Recently in Science Category

This is one that I bookmarked a long time ago, but haven't gotten around to blogging until now. Science Progress. And here is a story on the upcoming gap in manned space exploration from 2010 to 2015 and what we should do about it.

Hat tip to ArgMax (John Irons) who also points to Scott Page's book which I have not had a chance to read yet, but plan to this summer. (Page was a professor of mine at Iowa back in the day.)

In other news...

I have been working on a project with a deadline of this week, hence the lapse in blogging. That will improve soon enough, but still for a while I won't have much time to do much more than offer up some links. One thing that I do need to do is catch up on some old stuff (like this) that I bookmarked with the idea of blogging it later. Time to clear out the ol' RSS reader. The time for spring cleaning is soon over, but one can always do some "summer cleaning".

Already it has been a rather busy summer, and looks to continue that way. I'm teaching an MBA class (managerial econ) and having a blast with it. Trying to revise and create some new course materials when I have a spare moment. Of course there's always the family stuff going on too.

I ran a 5K a couple weeks ago and turned in a rather mediocre 27 minutes and change. I let myself get out of shape when I got out of grad school and am trying to turn it around. I'm doing another race in a couple weeks. Hopefully I'll do better...perhaps I'll even post a picture or two.

Conditions look more conducive for blogging next week. Until then, maybe a few more links out of the files of ancient history.

Always start out the summer with a new book. In my mailbox today... Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku.

Kaku was on C-Span2's Book TV recently, and the talk associated with this book was fascinating. Who knows if any of what he describes will come to pass, but if a fraction of it does it would be amazing. Stuff like that is just fun to think about.

Answer: Lots of chemicals. Check out this interesting explanation from Wired.

Recently I poked fun at the NY Times science section for asking:

Is it true that airport runways are lined with blue lights because blue light can be seen from the longest distance?

Of course, the runways are not lined with blue lights, the taxiways are.

So after receiving an e-mail from me and doubtless many other pilots (or even observant passengers) pointing out the error in the question, they changed it on the web page. The question now reads:

Is it true that airport taxiways are lined with blue lights because blue light can be seen from the longest distance?

Their first attempt was wrong. The correction now just sounds silly. Here's my answer...

No. Being able to see a taxiway from a distance is of minor importance compared to being able to see the runway from a distance. That explains why runways are lined with much brighter white lights that can pierce through low visibility conditions. The dimmer blue lights of the taxiway produce less glare for the pilots during ground operations when they need to focus on the path immediately ahead at slow speeds.

The fact that blue-green light is fairly easy to see is interesting, but not an answer to the question.

A side note that might have led them to a more interesting version of the question: My Volkswagen has blue backlit dashboard lights (with red pointers for the guages). When I bought the car, I was told that many European cars are like that, and that it makes the dashboard easier to read. I don't dispute it at all. Compared to my American made car with the conventional green lighting, the VW dashboard lights are very easy on the eyes. For what it's worth.

The science section of the NY Times asked this question:

Is it true that airport runways are lined with blue lights because blue light can be seen from the longest distance?"

They go on to answer that in fact yes, the human eye is particularly well adapted to seeing blue-green lights at night. One might infer that is why airports are marked the way they are.

Of course, airport runways are NOT lined with blue lights. Runways are lined with very bright white lights most of its length and yellow for the last 2000 feet. (If the runway is less than 4000 feet long, the last half is lined with yellow.)

Taxiways are lined with blue lights with green down the center line. They are typically dimmer than the runway lights as well.

Of course, taxiways are not the part of the airport that is critical to see from the air. But the dim soft blue color is easy on the eyes when you are making the long taxi out to the end of the runway at night.

So the human eye may be well adapted to seeing blue-green light at night, but if a pilot thought those blue and green lights marked a runway he or she would be in for a surprise. The Times needs better quality control on the science questions.

Iowa's native son receives the nation's highest civilian honor. Here is a post from last year about Borlaug. Read the entire presentation by the President. Here are the first few paragraphs.

United States Capitol

10:53 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, all. Madame Speaker, thank you. Madame Speaker, Mr. Leader, members of the congressional leadership, members of the Iowa delegation, fighting Texas A&M Aggies, Dr. Borlaug and his family:

All around us are testaments to our republic's young and storied history. Yet sometimes it takes a ceremony like this to remind us what a special place America is.

