Blog Entry

I have a high-school friend who is living with a cancer that will ultimately, and perhaps soon, be terminal.

She has been keeping a blog in part because her voice has been compromised by the illness.

She is the daughter of a physicist, and she is a gifted writer.

Read on to discover her reflections on time.

What a treat. Fellow children’s writer Elizabeth A. Briggs Jones has decided that her many blog readers should meet “Dr. Fred.”

I’d still like to see the candidates speak for themselves on scientific issues, but the Physics Today blog has a useful posting.

ScienceDebate2008 is looking more and more likely as the campaigns of two major candidates (Obama and Clinton) sent surrogates on short notice to a hastily pulled-together preliminary session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. Senator McCain’s campaign sent regrets due to the short notice, while the Huckabee and Paul campaigns did not respond at all.

An article in the New York Times discusses an extraordinary breakthough in the physics of solids a bit more than 50 years ago.

On January 14, NASA’s Messenger spacecraft will make the first flyby of Mercury since Mariner 10 made its third and final flyby of the innermost planet in 1975.

And the best is yet to come. After a series of flybys, Messenger will enter into orbit around Mercury on March 18, 2011.

Scientists estimate that a newly-discovered asteroid has a 1-in-75 chance of colliding with Mars on January 30, 2008.

The last time Uranus experienced an equinox, planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel was in Kindergarten.

This time, at age 47, she is at the forefront of discoveries about its atmosphere and climate.

I’ve blog-bragged about my books before, but this is special. In 2005, I published a young readers’ biography of a terrific astronomer, Beyond Jupiter: The Story of Planetary Astronomer Heidi Hammel.

She is featured in a Newsweek article for November 26.

As most of my regular readers know, I like to visit schools because it gives me a chance to speak directly to my readers.

I’ve just set up a visit in the Cleveland OH area in May and would like to set up one more.