This book review of The Hunt for Planet X, by Govert Schilling, appears in slightly different form in the Arizona Daily Sun. Even though I wrote it, it remains under copyright with the paper for two months. I reprint it here with permission, thanks to the editor, Randy Wilson. The Hunt for Planet X [...]
The Colorado River in Grand Canyon remains flooded with controversy, more than a decade after federal policies were established to regulate flows out of Glen Canyon Dam. I was tipped off to the latest round of legal battles by a blog post in Arizona Geology, “Science ignored in Grand Canyon flows.” In the short item, author and state [...]
The comment arrived on Day 2 of my 100-day effort, and I now regret getting so angry that I deleted it. My friend, posing as an anonymous reader, quoted my own line: “The scientific process is robust; its only weakness is human error,” and wrote: “Yikes, what if we humans erred right at the beginning, [...]
On my way to becoming a science writer, I earned a master’s degree in biology. My thesis was a genetics project, and I conducted my experiments among a group of dedicated future geneticists led by an already accomplished — indeed, famous — one. Each week, we would gather for lab meetings, where we gave reports [...]
NASA’s Fermi telescope has discovered 12 previously unseen pulsars — the tip of the iceberg, researchers say — and has the potential to unlock new secrets of supernova explosions. The Fermi/LAT collaboration announced the discovery of 12 pulsars on Tuesday that have never been observed before, along with 17 that were previously identified by their [...]
