Category: Blog

A new microscope at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has set a record for imaging the unimaginably small. Their new microscope (with some computer help) has a resolution of 0.6 angstrom. That’s small enough to see rows of dumbell-shaped atoms in a silicon crystal.

This looks more like a fantasy headline than an SF headline, but there it is in the New Scientist (well, technically, their headline says “Spacecrafts powered by thunder,” which is the first time I ever saw that particular plural, but I’m correcting it for them).

More Martian methane news: the incidence of methane in the Martian atomsphere correlates with water vapor: in other words, where there’s water, there’s methane. Since one possible source of methane is life, and life presumably needs water… Hmmm…

Perhaps credit for shooting down the Red Baron should rightly go to the anonymous machine gunner whose bullet creased the Baron’s skull nine months before his demise. And here I always thought the Baron was eventually shot down by a white beagle with long black ears…

The Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes are in the grip of an unknown force that seems to be holding them back as they head into interstellar space. Dark matter? A flaw in general relativity? Or simply a propellant leak? Nobody knows… (cue spooky music)

Nobody is sure what this is good for yet, but it sounds cool.

If shape-shifting robots aren’t science-fictional, I don’t know what is.

No, AMD, in this instance, is not the computer chip manufacturer, but rather age-related macular degeneration. My mother-in-law has lost most of her vision to it, and I, with my extremely myopic and astigmatic eyes, am apparently also at higher risk than others. Hence my interest in this new gene technique that is entering trials …

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Okay, it’s not really our space program, but we’ll take it. A balloon test flight in Colorado for the da Vinci project (an entry in the X-Prize competition that will launch from Kindersely October 2, if all goes well) was successful.

Apparently drinking can benefit your heart. Bottoms up!

Today’s two focuses (foci?) were editing the science column for online and newspaper (you can read it below) and getting my application in for the 2005-2006 Writer-in-Residence position at the Regina Public Library. Which I did. Throw in assorted mundane tasks and a lot of blog-reading, and the day went by. Tonight I held my …

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The stereotypical idea of hypnosis–the swinging pocket watch, the “You are getting sleepy…” patter, etc.–is so ingrained in us from countless depictions on stage and screen that it’s sometimes hard to take hypnosis seriously. Aggravating the problem, there has been no scientific consensus on how hypnotism works. That’s beginning to change: a new study is …

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