New Scientist: Jalila Essaïdi, a "bioartist" in the Netherlands, recently worked with an international team to blend spider silk with human skin to try to produce a bulletproof material. The project, called 2.6g 329m/s, involved a Utah State University team, which genetically engineered goats to produce spider-silk proteins in their milk. Researchers in South Korea and Germany spun the proteins and wove them into a fabric, which was then wedged between bioengineered skin cells by a biochemist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In making the material, Essaïdi, who uses biology and life sciences as an artistic medium, says she wanted "to explore the social, political, ethical and cultural issues surrounding safety in a world with access to new biotechnologies." According to the artist, safety is a relative concept, as demonstrated by the "bulletproof" shield she constructed from the hybrid material, which succeeded in stopping a partially slowed bullet, but not one traveling at full speed.
Recently in History, sociology, and philosophy Category
Guardian: Thousands of books were lost, burned, or scattered during the upheaval of Europe's Dark Ages. Among those missing books were treatises by some of the earliest mathematicians, such as Archimedes. But some of the material is now being rediscovered with the use of modern technology.
Centuries ago parchment was expensive, so scribes would frequently reuse pieces by scratching out the old text and replacing it with new. It was discovered years ago that a 13th century Byzantine prayer book was actually composed of several earlier, overwritten manuscripts—one of which contained several treatises by Archimedes that were copied in 10th century Constantinople. As Physics Today reported 10 years ago, by illuminating the manuscript with specific wavelengths of light and by applying intensive data analysis to the scattered images, the original wording can be recovered.
Besides Archimedes’ treatises, the prayer book also contained speeches by the classical Athenian orator Hyperides and a lost commentary on Aristotle's Categories.
The so-called Archimedes Palimpsest is on display through 1 January 2012 at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, and next week Cambridge University Press is publishing a two-volume book on the subject.
New York Times: Since the mid 20th century, experts have been exploring the overlap between code breaking and language translation. Recently, one of the world’s most stubborn codes, dating from the 1700s—the Copiale Cipher—was cracked by a team of Swedish and American linguists, who discussed their work at the June meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, Oregon. Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden to apply statistics-based translation techniques to the perplexing mix of some 75 000 symbols and Roman letters that make up the cipher. They were able to determine that the first 16 pages are a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society fascinated with eye surgery and ophthalmology. Now Knight is turning his expertise to cracking the 15th-century Voynich manuscript, the so-called white whale of the code-breaking world.
Los Angeles Times: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was started 75 years ago by a group of Caltech students who were assistants of Theodore von Kármán, a pioneer in aeronautical engineering and fluid dynamics. Dubbed the Suicide Squad, Ed Forman, H. S. Tsien, Frank Malina, Jack Parsons, Rudolph Schott, and A. M. O. Smith at first tested their homemade rockets on campus. But because of the loud and potentially dangerous explosions, they were forced to move their experiments away from Caltech to a dry creek bed, the Arroyo Seco. During World War II, working out of tarpaper shacks, the group developed rockets that were strapped to US Army aircraft to boost takeoff. Squad member Malina went on to become JPL’s director.
Science: In preindustrial Europe, climate shifts were a statistically significant cause of social disturbance, war, migration, epidemics, famine, and nutritional status, write David Zhang of the University of Hong Kong and colleagues online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers analyzed socioeconomic, ecological, and demographic data from the years 1500–1800 to try to determine whether cause-and-effect relationships existed between some 14 variables, such as human height, the price of gold, tree-ring width, and temperature. The researchers found that extreme climate shifts influenced human society, primarily through agriculture. Falling crop yield can drive up the price of gold and cause inflation, for example. Whether the research is relevant for the present day remains to be seen. Halvard Buhaug of the Peace Research Institute Oslo points out that trade, technological development, and other processes of modern industrial society make us less sensitive to the climate.
Daily Mail: The French-based International Bureau of Weights and Measures has proposed that to achieve greater accuracy, worldwide time be based entirely on atomic clocks. Since 1884 the standard, which is known as Coordinated Universal Time, has been based on Earth’s daily rotation. But because Earth rotates at slightly varying rates, each day can be fractionally different in length. In 1972 the system was updated to incorporate the use of atomic clocks, with leap seconds added occasionally to keep it in sync with Earth’s rotation. Now with the internet and satellite-based GPS systems, however, even greater accuracy is required. A proposed system based entirely on atomic clocks will be put to a vote in January 2012 at the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva.
