Browsing: Amos Zeeberg

The Antennae Galaxies are in a state of “starburst,” when the gas from the two colliding galaxies crashes together to produce huge numbers of new stars.ESA/Hubble & NASA According to the basic approximation, stars are formed by a stately, gradual process that belies the power it eventually unleashes. Within a great gas cloud, gravity slowly […]

Nutritional advice about eggs, naturally high in cholesterol, has been scrambled over the past 50 years.Jag_cz via Shutterstock The practice of nutritional science faces some significant problems, and they are mainly of its own making. For decades, starting in the 1950s, a consensus of experts recommended that Americans cut down on fat, cholesterol, and saturated […]

Cornelia Kopp via Flickr After five years of practicing meditation, subject number 99003 began to see the lights. “My eyes were closed,” he reported, “[and] there would be what appeared to be a moon-shaped object in my consciousness directly above me, about the same size as the moon if you lay down on the ground […]

These swirls in the cosmic microwave background show the effect of primordial gravitational waves.BICEP2 Scientists, on the whole, are a circumspect lot. When faced with a microphone or reporter’s notepad, most of them (excepting a vocal minority) hedge and temper their language, adding provisos and qualifications, burying significant news behind accurate but unexciting jargon. So […]

Smart LEDs are installed in Newark Liberty International AirportThe Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Not so long ago, LEDs were like the slide rule of the lighting world, found mostly in the lovably geekiest of places: front panels of technical equipment, scientific kits for kids, and of course Radio Shack. But over […]

A warped photo of Big Ben. Alan Cleaver via Flickr Earlier this month, the chief minister of the Indian state of Assam, Tarun Gogoi, started something of a brouhaha with a bold pronouncement on the generally sleepy topic of time zones. “We need a local time for Assam and the other northeastern states which will […]

Fluorescent-labeled neurons in a mouse hippocampus made visible using the new CLARITY technique.Kwanghun Chung &

Cadaverine and putrescine are the chemicals responsible for the dead-flesh stench.

Last month, a 40-year-old woman went to have her first mammogram, an unexceptional event at a time when women are encouraged to have breast-cancer screenings early and often. What was unusual about this test was that it was witnessed not just by an X-ray technician but by millions of people sitting in their living […]