Compared to dark energy or fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, dark matter is not quite so daunting to explain. It is indirectly detected through its gravitational pull on visible matter – stars and galaxies. There's a lot of it and we don't know what it's made of but scientists...
Category: washington post
Compared to dark energy or fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, dark matter is not quite so daunting to explain. It is indirectly detected through its gravitational pull on visible matter – stars and galaxies. There's a lot of it and we don't know what it's made of but scientists have their theories. And so there was some fanfare made over the results of an experiment called AMS meant to detect positrons that would theoretically be emitted if antimatter takes a particular form, called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), and these said WIMPs collide.
The experiment is also interesting because it was conceived by particle physicist Sam Ting, and because it’s flying on the International Space Station. The results were not definitive, but there was enough to work with.
I was disappointed to see little if any explanation for why the experiment flew on ISS and not some unmanned craft. Or why it was so atronomically...
Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post is reporting that Lenny Bernstein, a sports editor at The Washington Post, has...
Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post is reporting that Lenny Bernstein, a sports editor at The Washington Post, has been assigned to the environment beat at the paper.
The Columbia Journalism Review and others raised concern earlier this month when Bernstein's predecessor on the beat, Juliet Eilperin, was reassigned to the White House. The move was particularly disturbing because it came just after The New York Times had canceled its Green blog, a signal to many that the Times would devote fewer resources to environmental coverage. (Times officials said that was not the case, and that...
Within a day or so of last week’s asteroid explosion over Chelyabinsk, there was a blast of press releases from various groups seeking money and/or public support for projects to monitor and study the asteroid “threat”.
The impact of the news was magnified by the weird coincidence that this...
Within a day or so of last week’s asteroid explosion over Chelyabinsk, there was a blast of press releases from various groups seeking money and/or public support for projects to monitor and study the asteroid “threat”.
The impact of the news was magnified by the weird coincidence that this meteor shattered windows and injured people in Russia the same day as a predicted flyby of a larger asteroid. Charlie Petit covered the next-day coverage for the Tracker here. Over the weekend, a nicely-written story appeared in the Washington Post, by Joel Achenbach, Brian Vastag and Will Englund. The lede shows the power of simple, clear language:
It was a day when the Earth was caught in a cosmic crossfire. The big rock came from the south, the...
13Nov 2012
While the debate rages over the resignation of General David Petraeus, the book written by his lover, Paula Broadwell, raises serious questions about journalistic ethics. Until now, readers of her book about the general wouldn’t know that the author and subject had been having sex.
Had the...
While the debate rages over the resignation of General David Petraeus, the book written by his lover, Paula Broadwell, raises serious questions about journalistic ethics. Until now, readers of her book about the general wouldn’t know that the author and subject had been having sex.
Had the writer of a newspaper or magazine profile failed to disclose such an affair, it would be grounds for getting fired.
And so, while the Petraeus sex scandal isn’t a science story, the existence of this book makes the tale relevant for all journalists. The latest bombshell dropped today in the Washington Post, which ran an unusual conversational first-person story by Vernon Loeb, a staffer there who finds himself in the uncomfortable but possibly lucrative position of being Broadwell’s...
Barbara Feder Ostrov at Reporting on Health has put together a short list of summer healthcare stories you shouldn't miss. I've mentioned a couple of them here: Atul Gawande's...
Barbara Feder Ostrov at Reporting on Health has put together a short list of summer healthcare stories you shouldn't miss. I've mentioned a couple of them here: Atul Gawande's story on healthcare and The Cheesecake Factory in The New Yorker, and a New York Times exposé on excessive use of cardiac procedures. But she has a few other tasty tidbits as well, including a couple that I missed.
Find her recommendations here.
-Paul Raeburn
Ben Goldacre, the estimable British blogger, has...
Ben Goldacre, the estimable British blogger, has pointed out a problem that is so egregious I wouldn't have even thought to look for it. Too many bloggers and journalists, he tells us, are not linking to primary sources. And what's worse, many of those missing links are obscuring grotesque distortions of what the primary source contained.
Goldacre is a doctor and the author of the Bad Science column in the national British daily, the Guardian. His bio describes him as "an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and medical doctor who specialises in unpicking dodgy...
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