[Update below]

One of the biggest ethical dilemmas facing science is that between their desire for free and open access to information and their desire to not cause harm.

Back in 2003, I assigned this essay prompt to my class to help them grapple with some of ethical issues that scientists face [Read more…]

In addition to invisible cars, we now also have at least two prototypes of flying cars. [Read more…]

Who amongst us have not thought about what it might be to be invisible? Well, the engineers at Mercedes Benz have found a way to make a car (almost) invisible. Clever, though likely expensive.

The pressure to be the first with a new discovery is resulting in an increasing number of authors rushing to print with results that later turn out to be not true. In most cases, this is due to cutting corners, sloppiness, or not exercising sufficient skepticism about one’s own work. In a few cases, it is because of outright fraud. [Read more…]

The BBC showed a tiny bit of footage from the Challenger Deep mission. It is not very exciting, though. It may be that they are reserving the better footage for a National geographic special later.

One of the tenets of science is that the results be reproducible. One consequence of this maxim is that any paper that is published should have sufficient information that would enable anyone who wishes to do so to replicate the results. But there is no real incentive for people to try and replicate the work of others. It takes a lot of time and effort and one cannot publish a confirmation of someone else’s result unless the original result was so revolutionary that supportive evidence is called for. The cold fusion and the faster-than-light neutrino stories were examples of such high-profile cases. [Read more…]

Last Sunday, film director James Cameron became just the third person to go to the deepest part of the ocean, in the region known as Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench. He did this in an updated version of the 1960 expedition to the same spot in the bathyscaphe Trieste. [Read more…]

Today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer front page headline is that the past winter was the warmest on record ever since data was kept beginning 141 years ago, being a whopping eight degrees higher than average. This past week the daytime highs have been in the mid-70s, when the normal temperatures should be in the mid-40s. Yesterday it was over 80 degrees. People are wandering around in shorts and t-shirts, unthinkable for March. [Read more…]

Helium is extremely valuable for research and technology because it boils at the low temperature of -269^oC, close to the lowest attainable temperature known as absolute zero (-273^oC) and thus is used in its liquid form whenever extremely low temperatures are required. [Read more…]