Spring came late to Germany, but it seems it finally has arrived. The 2012 Riesling has the first leaves and the wheat is a foot high. ...

In expecto weekendum, I want to share with you the link of Regina Valluzzi'a blog Nerdly Painter . Regina has a BS in Materials Science ...

A recent arXiv paper provides an update on the cosmic ray composition problem: The UHECRs Composition Problem: Evidence for a New Physics a...

You might have read about this some weeks ago on Chad Orzel's blog or at Ars Technica : Nature published a paper by Pikovski et al on t...

It is my great pleasure to let you know that there will be a third conference on Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity, October 22 to 25, ...

In January, we discussed semi-classical gravity : Classical general relativity coupled to the expectation value of quantum fields. This theo...

The little prince Today, extrasolar planets, or exoplanets for short, are all over the news. Hundreds are known, and they are cataloged ...

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog By Chad Orzel Basic Books (February 28, 2012) Let me start with three disclaimers: First, I didn’t buy t...

I've been playing again with Google ngram , which shows the frequency by which words appear in books that are in the Google database, n...

Michael Nielsen in his book “Reinventing Discovery” relates the following anecdote from the history of science. In the year 1610, Galileo d...

Stefan honors the Easter tradition by coloring eggs every year. The equipment for this procedure is stored in a cardboard shoe-box labeled ...

The Quest for the Cure: The Science and Stories Behind the Next Generation of Medicines By Brent R. Stockwell Columbia University Press (Ju...

Some years ago, I attended a seminar by a young postdoc who spoke about an extension of the standard model of particle physics. Known as “ph...

In the past month, Lara and Gloria have learned to learn. They try to copy and repeat everything we do. Lara surprised me by grabbing a brus...

A group of computer scientists from Rutgers university have published a software intended for crowd-sourcing the ideal candidate. "We w...

A recurrent theme on this blog is the danger of attempting to measure scientific success by an oversimplified scale, and then forcing res...

It's been a year since the New York Times set up a paywall that restricts access to their online content. 20 items per month are free, m...

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science By Michael Nielsen Princeton University Press (October 3, 2011) Michael Nielsen is o...

When I read Dawkin's "God Delusion" some years ago, I had very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think he has a good point t...

The German "Bildungsbericht 2010" (report on education), has a table on the dropout rates by field that I thought would be of inte...