OpenScience / Science



The Jarzynski equality

So our latest little obsession in research-land is something called The Jarzynski Equality, which is a strong statement about equilibrium thermodynamical quantities being exactly derivable from irreversible (non-equilibrium) trajectories. Jarzynski has a brief commentary in PNAS that describes it, but … Continue reading

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Mind the Gaps – Slate’s take on ID

This quote is from Dahlia Lithwick’s article, Mind the Gaps – Intelligent design as an answer to all life’s great conundrums in Slate magazine: But the critics are missing the beauty of this new theory. Because the really great thing … Continue reading

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Snowflakes and Snow Crystals

Some absolutely beautiful pictures of snowlakes and ice crystals can be found at snowcrystals.com, a put together by Kenneth Libbrecht, Professor of physics at Caltech. I’m particularly enamored of his Snowflake primer as well as the movies of crystal growth.

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The Flying Mobulas of the Sea of Cortez

Found via the always wonderful BoingBoing is this set of photographs of The Flying Mobulas of the Sea of Cortez. Mobulas (Mobula mobular) and Mantas (Manta birostris) are related (a manta’s mouth is terminal, i.e. located at the front of … Continue reading

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Chemistry Comes Alive!

Why didn’t I know about this site before? Chemistry Comes Alive! has movies of some dangerous chemical reactions. These are the reactions that turned me into a chemist, and I’m reasonably sure that a large fraction of our nation’s chemists … Continue reading

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Stellarium

Today we have a new user-suggested link to Stellarium, an open source desktop planetarium that uses OpenGL to render realistic views of the stars. This looks like a wonderful new program to join our Astronomy section. Check it out! [tags]software, … Continue reading

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The know-nothings

Salon is running an article by Andrew O’Hehir called The know-nothings. This is a lengthy and expanded review of Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science,” although it goes into topics not covered in great detail by Mooney. The … Continue reading

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Don’t dumb me down

There’s a wonderful Bad Science column by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian all about media coverage of science and why media reports on science are uniformly horrible. Here’s an excerpt: Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare … Continue reading

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Vigyaan

Pratul Agarwal just released version 1.0 of his Vigyaan CD. This is a single CD image with many precompiled tools for bioinformatics, computational biology, and computational chemistry. Just a sample of what’s already there: Arka/GP Artemis BLAST ClustalX Garlic GROMACS … Continue reading

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The Pitch Drop Experiment

Another deep time experiment has been going on since 1927. Thomas Parnell set up an experiment to measure the viscosity of pitch, a derivative of tar once used for waterproofing boats. The Pitch Drop Experiment is a glass funnel full … Continue reading

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