Guardian: After a 26-year career, Fermilab’s Tevatron collider is being retired. Completed in 1983 at a cost of $120 million, the Tevatron was the highest-energy collider in the world for 25 years. It lost that standing, however, when CERN’s Large Hadron Collider began operations in early 2010. In an article for the Guardian, Mark Lancaster, a member of the High Energy Physics Group at University College London, reflects on his 15 years working on the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment at the Tevatron. He discusses how the Tevatron made novel use of superconducting materials in its magnets and how it required the construction of the world’s largest cryogenic facility.
Nature: Online at Nature, Ann Finkbeiner discusses at length the small group of elite US science advisers known as JASON—named for the Greek mythological hero. Formed some 50 years ago primarily of scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, JASON today comprises 30–40 members who meet for six weeks each summer in La Jolla, California. They answer technical questions posed by government agencies and are famously neutral and notoriously secretive. Incoming head Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla who has been a member for 14 years, says that the biggest challenge for the group today is attendance; many members attend only sporadically because of other obligations to research, career, and family. When Joyce takes over the helm this fall, he plans to review the members' areas of expertise and to try to redirect the group away from social science studies and policy and back to its origins in nuclear policy.
New Scientist: In 1952 Alan Turing introduced the best-known version of his eponymous test of artificial intelligence: If a human talking to a machine believes he or she is talking to a human, the machine has passed the test. Cleverbot, software created by Rollo Carpenter, passed a formal Turing test at the Techniche festival in Guwahati, India, on 3 September. Carpenter says passing the test indicates the ability to imitate intelligence, rather than proving the presence of intelligence itself. During the test, 30 volunteers conducted a typed 4-minute conversation with an unknown entity. Half of them conversed with humans, while the other half conversed with Cleverbot. The software was judged to be human by 59.3% of the people who interacted with it—not far off from the 63.3% of actual humans judged as such during the test.
New Scientist: In a case before a US federal court, animal rights groups are arguing that wild horses of the American West should be considered a native species and thus deserving of the same protections as elk or antelope. If the claim is successful, it could change the way the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages tens of thousands of wild horses on federal lands, writes Bob Holmes for New Scientist. Although it is generally accepted that North America is the ancestral home of horses, today's wild horses are the feral descendants of domestic ones brought over from Europe centuries ago. Yet according to some researchers, whether or not the horses are native ought to be irrelevant to their treatment by the BLM. Mark Davis at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, is lead author of a new paper in Nature that questions the valuing of native species over nonnative ones. He says the distinction between native and introduced is arbitrary: "The question should be, are wild horses causing a problem? Are they providing benefits? Then you can develop policy to either reduce or increase their numbers."
Nature: The spacesuits worn by the first astronauts are being moved from their current home in Maryland to the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. While the new facility will provide a much better environment for the suits, getting them there intact was a puzzle for conservators, writes Nicola Jones for Nature. Lisa Young, one of the conservators working on the project, came up with a unique solution: transport the suits in retrofitted coffins used by the airline industry. She and her colleagues lined the coffins to make them waterproof and equipped them with seat belts so the suits wouldn't move in transit. The suits' new home will keep them—along with the space shuttles Enterprise and Discovery and roughly 1200 other items such as spare spacesuit gloves, memorabilia, trophies, and artwork—under one roof with lab facilities for visiting scientists and the staff conservators. The conservation work and storage in the newer facility should allow the suits to last another 50 years—a significant improvement over the 20 more years they would likely have lasted otherwise.
Science: Long thought to be the reason behind Spain’s crippling inflation in the 16th and 17th centuries, the massive amounts of silver shipped in from the Americas may not even have entered Spain’s currency until at least 100 years later, according to a study conducted by a group at the University of Lyon in France and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Anne-Marie DeSaulty and colleagues used mass spectrometry to measure the ratios of several metal isotopes in 91 old coins from ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, 16th–18th century Spain, and Latin America, writes Sara Reardon for Science. The ratio of the silver-109 isotope to silver-107 was much higher in New World coins than in the European coins. That suggests that even though American silver arrived in Spain in 1550, the Spanish waited well over 100 years before using it for their own currency. DeSaulty believes instead that the Spanish probably used the imported silver for trade. Some people have questioned, however, whether her sample of coins was large enough to support her conclusions and whether the importation of all that silver could have caused the inflation even if it weren’t minted into coins.
