TIME.com: Eye on Science

So Where Were We?

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:47:24 -0500

When last we met...or...whatever we do here, I said you'd have to register in order to make comments from now on. That moment is evidently here, or so my blogmasters tell me. It's to prevent spam bots from flooding the...

New Policy on Comments

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 08:46:53 -0500

From now on, everyone has to agree with me. OK, that's not the new policy, unless I want comments to drop to zero. The truth is that our beloved spam filter is being overwhelmed, so while lots of the stuff...

Dark Matter Made Visible (sort of)

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:48:07 -0500

Magenta-colored areas represent the presence of invisible dark matter that surrounds clusters of galaxies/NASA, ESA, C. Heymans (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), M. Gray (University of Nottingham, U.K.), M. Barden (Innsbruck), the STAGES collaboration, C. Wolf (Oxford University, U.K.), K....

More Astronomy Porn

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:08:58 -0500

These giant, glowing clouds of gas and dust are the remnants of two different exploding stars. /Gemini Observatory / Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS-South) Image No, the headline doesn't't refer to astronomers behaving badly—it's just that the pictures we're getting from deep...

Double Cosmic Ring of Fire...With a Catch

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:18:56 -0500

An embedded pair of "Einstein Rings"—in essence, a cosmic optical illusion./NASA, ESA, and R. Gavazzi and T. Treu (University of California, Santa Barbara), and the SLACS team The catch is that it doesn't really exist, even though you can see...

Cosmic Firehose

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:00:39 -0500

Composite image of a cosmic jet spewing from one galaxy and caroming off another/X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/D.Evans et al.; Optical/UV: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/VLA/CfA/D.Evans et al., STFC/JBO/MERLIN Artist's rendering of the same thing, so you can see what's going on/NASA/CXC/M. Weiss The most...

More Blogs by Scientists

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:27:48 -0500

Overlooked in my first post, added thanks to reader reminders Bad Astronomy Real Climate More to come, I'm sure...

Why I Hate Scientist-Bloggers

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:57:10 -0500

OK, I don't really hate them. But it used to be that science journalists stood between scientists and the public. The scientists did research, then we asked questions and translated their dry jargon and complicated ideas into scintillating prose. Sure,...

Carrying a Baby is Hard Enough as it Is

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:03:59 -0500

Artist's rendering of a pregnant Australopithecene, circa 2 million years B.P. /John Gurche Paleoanthropologists agree that the change from walking on all fours to bipedalism was what started our distant ancestors on the evolutionary trail away from the apes...

Girls Rule

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 08:29:20 -0500

Back in 2005, Harvard president Lawrence Summers made some less than enthusiastic remarks about women in science. Now he's ex-president, and while some blamed the political-correctness police for his downfall, last week's results in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science...

Let's Have a Presidential Debate on Science

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:08:26 -0500

Last summer I blogged about a meeting of high-level journalists and scientists to address the question of why Americans are so uninterested in science—even though it has a huge impact on their lives. One idea was to try and get...

The Addiction Wars

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 08:29:20 -0500

I wrote a post a few weeks back on a paper that described a step forward in understanding the neurobiological basis of addiction. In it, I mentioned the fact that understanding the underlying biology could help lead to new medications...

Another Insight into Addiction

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:09:12 -0500

A couple of months ago, I wrote this cover story on the new science of addiction, and one of the things I talked about was the key role of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Among other things, dopamine governs the brain's reward...

Black Holes Galore

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:36:54 -0500

The circled galaxies all contain giant black holes. / NASA/JPL-Caltech/ Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique Theory says that most of the galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang should have giant black holes lurking in their cores--but until now, astronomers...

Flash: Saber-Toothed Tiger Was Really Dangerous

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:00:32 -0500

When I was a kid, toy dinosaur sets usually came with a little toy saber-toothed tiger, formally known as Smilodon. It wasn't because the toymakers were Creationists who thought every animal that ever lived was on the Earth at one...