Superconductive Leon Cooper: birthday

Sheldon Cooper is named after two people: physicist Leon Cooper and – with apologies to Sheldon Glashow – the film actor and producer Sheldo...

Czech president's alleged high treason: a childish yet harmful game

Even followers of stations such as Fox News could learn about a story that makes my homeland look like a banana republic: Czech president co...

Sir Ranulph Fiennes' frostbite highlights global warming

There have been numerous stories of the same kind (even on this blog) but they apparently never stop coming. Sir Ranulph Fiennes (63) decide...

Learning physics is futile without practicing

LHC news: CMS released two papers with 20/fb of the 8 TeV 2012 data. Remarkably enough, both the dijet paper (Figure 5) and the dilepton p...

Mauritia: microcontinents must have been around for eons

And pairs of opposing large continents may have been more typical than a single unified one Tons of articles including one at NPR have bee...

A pro-firewall paper

The black hole firewall saga has continued with several new papers. Since the last blog entry about the topic, three Japanese authors pro...

Mauna Loa carbon dioxide: a fit

I wanted to find a nice function that gives a satisfactory description of the carbon dioxide concentration as a function of time. Mauna Loa,...

Unstable Universes: guest blog

Guest blog by David Berenstein , Assoc. Prof. in Santa Barbara It’s a fine day for the Universe to die, and to be new again! Well, maybe no...

Ludwig Boltzmann: a birthday

Off-topic: Yuri Milner, Facebook's Zuckerberg, and Google's Brin launched a Life Sciences counterpart of the Milner Prize, the sam...