Daily Mail: Studies conducted by Pierre Pica of CNRS in France and his colleagues suggest that geometry skills are innate in humans, according to their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The group studied 8 children and 22 adults of the Amazon tribe known as the Mundurucu, using 30 French and US adults and children as a control group. All participants were asked questions about lines, planes, angles, triangles, and spheres. The Mundurucu people's responses to the questions were roughly as accurate as those of the French and US respondents; they seemed to have an intuition about lines and geometric shapes without formal education or even the relevant words. The Amazonian tribe test results “suggest Euclidean geometry, inasmuch as it concerns basic objects ... , is a cross-cultural universal that results from the inherent properties of the human mind as it develops in its natural environment,” according to the paper's authors.
Science: By 40 000 BCE, anatomically modern humans had begun spreading from Africa into Europe and Western Asia, the habitat of their hominid rivals, the Neanderthals. For how long did the two coexist? To help answer that question, Ron Pinhasi and Thomas Higham of Oxford University in the UK and their collaborators applied the combination of a new sample extraction technique and accelerator mass spectrometry to Neanderthal skull fragments found in a cave in Russia's Northern Caucasus region. The technique, which exploits the 5730-year half-life of carbon-14, put the age of the fragments at 39 700 ±1100 BP (years before present). Pinhasi and Higham then reanalyzed other Neanderthal bone samples, some of which had suggested that Neanderthals survived past 36 000 BP. When combined in a statistical model, the reanalyzed samples indicated that Neanderthals had become extinct throughout Western Eurasia by 40 000 BP. Pinhasi and Higham's paper appears in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
BBC: The private archive of Fred Hoyle has been released to the public for the first time. Hoyle was an English astronomer and mathematician who is best remembered as a popularizer of science and as the man who coined the term "Big Bang." His papers, letters, and personal belongings are kept at St. John's College, Cambridge, UK. The collection, which took three years to catalog, is now available online.
BBC: Weeks after Wilhelm Röntgen published his discovery of x rays in 1895, the directors of a high school and a hospital in Maastricht, the Netherlands, built their own x-ray imager. Now, more than a century later, Gerrit Kemerink of Maastricht University Medical Center has tested the old device, comparing it with a modern x-ray imager. In a paper to be published in Radiology, Kemerink reports that the old device produces images that are blurrier than those produced by its modern counterpart. Nevertheless, the vintage images are of medically useful quality. They do, however, require the use of radiation doses that are unacceptably high by modern standards.
Science: Archaeologists are criticizing the ethics of a planned Smithsonian Institution exhibit, Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds, slated to open in 2012. The exhibit is based on artifacts hauled up from an Arab dhow that sank to the bottom of the Java Sea in the 9th century CE. Critics say that the German company that salvaged the wreck, Seabed Explorations, did not observe professional archaeological standards while recovering the artifacts and later sold them to a second company in Singapore. Such commercialization of ancient objects doesn't break the laws of Indonesia, in whose territorial waters the dhow was found, but many archaeologists say that it contravenes their field's standard ethical guidelines. In addition, notes Ted Schultz, chair of the National Museum of Natural History Senate of Scientists, "We believe that substantial scientific information was lost due to the methods employed."
Science: Studies of the ruins of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the Taliban a decade ago, reveal new details about how they were made and what they originally looked like. The statues—originally 38 and 55 meters high—were carved into the sandstone cliffs of the Bamiyan Valley some 1500 years ago. Employing mass spectrometry analysis, a team led by Erwin Emmerling of the Technical University of Munich in Germany used organic material in the clay layers in the rubble to determine more precisely when the statues were created and found that, at one time, one was red and the other white. "The Buddhas once had an intensely colorful appearance," Emmerling said in a statement, and they were painted over several times.
