Category: Mountain climbin’
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Mapping the radioactive heat beneath our feet
Geochemical bods tell us that the Earth is heated from within by the decay of various isotopes, mainly uranium, thorium and potassium. Knowing the distribution of these elements is crucial for understanding the Earth’s inner dynamics. Geochemists have penty of ideas about how the Earth’s interior may work but no way of taking measurements to…
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The cold dark matter scrap
There’s a race on to find the first direct evidence of cold dark matter. And it ain’t pretty. There’s probably a Nobel at stake for the winner which means the leading groups are at each other’s throats, like alleycats over chicken bones. For any of ya’ll who wanna know who’s who in this backstreet brawl,…
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The number of fundamental dimensional constants reduced to two
Yer only have to go back to Plank to find a pretty detailed argument that there are three fundamental dimensional constants from which all others can be derived. They are length, time and mass. Plank argues that as long as you got a tape measure, a clock and set of scales you can measure anything…
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Recipes for other Earths
It ain’t gonna be long now before we find another Earth orbiting a nearby star and the question is: what are we gonna do when we find one? (By some accounts we already found at least one but in reality these bodies are too big to be like Earth.) Eric “Nose” Gaidos at the University…
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The science of the Edelweiss
The Sound of Music always brings a tear to mah eye. And now it’ll have new meaning thanks to the sterling work of Jean Pol “Pot” Vigneron and his buddies at the Facultes Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix in Belgium. Pol Pot has been a-caressin’ and a-cuddlin’ one of the movie’s stars: the Alpine flower…