On the life cycle of dust

It's London Climate Action Week in the midst of a searing heatwave , which was a good backdrop for the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum meeting (the first outside the US!). The venue was the Jellicoe…

Why a bet with positive expected returns can still wipe out an individual — the difference between ensemble averages (many people, one round) and time averages (one person, many rounds), illustrated…

The key to understanding how the brain operates so efficiently at only 20 watts of electricity could come from a better understanding of how migratory birds' internal compass helps them navigate…

Unidentified anomalous phenomena may barely qualify as phenomena, are unlikely to be anomalous, and may not even be unidentified

Anyone following developments at NIH will be familiar with a new category for disposition of grant proposals following initial review: CND, competitive not discussed. (Flashback for GenXers like me:…

A recent study represents a confluence of technological advances that is pretty interesting. The specific problem being addressed – chemotherapy for bladder cancer – is very promising,…

The creed hiding in your favorite physics theory Dear Magicians, A survey just asked 1,675 physicists a simple question. Which theory best unites quantum mechanics and gravity? String theory won.…

Every person is unique. No two people are identical. We differ in physical appearance, personality, fingerprints, heartbeat, gait, and DNA. Such differences are used to identify criminals and in…

Preface. Almost all environmental stories in the media are about greenhouse gases. Yet there are dozens of others in the meta/polycrisis and existential boundaries (Rockström 2009). Overpopulation is…

月食时月面边缘有一条青绿色的窄带，科普说那是臭氧吸收。但为什么是窄带不是整圈？为什么全食最深时反而看不见它？我们从最土的白圆盘开始，一层层加物理，硬算出这条带，在一路翻车里发现了一个更大的问题：AI 太懂物理，反而会把你带进前人留下的近似里。

During a lunar eclipse, a narrow green-blue band appears at the moon's edge; popular science says it is ozone absorption. But why a narrow band instead of a full ring? Why does it vanish at deepest…

Learn how satellites measure ocean temperatures, sea surface height, and other indicators used to monitor El Niño. The post How Remote Sensing Helps NOAA Monitor El Niño appeared first on Geography…

This is a US research ecosystem post. Feel free to skip if this isn't your cup of tea. I'm showing my internet age in thinking that the right image to put at the top of this post is either the Drudge…

Spherical coordinates (r, θ, φ) alongside Cartesian and cylindrical, the conversion formulas both ways, and worked examples in each direction.

North is right. 0.52"/pixel (18'x9' field) FWHM=4.5" The pair of galaxies near the center is NGC 6285 (top) and NGC 6286 (bottom). The lower one has a distinct tidal trail below it, and a faint…

And yes, that includes all y'all in the UC and other R1s.

--> --> --> For the past few years I’ve kept this chart running: the daily mean temperature in Spain against its climatological normal, with the anomaly shaded in red (above normal) and blue (below).…

This post discusses the Shoelace Formula for computing the area of arbitrary simple polygons.

This book seems largely constructed out of interviews rather than following people doing field work around. This is understandable to some extent, we can’t expect the author to fly to mars. I…

Photograph by Bridgette Stockwell. Bouquet of flowers exposed to medical x-rays with contrast medium. Ms. Stockwell writes, "I am a Traveling Radiolologic Technologist (a.k.a. X-ray tech) in Boulder.…

Each year an international BRIDGES Conference celebrates the connections between mathematics and the arts -- featuring connections with music, literature, visual art, theater . . . Here is a link to…

Now and again, I run across a news article or psychological question that is so big that it bleeds out of straight statistics and requires a thorough understanding of the research methodology that…

How much attention do you pay to…well, attention? Attention is one of those many brain functions that you don’t notice or think about when it is working fine, but can become debilitating…

Multi-flaring Northern Taurid fireball on 2025 November 1 at 22h31m CET (21h31m UT) from Egmond aan Zee, Netherlands. Image courtesy: …

If you’ve been looking up at the night sky recently, you might have felt a little extra magic in the air. For the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, humanity returned to the Moon. NASA’s…

In this post, we check the first step of our proof given last time. Links to: 6/15/26 for (1.x), 6/18/26 for (2.x). Links for mobile devices

Plus: What the agency’s planning in the lead up to safe Apollo astronaut landings teaches us about preparing for the next frontier this century.

A studies dynamical systems. How a point change over time following a rule. She told me that simple rules can produce unexpected behaviour. This stayed with me. It feels very close to my artistic…

On this vast subject of the climate, you will regularly find here and there, especially in social media feeds, people with superb ideas—sometimes well-developed (especially on Mastodon which allows…

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jame7t:we spliced human DNA with Hello-Kitty DNA to make the first Sanriomorph… but it was too cute, and made everyone in the facility smile

The cliff known to the Lakota people as Six Grandfathers, now known as Mount Rushmore. From Wikimedia, public domain.   Glenn Branch has pointed out that there is now a paper in the philosophy…

The de Rham theorem equates simplicial cohomology with de Rham cohomology. The correspondence is explicit. Start with a smooth differential k-form f, it defines a discrete differential form by…

IntroductionIn this inquiry, we build a sequence from a single 2. The first rule of this sequence is that it has to describe itself.Starting with TwoHere is a 2. 2It says, "There are two…

Better modeling, by including the biosphere, retrodicts more of Earth's dynamic climate history. Climate change, while ignored by the current administration, is not ignoring us. The Earth is warming…