Ours is a land of hope and promise and compassion. And we see that compassion and promise in the man we honor today -- a farm boy, educated in a one-room schoolhouse, who left the golden fields of Iowa to become known as "The man who fed the world."

Many have highlighted Norman Borlaug's achievements in turning ordinary staples such as wheat and rice into miracles that brought hope to millions. I particularly appreciated the story about a former Vice President, and fellow Iowan, named Henry Wallace, who once came to observe Norman's grain experiments up close. The Vice President looked around, and then asked why a good Iowa boy like Norman wasn't working on something to do with corn. (Laughter.)

For more on Borlaug, see today's Wall Street Journal.

And this from RadioIowa.

The honor for Dr. Borlaug is well deserved.

From the NY Times,

Don Herbert, who unlocked the wonders of science for youngsters of the 1950s and ’60s as television’s Mr. Wizard, died yesterday at his home in the Bell Canyon section of Los Angeles. He was 89.

The cause was bone cancer, his son-in-law Tom Nikosey told The Associated Press in confirming the death.

Mr. Herbert held no advanced degree in science, he used household items in his TV lab, and his assistants were boys and girls. But he became an influential showman-science teacher on his half-hour “Watch Mr. Wizard” programs, which ran on NBC from 1951 to 1965.

And the LA Times recounts this story. (Hat tip to Betsy's Page for the article.)

Not every Mr. Wizard experiment went according to plan.

In "Saturday Morning TV," a 1981 book by Gary H. Grossman, Herbert recalled pouring two colorless solutions into one glass and then announced that the solution would turn black before he counted to nine.

"I got up to 20 and decided I'd better stop," he recalled. "I explained that apparently other factors like temperature and acidity had interfered with the experiment."

But as he finished his explanation, the liquid changed color.

"It was embarrassing, certainly, but I discovered the answer," he said. "We hadn't used a fresh solution, so the reaction was slower than expected."

I am not old enough to remember the original NBC series, but I have seen some of those episodes shown on The Science Channel. By the time he revived the concept for the Nickelodeon network in the 1980s, I was a little older than his target demographic, but I still was fascinated by it. I remember thinking, "Why isn't there more stuff like this on TV?" Today we have The Science Channel, Bill Nye, and of course, the Mythbusters; but Mr. Wizard started it all and no one has done it quite like he did.

And he did it with class. No big budget effects. No gimmicks. You could try it at home.

A lot of us did. Thanks, Mr. Wizard.

The official Mr. Wizard website.

UPDATE: Wired News interviewed Herbert last month. It doesn't surprise me at all that he liked the Science Channel too.

WN: Are there any current science shows that you find particularly educational or entertaining?

Herbert: The Discovery Science Channel.

WN: Do you think that you were an inspiration for the science programming that has become very popular on the Discovery Channel?

Herbert: Maybe.

Go read the rest of the interview.

I received a notification in my e-mail today about the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. If you don't have Mathematica 6.0, you will need to download the free player for the demonstrations. (I have version 5, and it doesn't play the files--you need the new interactive interface in version 6 apparently.)

There are some really nice demonstrations available, including many in for economics.

Take some time this weekend to download the player and experiment with some of the demonstrations. Many would be great for use in classes in math, economics, and the sciences. Enjoy!

The Dead Parrot Society links to this map of world sunlight and cloud cover with the comment, "This is very cool."

Ditto.

Jim Carey thinks so. In the Wall Street Journal, Carl Bialik seems amused but unconvinced.

...In the film, Mr. Carrey plays a man "spiraling into a dark obsession with the number 23," after reading a book on the number's ominous properties. (Among the "evidence:" Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was born in 1967 and died in 1994 -- the digits in both years add up to 23. Caesar was stabbed 23 times. Even the date of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks has a connection -- 9+11+2+0+0+1=23. And so on.)

The movie -- like my proposed sequel -- shows how just about any number can seem to have all sorts of eerie properties if you look hard enough.

