Blog Entry

My latest book for middle-graders, Seven Wonders of Exploration Technology, is now available from Twenty-First Century Books, an imprint of Lerner Publishing. “Exploration” is viewed broadly enough to include the Large Hadron Collider and climate modeling.

This is a follow-up to an earlier posting about gravitational waves, which relates a bone of contention between me and another blogger who insists that gravitational waves do not exist.

In my daily Sigma Xi e-mail “Science in the News,” I received the following link titled “Science Not Faked, But Not Pretty” about the hacked IPCC e-mails.

Could it be that the scientists were too accepting of advice that they should pay attention to the way they frame their arguments for the general public?

Here’s a link to a BBC page that puts the recent flap over IPCC e-mails in perspective.

It’s certainly not a clear-cut case, but politics will make it seem so — in both directions.

It makes me think of Mark Fuhrman in the O. J. Simpson case.

When Pittsburgh Voyager began its unique river-based educational programs, I was in academe and was asked to join its Board of Directors.

When I left my “day job” in 1996 to write full-time, it was time for someone else to take my spot on the Board.

But I still have a soft spot for the organization, which now has a new name that captures its spirit of experiential learning.

The latest Science Shelf Newsletter is now online. It includes plenty of interesting titles, plus one I review negatively.

Ever since I interviewed members of the Alvarez team (who developed the asteroid impact theory of the great Cretaceous/Tertiary extinction) and Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker (of the 1994 “Great Comet Crash” fame) for a 1997 young adult book called To the Young Scientist, I’ve been following news of comet and asteroid impact events closely.

I haven’t lost any sleep over the possibility of a collision with the Earth orbit-crossing asteroid Apophis, but it certainly couldn’t be ruled out in my lifetime (though I’d be quite old by 2036).

Here’s a NASA news release with good news about that asteroid. Note that superstitious people might have been worried at one time about an impact on a certain Friday the thirteenth in 2029.

Following the release are specific links to a few of my books for children and teens.

I’ve updated my Science Shelf book review archive with two interesting titles, Pluto Confidential and Rising Plague.

Another blogger here has posted regularly with claims of theories that supersede both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. I have been his primary challenger, though others have chimed in. Ultimately, I have concluded that his papers are either erroneous or not novel. But at least he has offered a claim that can be tested by observation. Now the possibility of such a test appears to be closer at hand.

In the August issue of Physics Today, there is an article entitled “Iron-based superconductors” by the magazine’s senior editor, Charles Day. The magazine summarizes it this way: “For 22 years ceramic oxides of copper seemed to offer the only way to reach high-temperature superconductivity. Now, a new and unexpected route is being charted: through semimetal compounds of iron.”

It makes me wonder whether we are about to see a repeat of the mania of the late 1980s with the discovery of “high-temperature” superconductivity in a family of cuprate ceramics with a particular crystal structure that gave them the designation of perovskites.