New York Times: An Israeli scholar says he has identified the first known physical sample of tekhelet—the shade of blue used for ritual prayer tassels and for ceremonial robes worn by high priests. Zvi Koren, a professor specializing in the analytical chemistry of ancient colorants, analyzed a 2000-year-old piece of dyed fabric recovered from Masada, King Herod’s Judean Desert fortress. The exact shade of blue used has been a mystery for centuries. The dye was produced from the secretion of the sea snail, still found on Israeli beaches, but the technique of producing the dye was lost some time after the Jews were exiled from Israel in AD 70.
NPR: NPR’s Robert Krulwich recently made a bet with Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine, who claimed that “there is no species of technology that’s gone globally extinct on this planet”—in other words, there is no tool, no invention ever manufactured by humans that isn’t still being made new today. Krulwich appealed to his readers to come up with suggestions to prove Kelly wrong, which he narrowed to what he thought were three definitely dead technologies: radium suppositories, a Roman corvus (a plank used to board enemy ships), and the memory device inside a 1950s jukebox. Kelly proves him wrong, in this entertaining NPR blog.
Nature: A Viking legend tells of a glowing "sunstone" that, when held up to the sky, revealed the position of the Sun even on a cloudy day, writes Jo Marchant for Nature. It sounds like magic, but scientists measuring the properties of light in the sky say that polarizing crystals—which function in the same way as the mythical sunstone—could have helped ancient sailors to cross the northern Atlantic. A review of their evidence is published today in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
The Independent: On Monday scientists gathered in London at the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, to present their progress on redefining the kilogram. It has been based since 1889 on the mass of a solid cylinder of platinum–iridium alloy locked in a vault in Sèvres, France. The kilogram is the only international standard unit of measurement that is based on a physical object rather than a fundamental physical constant. Scientists now believe, however, that it is time to redefine the kilogram because there is evidence that the precise mass of the international prototype in Sèvres is not as constant as it should be.
New York Times: The world's most extensive and diverse collection of historical computer hardware has a permanent and newly refurbished home in Mountain View, a town in California's Silicon Valley. Once housed in Boston, the Computer History Museum moved to California in 2000, occupying the office building of a failed dot-com company. The museum has stayed in the building, which has just undergone a major refurbishment. Among the artifacts on display are Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, a German World War II Enigma machine, a Cray-1 supercomputer, and a Google server.
Science: By sequencing the nuclear genome of an ancient finger bone, researchers have confirmed the discovery of a new type of human that lived in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia more than 30 000 years ago. The long-lost group of people, which researchers are calling "Denisovans" after the Denisova cave in which the bone was found, lived at roughly the same time modern humans and Neandertals were in the region, and it appears to be more closely related to Neandertals than us. Although the Denisovans went extinct, they were widespread enough in Asia to interbreed with modern humans before they disappeared, writes Science’s Ann Gibbons.
Physics Today: Two different groups of researchers have come up with two different methods that Neolithic Britons could have used to transport 4-ton stones from quarries in Wales to the site of Stonehenge more than 150 miles away. The Daily Mail reported on 19 November that a group from the University of Exeter has proposed that ball bearings carved from stone or wood could have been placed in grooved wooden tracks to ease the giant stone slabs along their journey. On 30 November the Daily Mail reported on a second method put forth by an engineer and former BBC presenter, Garry Lavin. He believes giant wicker baskets were used to roll the boulders from Wales. Key to Lavin’s proposal is that the wicker cages containing the stones can float and thus early humans could have floated them on rivers part of the way.
Washington Post: The man who invented the digital camera didn't really know anything about photography; nor had he ever even mentioned to his wife that he was the inventor. Last week, however, Steve Sasson was one of four people awarded the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Obama—for his invention while working for Kodak in the late 1970s. Monica Hesse of the Washington Post writes an entertaining profile of this quirky, 60-year-old inventor from Upstate New York.
Guardian: Richard Holmes writes a lengthy article for the Guardian on women in science over the past several centuries, based on information gleaned from the Royal Society of London’s archives. He has found that women played a far more important role in the development and dissemination of science than had previously been thought, citing such trailblazing women as the 18th-century figures Caroline Herschel, who discovered two new comets, and Scottish scientific writer and polymath Mary Somerville. Holmes’s book The Age of Wonder won the Royal Society’s Science Books Prize for 2009.