Can I play along? The months and dates of my wife's birth and my birth add up to...you guessed it...23. Another? Take our house number, add the digits together. Then add the digits of the result. Add the final result to the sum of the digits in our ZIP code and, yes, it is 23. In fact, if I looked around I would find a few other things that could add up to 23, or 24, or 25, or....

So what? It's nothing. Just parlor tricks and nothing more. Choose a low number--a number that could be easily obtained by summing up a short series of single digit numbers. Then go looking for sets of digits that add up to that number. You'll find them without much difficulty. The mistake people then make is to attribute some significance to that particular set of digits ex post.

For example, if you go to a shopping mall and meet an old acquaintance whom you haven't seen in years, you may attach some significance to that, as in, "Wow, what a coincidence that he and I would be in the same place at the same time. It must mean something." But the chances are that if you to to the mall regularly and you have a fairly large circle of acquaintances, you will eventually bump into one of them at some point. Now if you woke up one morning and said, maybe today is the day that I'll run into X, and then you did, that would be impressive. But running into some random person out of your circle of acquaintances is nothing special. (John Allen Paulos gives a version of this argument in his book, Innumeracy.) You can't attach some significance ex post when there was no such attachment ex ante.

You might say that life is just a series of very improbable events. Bizarre coincidences are to be expected. Ex ante, they have near zero probability. Some of them simply have to happen, but you can't predict which ones. (Douglas Adams used this with entertaining effect in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with the Infinite Improbability Drive.)

As for whether a number is interesting, most of them are. Even numbers that look very dull from the outset. When mathematician G.H. Hardy visited his friend and collaborator Ramanujan, he expressed his disappointment with the number of the taxicab in which he rode that day, 1729. Ramanujan replied that 1729 was a very interesting number. It is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways (1^3+12^3 and 9^3+10^3). Today, 1729 is known to mathematicians as the Hardy-Ramanujan number.

Ramanujan's ability to see patterns in numbers was much more interesting and useful than some numerologist's obsession with the number 23.

I am not one-dimensional. Economics is not the only thing that gets me fired up. I'm also a science enthusiast. Yes, I'm a big fan of Mr. Wizard, Bill Nye, etc. Are Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage in their league? The NY Times recently ran a piece on one of my guilty pleasures, Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel

Mr. Hyneman, however, insists that he and the “Mythbusters” team “don’t have any pretense of teaching science.” His wife, he noted, is a science teacher, and he knows how difficult that profession is. “If we tried to teach science,” he said, “the shows probably wouldn’t be successful.”

“If people take away science from it,” Mr. Hyneman said, “it’s not our fault.” But if the antics inspire people to dig deeper into learning, he said, “that’s great.”

Science teachers know a good thing when they see one, however: Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage were invited to speak at the annual convention of the National Science Teachers Association in March, and the California Science Teachers Association named Mr. Savage and Mr. Hyneman honorary lifetime members in October.

I really enjoy the show, but it is not a science lesson. Over the years there have been a number of times where I was howling at the TV convinced that they had made a fundamental scientific error. But most of the time they prove themselves to be very, very clever. If you like seeing people get creative with everyday items and use the scientific method, then there's a good chance that you will find it to be entertaining television.

I will also note that there was one episode where they could have discussed statistical inference but didn't (the helium football episode). Ultimately their reasoning was essentially correct, and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they could have done it but decided (correctly, I think) that it wouldn't be good for television.

My guess is that they have a pretty diverse audience and it is next to impossible for them to fine tune the show to please everyone. I'd like more science, but too much science would cause them to lose some viewers. After all, if I get inspired to think about the science behind the show, there are plenty of ways to dig deeper. I enjoy the show for what it is, and I wonder if any other economist-types do as well?

From Wired: The real story behind the iPod.

Exercise for those who teach principles of economics (especially micro): Come up with as many principles level lessons as you can from this. Here's one:

Apple's team knew it could solve most of the problems plagued by the Nomad. Its FireWire connector could quickly transfer songs from the computer to player -- an entire CD in a few seconds; a huge library of MP3s in minutes. And thanks to the rapidly growing cell phone industry, new batteries and displays were constantly coming to market.

