| Death of the directory: When was the last time you opened a phone book? They can be used to press flowers--or as a booster seat, door stop or laptop desk. However, fewer and fewer phone books today are employed as originally intended--to look up telephone numbers. So why are they still regularly dropped at our doorsteps? [More] rss.sciam.com |
Is the World Outsourcing Its Greenhouse Emissions to China? Dear EarthTalk: Has China been making any progress reducing its output of global warming gases, and/or in tackling other environmental problems? --Bill W., Saugus, MA [More] rss.sciam.com |
Wyoming's environmental Hobson's choice: Killing wind energy or endangering birds? Which is more important, an endangered bird or sustainable energy ? That has become the question in Wyoming, where a recent ruling by the state's governor has blocked future wind-turbine development in about 20 percent of the state in a move to protect the greater sage grouse ( Centrocercus urophasianus ). [More] rss.sciam.com |
Small World As I type this column, several recent storms are weighing on my mind. Winter snowfalls around the country have sparked questions about climate change yet again. Skeptics ask, How can warming be happening if we’re getting big snows? As if we could determine the world’s condition during a single season. In fact, one symptom of a changing climate could be more varied or more extreme weather--but a couple of heavy snows wouldn’t prove that either. January was slightly warmer in the U.S. than average, in any case.Another storm surrounds “Climategate.” More than 1,000 private e-mails were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and publicly released last November. Climate doubters have asserted that the e-mails prove that science surrounding global climate change is not settled and that the data in favor of it were misrepresented. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Rummaging for a Final Theory: Can a 1960s Approach Unify Gravity with the Rest of Physics? Turning the clock back by half a century could be the key to solving one of science’s biggest puzzles: how to bring together gravity and particle physics. At least that is the hope of researchers advocating a back-to-basics approach in the search for a unified theory of physics.In July mathematicians and physicists met at the Banff International Research Station in Alberta, Canada, to discuss a return to the golden age of particle physics. They were harking back to the 1960s, when physicist Murray Gell-Mann realized that elementary particles could be grouped according to their masses, charges and other properties, falling into patterns that matched complex symmetrical mathematical structures known as Lie (“lee”) groups. The power of this correspondence was cemented when Gell-Mann mapped known particles to the Lie group SU(3), exposing a vacant position indicating that a new particle, the soon to be discovered “Omega-minus,” must exist. [More] Physics - Murray Gell-Mann - Elementary particle - Alberta - Canada rss.sciam.com |