Tag Archives: nonfiction

Where’s my robot?

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As a kid who grew up obsessed with robots, I have to wonder why I’m still mowing my lawn or grocery shopping. Where’s my personal robot? Perhaps the same place my flying car got lost. Oh well. More seriously, we are on the verge of some very cool robotic things. I had the opportunity to …

Alien Radio

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No, I’m not talking about Orson Welles invading homes with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast (something I imagine would spread on social media today). I’m talking about radio signals from space finally resolving the Fermi Paradox: Where are all the aliens? Radio signals abound in space from natural phenomena, so an alien signal …

Image of a Black Hole Event Horizon

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First image from the Event Horizon Telescope, a global collaboration of radio telescopes from around the world, all synthesized into one big virtual telescope. The whole point was to find out what a black hole looks like, and now we have it. This is a bit blurry and low-resolution, but still amazing when you realize …

The Science of Memory Implants

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A recent article talks about MIT researchers Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu, who successfully implanted a false memory into the mind of a mouse. This is the real world catching up with science fiction, where the possibility of implanted memories has been around since Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series in the 1940’s. In fact, I used …

Why Scientists are Allergic to Statistics

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This article in Medical Xpress addresses a huge pet peeve of mine. Scientists largely suck at statistics! Especially for experimental scientists, this is insane. Yet I cannot express how frustrating it has been to me throughout my career as an experimental scientist to see study after study proven invalid because the statistics were botched. And I’m not …

Book Review of Mary’s Monster

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Mary’s Monster by Lita Judge is a book that defies category. This is too bad, because it will get categorized anyway, which means many people will miss it. I can’t express how sad this is, because Mary’s Monster is an otherworldly great book! If you were to ask me what type of book, well…that’s where …

Mars Terraforming Possible

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I recently saw a banner headline on a social media site (which shall remain nameless) that said: “Mars Terraforming Not Possible.” This instantly annoyed me. I am familiar with the science, and happen to know that terraforming Mars is within the realm of future science. So, I followed the link and found an article titled: …

Entanglement a Permanent Feature of Reality

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A new paper presents a mathematical proof that entanglement isn’t just a weirdness unique to quantum theory, but something that is a necessary feature of any theory that describes the universe we know. If you remember my earlier blog post about entanglement, you’ll know that I’m obsessed by it. If not, then I’ll quote myself …

Robots in your blood

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Nanobots (very small robots, potentially as tiny as molecules) have been a staple of science fiction for decades. But, despite massive investment in scientific research that has produced amazing things, actual nanobots haven’t made it into the real world. However, that may be about to change. This article talks about research at the University of California …