All Science Topics

This year has been a wild ride. During my absence from TalkingScience, I made the transition from bench scientist to program administrator/outreach maven/quasi-boss-type-person. I know some of you want to make a similar move, and I want to help you. So, I am starting a column called Off the Bench that will detail for you what this transition has been like, what has worked, and what hasn’t. I tell you, there is a lot you need to know that you ain’t learning in grad school. …

One of the best kept secrets about being a doctor is that you can get to travel beyond the four walls of your office, the operating room, and patient rooms in the hospital. Doctors go to conferences to learn, to present research and to share knowledge. And we learn from each other over conversations that cannot be duplicated by teleconference, books, journals, videoconferencing or even Google.

Well, it tries… and succeeds in its own way. However, success on the part of the immune system may actually contribute to the permanence of a tattoo.
Skin is an incredible organ. It represents approximately 7% of one’s body mass and is responsible for very important tasks such as regulating body temperature, restricting water loss, and protecting all of our other organs from bacteria and chemicals. In order to maximize its ability to ward off invading pathogens and particles, the skin is immunologically robust. In the skin, the immune system primarily …

Look at a map of North America, and trace with your finger (or, visit this Google Map and trace with your mouse) a path from the coast of British Columbia, around Alaska, through the Bering Strait. Pass by Barrow, a city at the northern edge of Alaska, then turn east and continue until you reach the Baffin Sea. Do you notice that the route gets a bit trickier just east of the Beaufort Sea? Welcome to the challenge of the Northwest Passage: a smattering of Canadian islands that are enshrouded …

From the SATs to the MCAT and the Boards exams, I’ve been a career student. Tests have become a way of life, in a way. (Is that sad?) From multiple-choice to essay to true/false to oral exams, tests have been the predictable pacemakers of my career from high school through college, from college to medical school and graduate school.

In honor of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson sailing into New York’s waters, the New York Public Library presents a beautiful selection of maps spanning the 17th through 21st centuries – ranging from maps that Hudson would have used, to a dynamic satellite map supported by Google.  The collection offers an overview of the region’s earliest exploration and how maps of the region have changed through the years.
The NYPL is home to one of the largest and most well used map collections in the world, according to my enthusiastic …

Before continuing with the cosmic microwave background, I want to take a minute to talk about something slightly different, the learning and teaching of science. This week at Yale, we had Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman to visit, and he gave two great talks on research people have done on how students actually learn science. Professor Wieman has been applying scientific methods to scientific learning for some time now, and among other things, he writes a blog about it.
One of the more interesting conclusions is that the standard lecture format of …

Let’s say you’re the parent/mentor/teacher/tutor/friend of a kid super-excited about some aspect of science, technology, engineering or math (STEM). You want to nurture that interest and keep that child engaged, especially during the dull times of school breaks, after-school and perhaps even for school-related projects. Whether you’re an educator or not, sometimes an adult needs reinforcements to help a child or teen find his/her own interest path.
Fostering science, math, and engineering interests in young people is the goal of several organizations, including many of our nation’s publicly funded agencies like …

Merry Christmas, everyone. I know I need to write more on the CMB and thermal equilibrium, and I’ll get to it, but I want to take a slight detour to mention some exciting results announced last week by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS), a dark matter experiment based on a different technology than my own. For the last decade, CDMS has been the leading experiment in the field, and their new result is no different. A week ago, CDMS released the results of their most recent analysis, and lo …

Recently, two of my friends from various stages in graduate school came to visit New Haven. One of my friends is now doing post-doctoral work at UCLA, while another is working for a financial firm outside of New York. One night we spent some time in the early morning hours discussing the economy and the stock market. In that discussion, I came up with a somewhat stilted metaphor that I’m now going to invert to describe the concept of thermal equilibrium, which is where I want to begin the series …