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Tag archives: Web technologies
Golden-anniversary physics, flaming challenges, smart lists and more
How do you explain the science behind a rainbow to a child?
By Tushna Commissariat
It never rains but it pours, they say, and 1964 experienced quite a downpour of amazing “physics firsts” as the first papers about quarks, the Higgs mechanism and the EPR paradox or Bell’s inequality were all published. Also, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson made their first measurement of the cosmic microwave background on 20 May 1964, detecting the whisper of the Big Bang. To celebrate 50 years since these world-changing discoveries were made, the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics has produced a webcast (you can watch the video on their YouTube page in a week’s time) featuring leading cosmologists Alan Guth, Robert Woodrow Wilson, Robert Kirshner and Avi Loeb. You can read more about it in this fascinating article by David Kaiser on the Huffington Post website, as he take a deeper look at the eventful year of 1964.
What’s the most important feature of a successful science blog?
The good ol’ blog, a stalwart of Web 2.0. (iStockphoto/malerapaso)
By James Dacey
The dramatic rise in traffic on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in recent years could have left the good “old-fashioned” blog looking a bit like a frumpy relic of the noughties. But I’m convinced that this is not yet the case.
While it is true that we science writers are becoming Face-Twits in our droves, it seems that many of us still see the blogosphere as an important forum for discussion and debate. I view it as a place where you can express yourself candidly in a more freeform style, and do so without stripping away all the complexities of an issue to nothing more than a witty 140-character soundbite #BitterJournoTakesSwipe@Twitter.