Guardian: Daniel Defoe (1661–1731), an English novelist, journalist, and traveler, was also, apparently, an amateur meteorologist. He reported dozens of events involving the devastation wrought by strong winds, such as the damage from the Great Storm of 26 November 1703. He observed that more tiles were blown off the lee side of the houses than the sides facing the wind and that hundreds of windmills were destroyed because the wind turned them so fast that friction caused them to overheat and catch fire.
Associated Press: The pioneering Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe died on 24 October 1601 11 days after attending a banquet in Prague. The cause of death, usually attributed to a bladder infection, is in doubt. Some people claim Brahe was poisoned with mercury. To settle the matter, an international team has exhumed Brahe's body and will conduct an autopsy that will include sophisticated x-ray scanning and neutron activation analysis. The results are expected sometime next year.
New Scientist: The International System of Units (SI), established in 1960 at a conference in Paris, set an international standard for core units of measure, such as the kilogram, meter, and second. The system was developed to improve accuracy and standardization around the world. On the 50th anniversary of the system’s adoption, New Scientist’s Alison George conducts a brief interview with Brian Bowsher, head of the UK’s measurement standards laboratory, the National Physical Laboratory.
Nature: During the English Civil War (1641–52), a warship, thought to be the Parliamentarians' Swan, sank off Scotland's west coast. Among artifacts retrieved from the wreck in the 1990s was a barnacle-encrusted pocket watch. Now, thanks to a compact CT scanner built by X-Tek Systems of Tring outside London, a team from the National Museum of Scotland has peered through the barnacles to discover the watch's movement. Jo Marchant's report for Nature includes a movie that presents a "fly through" view of the CT data.
Wired: Lisa Grossman has written an extensive article on the uncertain future of the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin—the self-proclaimed “birthplace of modern astronomy.” 
Administered by the University of Chicago, the 113-year-old observatory once claimed one of the best astronomical libraries in the country, the world’s largest refracting telescope, and all the university's astronomy faculty and graduate students, including the Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Now, however, most of the faculty and the books from the library have migrated to the university campus. Grossman took a tour of the observatory to see it as it is today and find out what is going to happen to it.
Los Angeles Times: A little-known NASA structure, the 44-year-old Deep Space Station 14, is undergoing a major remodeling. 
Nicknamed the "Mars antenna," the remote structure, located in the Mojave Desert, is the size of a football field and weighs almost 2000 tons. It is the largest antenna in the world that can both rotate fully and send and receive data. Overseen by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Deep Space Station 14, originally constructed in 1966 to track a spacecraft as it flew past Mars, was intended to last only until the 1980s, but it has since tracked asteroids, rovers on distant planets, and probes traveling through and out of the solar system. With a manned mission to Mars on the horizon, NASA is working to renovate the antenna that has, in the words of Los Angeles Times writer Kurt Streeter, "shepherded, at least partly, every NASA spacecraft that has traveled far past the Moon."
NPR: Recently, the New York Times online featured stunning images of atomic bomb explosions, some taken in the 1950s and 1960s by Harold Edgerton, a professor at MIT who developed the rapatronic camera specifically for that purpose. Capturing the explosions was exceptionally challenging, partly because of the extraordinary light intensity and the ultrashort duration. Edgerton, who specialized in stop-motion photography, earned the reputation of being “the man who made time stand still.” While his images reveal what the human eye cannot see, they also achieve a certain visual aesthetic.
Guardian: NASA, Flickr, and Internet Archive have joined forces to post a collection of photos called NASA Commons to commemorate 50 years of photographing the space agency's spectacular ventures. The collection focuses on key figures in the agency's development, tests and launches of early capsules and probes, and construction at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. According to NASA, the archive is "an opportunity for the public to participate in the process of discovery."
Physics Today: Curiosity, awareness, initiative, and the fragility of Earth are the themes at the heart of Douglas W. Jacobs’s play R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe, which opened last month at Arena Stage in Crystal City, Virginia. The final performance is this weekend.
Listen to a Physics Today interview with Jacobs.
