In an investigation published today, Science reveals that a Caltech professor received a one-year suspension for sexually harassing his students. A physics professor was academically punished by his institution to protect students?! That’s not how this usually works at all! Thank you, Caltech.
The informally-named Holuhraun volcano in Iceland now formally bears the same name, making fans of naming it after dragons, witches, or internet service providers sob furiously.
Once again, a prominent researcher is revealed to be complicit in creating a culture of oppressive harassment that alienates women from science. Can we hurry up with the cultural revolution to ditch this bullshit already?
The New Horizons space probe is sending back incredible data from the Pluto-Charon system, even shaking the foundations of planetary geophysics. The spacecraft has the capacity to make another flyby of a second Kuiper Belt Object, with all-new data to shape our ideas about our solar system. All it takes is money.
Every geoscientist in North America has a favourite story of helicopters, bears, or both, but these epic field stories take it up a notch to nearly incredible.
Yesterday, John Bohannon reported on his deeply (and intentionally) flawed study claiming chocolate accelerates weight loss. Today, we have a new twist: The editor of the journal that published his paper claims they never really published it in the first place, despite emails to Bohannon to the contrary.
Scientists love their toys. Monster machines, delicate precision devices, even those finicky electronic brats that spend more time sulking in a heap of malfunction than collecting data: we love the equipment that allows us to explore the world around us.
Today, Mike Irvine defended his thesis in a pinstripe suit and scuba gear underwater from a dive site in the Pacific Ocean. With his committee connected by a livestreamed teleconference, the first submarine defense was a proof-of-concept for his research on how marine web cameras are impacting ocean education.
On December 6th, 1989, women were targeted, shot, and killed for being engineering students. Today is a day to honour women scientists and engineers living and working in Canada.
Should I be disturbed that the most compelling, diverse, women in science outreach video I've seen was produced by a makeup company?
Earlier this year, the world's oldest mountaintop observatory was teetering on dying off. Not due to technology obsolescence, or even creeping light pollution, but because the overseeing university decided it wasn't worth funding any more. Now, thanks to public outrage, they've got the cash to keep doing science.
An infographic at Quanta Magazine explains how scientists could've mistaken cosmic dust for gravitational waves as part of their special on the latest saga of the hazards of doing science in public. While disappointing, this just part of the halting, uncertain progress at uncovering the mysteries of the universe.
Astronomy loves acronyms. Some of them are evocative, charming, and memorable. Others are more laboured in their execution. This is an ode unusual acronyms, from the cleverly complex to the eye-rolling fail.
Is chasing storms ethical? After one profit-hungry chaser published the photograph of a dying child, it's time to re-evaluate if this is acceptable.
It's old news that science fiction inspires scientists, but it's downright adorable watching Dr. S. James Gates, Jr. retell the story of the first movie he ever saw. Spaceways featured rockets, astronauts, and a relatively diverse cast for the 1950s: no wonder he became a physicist!
Did you have fun as a first-person palaeontologist uncovering dino-eggs in the Gobi Desert? Here's another video leading up to that moment, once again from the Google-Glass First-Person Perspective
Find a palaeontologist. Have him watch a whole lot of science fiction time-travel movies. Guide him into philosophical conversations about pivotal moments and alternate history. Then set him in front a keyboard, and see what spills out about what he might have studied if not dinosaurs.
Watching Andrei Linde and Renata Kallosh hear that BICEP-2 found gravitational waves is heartwarming. But with a bit of translating of everything left unsaid, it becomes even more gut-wrenchingly awesome. Allow me to translate for you to see this through a physicist's eyes.
Today an engineer in Washington can be proud of doing a very good job. After noticing a crack and bowing in the structure, the engineer ordered the dam inspected and caught a problem before it catastrophically failed.