Complementary goods in production Lower input cost per unit of quality--Better and cheaper cell phone batteries and displays lowered the cost and increased the quality of Apple's innovation. (UPDATE: Lower input costs would be a more direct answer, but here is what I was thinking. Smaller batteries and displays were complementary with the smaller sized hard drive and other features of the iPod. What good is the small hard drive if everything else is bulky? What good is it to be mobile if the battery doesn't last? The iPod's value came from the combination of innovations. Only when the size and power requirements on all of these complementary inputs are met does the iPod become viable. Substituting a bulkier battery greatly diminishes the value. That is the sense in which I meant them complementary. Not in the literal production process, but innovative, value-creating process.)

You could probably spend a couple weeks in class on the intellectual property rights issues if you were so inclined. You are invited to post iPod teaching suggestions in the comments.

UPDATE: I also like to use the iPod as an example of invention (small hard drive, battery, etc.), innovation (assembling the various inventions into a music player), and diffusion (network externalities with iTunes, marketing, and adoption by the masses).

This is nice to see. Norman Borlaug has received some press lately. In the Opinion Journal...

Who? Norman Borlaug, 92, is the father of the "Green Revolution," the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s. He is now the subject of an admiring biography by Leon Hesser, a former State Department official who first met Mr. Borlaug 40 years ago in Pakistan, where they worked together to boost that country's grain production. "The Man Who Fed the World" describes, in a workmanlike way, how a poor Iowa farm boy trained in forestry and plant pathology came to be one of humanity's greatest benefactors.

...

Whether bread induces peace is a question for another day. It certainly kills hunger and saves lives. Contrary to Mr. Ehrlich's bold pronouncement, hundreds of millions of people did not die for lack of food. Far from it. Despite occasional local famines caused by armed conflicts or political mischief, food is more abundant and cheaper today than ever before in history. It is an absurd travesty that Mr. Ehrlich is still much better known than Mr. Borlaug, but perhaps Mr. Hesser's biography can begin to right the balance.

Mr. Borlaug is still tirelessly working to keep hunger at bay. He remains a consultant to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico and president of a private Japanese foundation working to spread the Green Revolution to sub-Saharan Africa. He believes that biotechnology will be crucial to boosting world food supplies in the coming decades and decries the underfunding of the world's network of nonprofit agricultural research centers.

He also laments the unnecessary suspicion with which biotech is treated these days. "Activists have resisted research," he notes, "and governments have overregulated it." They both miss the point. "Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy: starvation is."

And in The Economist...

NORMAN BORLAUG, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1970 for his role in the green revolution, remains as sturdy and “high-yielding” as the varieties of wheat he helped to invent. Last week, at the age of 92, he gave a stirring lecture in Washington, DC, calling for a renewed effort to bring his revolution to Africa, the one continent it bypassed first time around.

The Economist does not mention Hesser's new biography.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation posted this on their blog. (I didn't know the CBC had a blog. I may have to check that out more often.)

Joining forces with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates foundation will immediately pump $150 million into seed research. Already the Rockefeller scientists say they have a developed a new strain of rice that could increase yields in West Africa five times.

...

Noting Borlaug's work took 20 years before it met with ultimate success, Bill and Melinda Gates promised their foundation will stay the course in the fight against African poverty.

It's clear the world's richest countries have not dented African hunger and poverty.

Private sources and philanthropy will finance Borlaug's ideas that worked so well years ago.

Give them better seed and resources. Help them grow more food.

Finally, for those who desire even more, the presentation links are here (transcript, video, and slides).

Pluto has been demoted to a minor planet and the object which was nicknamed Xena is now named Eris. Eris is the Greek goddess of discord and strife. That is a fitting name since its discovery seemed to be the catalyst for Pluto's demotion.

There are a couple of things worth noting here. First of all, I was not aware of this open access medical journal, PLoS. I figure that a few of you might not know of it either, so now you know.