Washington Post: 
Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish priest and astronomer who proposed that the Earth orbits the Sun, has been reburied with honors at Frombork Cathedral in Northern Poland, five centuries after he advanced his then-controversial theory. His remains had previously lain in an unmarked grave beneath the cathedral's floor. The reburial is the culmination of a six-year effort, initiated by a local bishop, to locate the astronomer's remains and identify them using forensic reconstruction and DNA analysis.
NPR: Sydney Levitus is land-based in Silver Spring, Maryland. But his work frequently transports him—at least figuratively—back to the helms of ships that plied the seas many decades ago. He's looking at temperature readings from the ship's logbooks.
Physics Today: A new radiocarbon dating technique that can determine the age of ancient mummies, old artwork, and other relics without causing damage was announced yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society held in San Francisco, California.
"This technique stands to revolutionize radiocarbon dating," said Marvin Rowe, of Texas A&M university at Qatar, who led the research team. "It expands the possibility for analyzing extensive museum collections that have previously been off limits because of their rarity or intrinsic value and the destructive nature of the current method of radiocarbon dating."
Physics Today: Updated: 3/29/2010: The Royal Society has unveiled a list of the 10 most influential women scientists in UK history, with Caroline Herschel in first place.
Women scientists have discovered nebulas and the first radio pulsars, developed spray-on skin for burn victims, pioneered cancer-beating therapies, created cutting-edge computer chips, and won Nobel Prizes, but as the Royal Society lauds past women scientists, their contemporaries are still facing a number of difficulties, including being asked to make the tea and take notes at meetings by their male colleagues.
A survey of US science education by the Bayer Corporation reports that "significant numbers of women and underrepresented minority chemists and chemical engineers say they were discouraged from pursuing" a career in science and engineering at some point in their lives"
Some letters were published in the New York Times on the 28 March 2010 on this very issue.
Have you noticed any improvements in how women scientists have been treated at your institution? Physics Today would like to know. Contact us in the comment box below.
Wired.com: In 2006, Oleg Khinsagov was caught trying to smuggle 100 grams of refined uranium into Georgia with the aim of selling it to a Muslim man he believed was connected to “a serious organization.”
The amount was small, but enriched enough to make a bomb, and Khinsagov said he had another 2 to 3 kilograms stored in his apartment that he was willing to sell.
That should be the opening scene of a new documentary on nuclear proliferation, but instead it’s tucked into the middle of Countdown to Zero, which aims to do for antinuclear proliferation what An Inconvenient Truth did for the environmental movement.
The film takes a while to work up to its most important point—that anyone with a relatively small amount of money has the ability to obtain enough nuclear weapons material to incinerate everything in a five-mile radius of a large city. And he or she wouldn’t have to missile it into the US, they could simply detonate it in a container ship at a port.
Science Friday: For the past week, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York has been home to an unusual sight—performances of Il Mondo Della Luna, a comic opera about the Moon written by Joseph Haydn in 1777.
The performance blends traditional opera with laser and light technology provided by the planetarium. NPR's Science Friday's Ira Flatow talks with the director of the performance.
The Daily Telegraph: Royal Society president Martin Rees celebrates 350 years of one of the UK's greatest institutions and looks towards the changing nature of scientific publishing.
BBC News: The world's first large-scale, electronic programmable computer was created to do one job—crack the wartime codes used by the Germans during World War II. Engineers and code-crackers describe life working on Colossus as part of a BBC News series on computer pioneers.
WSJ.com: Adam Keiper, editor of the New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, expresses his personal view about the history of nanotechnology.
On 29 December 1959, Richard P. Feynman gave an after-dinner talk at an annual American Physical Society meeting, entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom."One attendee later told science writer Ed Regis that the puzzled physicists in the room feared Feynman meant that "there are plenty of lousy jobs in physics."
Feynman said that he really wanted to discuss "the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale." In short, a half-century ago he anticipated what we now call nanotechnology—the manipulation of matter at the level of billionths of a meter.
Some historians depict the speech as the start of this now-burgeoning field of research. Yet Feynman didn't use the word "nanotechnology" himself, and his lecture went for years almost entirely unmentioned in the scientific literature until the 1980s (Editor's note: Physics Today referred to it in 1979).
