Category Archives: Electromagnetism

Press Release: New Imaging Method Reveals Cellular Secrets

Sacharomyces cerevisiae cells. Image courtesy Wikipedia Photo/Masur.
Sacharomyces cerevisiae cells. Image courtesy Wikipedia Photo/Masur.

Researchers from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and the University of Colorado Boulder have combined two optical systems to get around the natural limits of optical microscopes, which usually cannot see objects smaller than the wavelengths of light. Using this method, the team found that spindle pole bodies in yeast — tiny, tube-shaped structures essential to cell division — duplicate and form some structures at different times than once thought.

(This is one of a series of press releases I am writing for Stowers. They are a bit more technical than my usual articles, but each includes a more widely accessible summary at the end. I hope you’ll check them out!)

Innovative Imaging Technique Reveals New Cellular Secrets

Tesla’s Powerwall: Reading the Meter

Image of Tesla Powerwall battery.
Photo by Tesla Energy.

April 2015 saw Tesla Motors’ entry into the home and industrial battery market. Thousands of pre-orders – and more than a little hype – attended the announcement, and it’s easy to see why: The promise of a cost-effective home battery, one that could make self-storage an equal or better option for solar customers than the prevailing sell-and-buyback model, could revolutionize the solar industry.

Yet some experts argue that the battery is not all it’s cracked up to be, while harsher critics accuse Tesla of using the storage cells as big green stalking horses, part of a plan to bilk taxpayers into subsidizing the company’s massive battery factory and R&D facility in Nevada. Read on as I make the connections in …

How the Tesla Powerwall Works

The James Webb Space Telescope Prepares to Peer Past Hubble

Artist's rendering of JWST
Artist’s rendering. Image courtesy NASA.

For two decades, the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope helped pierce the veil of time, image stellar nurseries and prove that galaxies collide. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope stands poised to take those observations to the next level, making the delicate observations possible only in the cold, dark spaces beyond the moon.

Slated for a 2018 launch date and team-built by 14 countries, 27 states and the District of Columbia, Webb will take astronomers closer to the beginning of time than ever before, granting glimpses of sights long hypothesized but never seen, from the birth of galaxies to light from the very first stars. Join us as we explore…

How the James Webb Space Telescope Will Work

Top 5 Large Hadron Collider Findings

Photo of man examining accelerator
Photo courtesy CERN

When physicists at CERN cranked up the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on Sept. 10, 2008, they had high (if contradictory) hopes. Like a child at Christmas, they wanted to get exactly what was on their wish list – the Higgs boson, some proof of supersymmetry – but also yearned for some wonderful surprise; because, if everything they predicted was right on the money, then particle physicists might well weep, for they would have no new worlds to conquer.

Years later, the LHC still hasn’t destroyed the planet or crushed physicists’ hopes. In fact, it’s made some amazing and somewhat perplexing discoveries. In this article, I take a (relatively) nontechnical look back at five the five most major findings so far.

5 Discoveries Made By the Large Hadron Collider (So Far)

There was Madness to Their Method: The Western World Before the Scientific Method

Cartoon of Mary Toft's doctors.
“My money’s on a lop-eared doe, or perhaps a Britannia Petite.”

One of the many things I enjoy about teaching my university class, Science, Feuds, Scandals and Hoaxes, is the opportunity to explore some of the most outrageous ideas ever to gain traction in the public mind. It’s easy to make fun today, but some of these ideas were grounded in reasoning that, though flawed, eventually gave rise to the right answer. Then again, there’s really no defending those doctors who thought that woman was giving birth to rabbit parts.

10 Things We Thought Were True Before the Scientific Method