Anyway, I tracked it down from this story on MSNBC.com. The article is on the vast differences in life expectancies across geographical areas of the country. The authors then break down the data into "eight Americas" based on income and race. Hawaii scores well, but the south does very poorly. Of course one can easily criticize this as leaving out many potential other explanatory variables. For example, If industrial pollutants reduce life expectancy of all races but are concentrated in counties of a certain racial makeup, that would be useful to know. (I confess to having no knowledge of whether this would be a significant issue, but an enterprising person with a map of chemical factories could find out in a hurry.) The authors do identify access to health care, even among low-income rural areas of the northern states (e.g. my old stompin' grounds), as being an important positive factor contributing to life expectancy. Food for thought.

For the curious, their life expectancy data is available.

Other articles in this issue of the on-line journal look interesting as well, including a study comparing outcomes in academic medicine (i.e. teaching hospitals) and non-academic medicine.

I commend this journal for making medical studies more accessible to researchers, including those in other fields who will benefit from easy access.

Actually, four mathematicians received the coveted Fields Medal for work in a variety of areas. The NY Times carries a story today that lists all of them. However, the big news concerns Grigory Perelman, a Russian mathematician, who was one of the four named today, but refused the prize.

And while the Times article gives a little more background on the problem than the AP story carried by CNN and the Wall Street Journal, they all leave something out that is of interest to mathematicians. (But of course the mathematicians are not getting their news on this subject from the AP.)

Perelman may have actually succeeded in proving Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture which includes Poincaré's Conjecture as a special case. If the proof holds, it would be quite an achievement. However, according to the Mathematical Association of America's FOCUS newsletter this month, Perelman does not seem intent on publishing his result. In fact, the preprints are not complete to the standards of mathematical literature. Two other mathematicians, Bruce Kleiner and John Lott, have attempted to fill in some of the details Perelman left out.

The Clay Mathematics Institute is offering a million dollar prize for the solution to this and other famous math problems. (The link has an even better description of the conjecture.) However, the rules state that the work must be published and withstand two years of scrutiny. So Perelman receives (but turns down) the Fields Medal, but will he win the million dollar prize from the Clay Institute? That remains to be seen.

Why is ice so slippery? Read here (NY Times)

From ABC News:

Michael Viscardi, a senior from San Diego, won a $100,000 college scholarship, the top individual prize in the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology.

Viscardi said he's been homeschooled since fifth grade, although he does take math classes at the University of California at San Diego three days a week. His father is a software engineer and his mother, who stays at home, has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, he said.

...

Viscardi tackled a 19th century math problem known as the Dirichlet problem, formulated by the mathematician Lejeune Dirichlet. The theorem Viscardi created to solve it has potential applications in the fields of engineering and physics, including airplane wing design. He said he worked on it for about six months with a professor at UCSD.

"He is a super-duper mathematics student," said lead judge Constance Atwell, a consultant and former research director at the National Institutes of Health. "It was almost impossible for our judges to figure out the limits of his understanding during our questioning. And he's only 16 years old," she said.

Some news stories described his project. This article goes into even more detail. This is an outstanding achievement and Viscardi sounds like a prodigy in more than one area.

The NY Times, on the other hand, had this to say about Viscardi.

Michael Viscardi, a senior from San Diego, also won a $100,000 grand prize for his entry, a project that tackled a centuries-old puzzle in mathematical physics.

Anyone who can make string theory accessible to a mass audience is pretty good in my book. In this NY Times piece, he celebrates famous equation E=mc². He thinks about physics the way I think about economics. Understand the math, but don't consider your understanding complete until you can tell the story. We call that intuition. And I wouldn't trust an economist (or a string theorist) who doesn't think it's important.

Einstein's derivation of E = mc² was wholly mathematical. I know his derivation, as does just about anyone who has taken a course in modern physics. Nevertheless, I consider my understanding of a result incomplete if I rely solely on the math. Instead, I've found that thorough understanding requires a mental image - an analogy or a story - that may sacrifice some precision but captures the essence of the result.

Here's a story for E = mc². Two equally strong and skilled jousters, riding identical horses and gripping identical (blunt) lances, head toward each other at an identical speed. As they pass, each thrusts his lance across his breastplate toward his opponent, slamming blunt end into blunt end. Because they're equally matched, neither lance pushes farther than the other, and so the referee calls it a draw.

This story contains the essence of Einstein's discovery. Let me explain.

Read the rest of the story here.

Newmark's Door links to this article from Slate on why power lines are so dangerous. Don't they have insulation?