The story of how his talk was forgotten and then, decades later, inserted into the history of nanotechnology is worth understanding less because of what it tells us about the past than because of what it hints about the future, a future in which billions of dollars in research and development funds are at stake.
Related Physics Today article
Microscience: an overview
The Independent: The Royal Society in London is making available in digital form the key original manuscript that describes how Isaac Newton devised his theory of gravity after witnessing an apple falling from a tree in his mother's garden in Lincolnshire, although there is no evidence to suggest that it hit him on the head.
Science: Back in the late 1990s, archaeologist Sam Paley of the University at Buffalo in New York was frustrated in his study of the throne room of the 9th century BCE Northwest Palace at Nimrud, the storied Assyrian capital in what is now Iraq, as many artifacts from the room were scattered among many museums.
Then at a conference he heard a presentation by Donald Sanders, a leading proponent of using interactive three-dimensional computer graphics in archaeology, and enlisted Sanders's help.
The pair spent many years getting photographs from museums and successfully built a virtual 3D model of the structure.
The throne room is a classic example of the growth of virtual archaeology, in which archaeologists use computers to re-create the environment and conditions of the past.
The technique is slowly moving into mainstream archaeology.
Various: A three-day conference on the relationship between science, religion, and society has been held at Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, Italy, to celebrate the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. A writeup of the conference appeared at Catholic.net.
Entitled "1609-2009: From Galilei's Telescope to Evolutionary Cosmology—Science, Philosophy and Theology in Dialogue," the conference began by clearing up the myths that still surround Galileo and his relationship with the Catholic Church.
Owen J. Gingerich, emeritus professor of astronomy and of history of science at Harvard University, swiftly ruled out the most famous and seemingly irrefutable accusation: that Galileo was tortured by the Church. The minutes of the interrogation, now preserved in the Vatican Archives, state that Galileo was to be "interrogated for vehement expression of heresy" and that included "legally being shown the instruments of torture."
In an e-mail to Physics Today, Gingerich expands on some aspects of his lecture. "In this International Year of Astronomy we read that with his telescope Galileo proved the Copernican system (that the Earth goes round the Sun)," he says. But Galileo proved no such thing, he adds.
"Galileo would dearly have loved to find an irrefutable proof of the motion of the earth, but instead all he could do was to make the motion of the earth more reasonable and to assure readers that the Copernican system was a coherent way to look at the world."
"What Galileo's Dialogo did was make the motion of the earth intellectually respectable, and not just a ridiculous idea as the vast majority of people believed at that time. When I present this interpretation, I am typically asked, "In that case, when was the aha! moment when the Copernican system was finally proved?"
"In astronomy textbooks the Foucault pendulum and the annual parallax of nearby stars are typically presented as proof for the motion of the earth. But those demonstrations came much too late, and by that time nearly everyone was already convinced by the Copernican cosmology."
"What happened was that a persuasive new theoretical structure had emerged—Newtonian physics described in Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica—and the Principia was credentialed by a series of observations including Pierre Louis Maupertuis's demonstrations of the oblateness of the earth, the predicted return of Halley's comet, and James Bradley's discovery of the aberration of starlight. So I am not dismissing observations, which are critical in providing persuasion. But specific proofs were not what suddenly produced the acceptance of the Copernican cosmology."
Gingerich said that the Galileo controversy "essentially changed the way we do science because today science works primarily by persuasion and not by proof, and Galileo influenced how that happened."
BBC News: One of the world's oldest scientific institutions is marking the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online.
The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, is making public manuscripts by figures like Isaac Newton.
Benjamin Franklin's account of his infamous kite-flying experiment is also available on the Trailblazing website.
Society president Martin Rees said the papers documented some of the most "thrilling moments" in science history.
The site will remain free to the public until the end of February 2010.
The Guardian: Walk round the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park and sooner or later you'll hear a cry of recognition and someone will say: "I remember using one of those."
It probably doesn't happen often to The Millionaire, a mechanical calculator that went into production in 1893, but Sir Maurice Wilkes spotted it, adding: "We used to have one in the lab. I hope it's still there."
In this case, "the lab" was what became the Cambridge University Computer Lab, which Wilkes headed from 1945 until 1980.
It was where he built Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (Edsac), one of the world's first electronic computers, using sound beams traversing baths of mercury for the memory units.
