello, world. 🙂 I’m filing this post under a new category on Is Nerd called Psych of Science. A dull name but it’ll do. This category will host my personal reflections on the science in the stories I’ve…
May 2014
Rocky exoplanets only get so big before they get gassy
By the time the NASA Kepler mission failed in 2013, it had gathered evidence that there were at least 962 exoplanets in 76 stellar systems, not to mention the final word is awaited on 2,900 more.…
Replication studies, ceiling effects, and the psychology of science
On May 25, I found Erika Salomon’s tweet: Excellent comment thread on replication going on at the SPSP blog http://t.co/9dI72z0LGL — Erika Salomon (@ecsalomon) May 25, 2014 The story started when the journal Social Psychology decided to…
All ice that falls is not an avalanche
Note: Updated with quotes from Patrick Wagnon, ICIMOD On April 18, an avalanche on Mount Everest killed 16 Nepalese guides. By the end of the month, 13 bodies had been recovered. The search for the…
The violent history of the Chelyabinsk meteorite
The Copernican May 22, 2014 With the second largest air burst recorded in history, a meteorite exploded over the southern Ural region of Russia in February 2013 and crashed near the city of Chelyabinsk. During its journey through…
A crisis of commas
(Update: Includes Gopal Gandhi’s reply.) Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s lead in The Hindu, ‘An open letter to Narendra Modi‘, was a wonderful read – as if from the Keeper of the Nation’s Conscience to the Executor of…
Metal, flesh and monochrome
Sunday Magazine May 18, 2014 Hans Rudolf Giger, the Swiss artist who conceived of the alien xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), died on May 12 at the age of 84 in Zurich. Here was…
‘Free Indian science’: Responses, rebuttals and retrenchments
In the April 3 issue of Nature, Joseph Mathai and Andrew Robinson published a Comment on the afflictions of scientific research in India – and found the interference of bureaucracy to be chief among all ills. Most…
If prey can eat predators, we’re ignoring evolution
The half-century old mathematics that ecologists use to understand how predator and prey populations rise and fall has received a revamp. Two scientists from Georgia Tech did this by crediting evolution for what it is but…
The magnetic sky
On May 6, the team behind the now-inoperative Planck space telescope released a map of the magnetic field pervading the Milky Way galaxy. Titled ‘Milky Way’s Magnetic Fingerprint’, the map incorporates two textures to visualize…
Smaller dinos were harder to wipe out, and they’re still around
The asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs 66 million years ago didn’t get them all. Some of them survive to this day in the form of birds, and they may have made it because they got…
The secrets of how planets form
Astronomers who were measuring the length of one day on an exoplanet for the first time were in for a surprise: it was shorter than any planet’s in the Solar System. Beta Pictoris b, orbiting…