NOTES FROM ELSEWHERE / 2017–2022
Strange science, studio stories and dispatches from a world that never quite happened.
81 articles in the archive · Showing 12
By now, you’ve probably seen a rash of breathless headlines, inspired by the recent Nobel Prize in Physics, proclaiming that physicists have proven “The Universe Isn’t Real!” It’s an exciting idea—my mind immediately leapt to what it…
Around the Planetary Broadcast Network water cooler, the conversations can get pretty technical. Sure, we talk about sports and entertainment as well, but our staff is quite diverse and well-read, so we often end up chatting about the…
Welcome back to our ongoing series on science-y buzz words. This time, we’re turning to the social sciences, so let’s begin with a social question: how many friends do you have? If you are under 50, you probably thought about checking…
If you’re following the latest news out of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)—and you should be, because it’s arguably the most powerful observational tool mankind has ever created—you probably saw a few headlines recently about a…
Imagine you’re a researcher, studying human beings in their natural environment. Throughout your career you’ve seen some variation in human size, but while gathering data one day, you come across a human who is roughly the same height…
If you’ve been near any form of media over the last few days, you’re probably aware that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has been turned back on after three years of maintenance and upgrades. If you paid closer attention to…
If you’re a fan of science or science fiction, you’re familiar with ‘techno-babble’—the word salad of terms swiped from textbooks and peer-reviewed articles that writers use to make things sound more exciting and futuristic. This kind…
Recently, you may have heard something about an elementary particle called the W boson. It probably caught your eye because it had a dire headline like “The Mass of the W Boson May Destroy Physics!” Upon reading it, you probably…
Welcome to another installment in our ongoing series on physics concepts that we hear all the time and don’t actually understand. Today’s buzzword is “Dark Matter” – and no, not the TV adaptation of the sci-fi comic book. Or the…
NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute (STSci) lacks the rockstar name recognition of places like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cape Canaveral, or Kennedy Space Center, but that may be about to change. STSci is the mission…
At some point, you may have overheard your physics nerd friends (everyone has a couple of those, right?) talking about ‘red shift’ and wondered if it was some kind of code for their secret geopolitical leanings. Luckily, there is no…
As promised in our last article, we’re going to continue clarifying the terms that are so present in mainstream press coverage of the latest developments in physics. To select today’s topic, I polled the other reporters here at the…
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