No, they don't—at least the ones that run aboveground. Most of the hundreds of thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines in this country are made solely of metal—either aluminum or aluminum wrapped around a steel core. Adding a layer of insulation to every line would be pricey and has been deemed unnecessary given how high the lines are off the ground. (Underground lines are insulated, both for the safety of the walkers above and to protect the lines from shovels and the like.)

Simple economics of reducing risk to an acceptable level. As long as you and the lines keep your distance, there's no need for insulation.

When I was in college, I worked for a power utility one summer. My job had nothing to do with power lines. I was collecting data on customers who used electric heat. My head was filled with facts that I have long forgotten (like the average annual kilowatt hours of power used by a geothermal heat pump). I also learned to identify types of transmission lines and learned the answer to questions such as why direct current (DC) is used on some long distance lines. Click here for an explanation of that and other facts about power lines.

I subscribe to NASA press releases, and this just hit my inbox.

A media teleconference will be held today to announce major findings regarding the detection of a new planet in our solar system.

Dr. Michael Brown, associate professor of planetary astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., will present his discovery of the most distant object ever detected orbiting the Sun. He and his colleagues made the observations as part of a NASA-funded research project.

It is just a few minutes before 7pm EDT, the scheduled start of the teleconference, and this e-mail just now arrived. And why announce this on a Friday night when it will get little media play?

My 3 year old knows the names of all the planets (thanks to a song on "Blue's Clues"). Is he going to have to learn one more?

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here are more details.

A planet larger than Pluto has been discovered in the outlying regions of the solar system.

The planet was discovered using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, Calif. The discovery was announced today by planetary scientist Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., whose research is partly funded by NASA.

The planet is a typical member of the Kuiper belt, but its sheer size in relation to the nine known planets means that it can only be classified as a planet, Brown said. Currently about 97 times further from the sun than the Earth, the planet is the farthest-known object in the solar system, and the third brightest of the Kuiper belt objects.

"It will be visible with a telescope over the next six months and is currently almost directly overhead in the early-morning eastern sky, in the constellation Cetus," said Brown, who made the discovery with colleagues Chad Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz, of Yale University, New Haven, Conn., on January 8.

Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz first photographed the new planet with the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on October 31, 2003. However, the object was so far away that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data in January of this year. In the last seven months, the scientists have been studying the planet to better estimate its size and its motions.

"It's definitely bigger than Pluto," said Brown, who is a professor of planetary astronomy.

...

A name for the new planet has been proposed by the discoverers to the International Astronomical Union, and they are awaiting the decision of this body before announcing the name.

For more information on the discovery and to view images, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/newplanet-072905-images.html

UPDATE: NASA has pictures on their website. NASA images are generally not copyrighted and may be reproduced for educational purposes. Here is the picture:

These time-lapse images of a newfound planet in our solar system, called 2003UB313, were taken on Oct. 21, 2003, using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, Calif. The planet, circled in white, is seen moving across a field of stars. The three images were taken about 90 minutes apart.

Scientists did not discover that the object in these pictures was a planet until Jan. 8, 2005. Image credit: Samuel Oschin Telescope, Palomar Observatory

This is what an artists conception of the planet looks like with the sun in the distance. Obviously, it will be a long time before we actually get that close!

UPDATE (yet again): They want to call the new planet "Xena" after the TV show starring Lucy Lawless. Why "Xena"? Well...

'We have always wanted to name something Xena,' said Michael Brown, a member of the team that made the discovery using telescopes at the Palomar Observatory, outside San Diego, California.

Uh huh... Anyway, you can read the story of the brewing controversy here. No, the controversy isn't over the name, it's whether this should be a considered a planet at all. Some would even want to demote Pluto to "minor planet" status, a point that Phil Miller had already seized upon with this post.

Men first walked on the moon 36 years ago today. Here's the story as it was reported July 21, 1969 in the NY Times.

Another reason why I think Brian Greene is one of the best ambassadors of physics is in today's NY Times.

In case you missed the PBS special The Elegant Universe on TV (or if you want to see parts of it again), you can watch the whole thing online. Actually, you can watch a number of NOVA programs online.