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Astronomers have discovered Earth’s first trojan asteroid.  Trojan asteroids are asteroids which orbit in the path of another planet.  They are difficult to discover because they occupy a part of the sky where the Sun is.  However, this particular trojan was discovered because of its highly erratic orbit and thanks to the NASA’s WISE observatory.…

One of the very interesting phenomena of gravitational physics relates to how massive rotating objects actually drag space time around with them.  Imagine a ball spinning in a viscous fluid such as thick syrup.  As the ball spins, it drags some of the syrup around with it.  The syrup is like spacetime.  It sounds uncanny,…

From a just-published nytimes.com article entitled “‘Safety Myth’ Left Japan Ripe for Nuclear Crisis“.  I quote a few excerpts below: Near a nuclear power plant facing the Sea of Japan, a series of exhibitions in a large public relations building here extols the virtues of the energy source with some help from “Alice in Wonderland.”…

I decided to get a few different types of soft plastic jewelry organizers as an experiment.  The one that I like the most is the Household Essentials 01943 Ultra 80-Pocket Hanging Jewelry Organizer.   The actual quality of this organizer is very high.  It is not cheap, tacky plastic but very high-quality plastic.  It looks and…

This graphic was part of a recent OXFAM report “Growing a Better Future: Food justice in a resource-constrained world” I checked on of the links listed as a reference: http://faostat.fao.org/site/368/DesktopDefault.aspx On this page you can select a country and get detailed data about the amounts of various crops produced by it.  At the top of the…

A cosmic ray detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has just been installed on the International Space Station.  Cosmic rays are really cool even though most people don’t have a clue what they are.  What are they?  They are basically extremely high energy particles that have been accelerated to very high energies through interactions somewhere in…

I always suspected that there was something like this lying behind the motivation of the US, Russia, and the UK to ban open-air nuclear tests starting in 1963. To think that humans did such stupid things blindly such as blowing up atomic weapons, which spread all kinds of nasty radioactive fallout, is just hard to…

I’m still reading this book about the history of spices and the spice trade.  The book presents cumulative information from sources dating far back to ancient times relating to spices and their trade.  With almost every section on a different spice, it seems like it unlocks entire worlds. The most recent world I am reading…

A light year is very, very far.  About 10 trillion kilometers.  46 nanometers is extremely short. On October 15, 1991 a particle detector operated by the University of Utah detected an extremely unusual event: a cosmic ray particle traveling at close to the speed of light.  This was a particle of matter, not a form…

Researchers at the Fermilab Tevatron collider have conducted proton collision experiments in which the parity between matter and antimatter is violated, slightly in favor of matter.  During the formation of the Universe after the Big Bang, an as yet unknown process led to baryogenesis – the creation of baryonic matter which forms the basis of…