Description:
A science blog with Eric Berger
Contents:
Public support of nanotech seems quite shallow, Part II
Yesterday, in Part I, I wrote about how public support for advanced nanotechnology applications wanes outside the field of medicine (and, I suspect, energy). Now let's try to get a grasp on how the public might perceive nanotech once a)...
Public support of nanotech seems quite shallow, Part I
During the next two days I'm going to present some selected results from a survey of public opinion on nanotechnology. Conducted by North Carolina State's Michael Cobb and others, the scientific survey of 556 participants is one of the best...
Hurricane season goes bye-bye. So might the Saffir-Simpson scale as we know it, too.
Last month we discussed the shortcomings of the Saffir-Simpson scale when it comes to measuring hurricanes. It turns out that we weren't alone. As I reported Sunday, there's a serious effort afoot to modify the Saffir-Simpson scale to better account...
Live Chat: Space shuttle Endeavour landing
Join space writer Mark Carreau and I for a live chat now during today's landing of space shuttle Endeavour, scheduled for 3:25 p.m. CT....
Saturday special: Sweet, quasi science-related videos
It's a busy Saturday as the Berger household begins the process of putting up Christmas decorations, so I'll save the in-depth analysis for another day. Instead I'm going to borrow a title from my favorite Chron sports blogger, and throw...
If you're cleaner, you're meaner?
There's an interesting new study in Psychological Science that may tell us a little bit about ourselves. As part of one experiment researchers asked 40 volunteers to unscramble sentences. Half had sentences that contained "clean" words, such as "washed", "immaculate"...
Turkeys and Neandertals (not a Geico commercial)
Happy Thanksgiving. As I think everyone is pretty well acquainted with the Thanksgiving Day myths (i.e. the tryptophan in turkey makes one tired) I thought I'd try something a bit different. Like, John Hawks' excellent and entertaining take on Neandertal...
Stars and the space station, oh my.
When some of the galaxy's large stars, about 25 times the size of the sun or greater, reach an advanced age they begin losing mass at a very high rate. These are known as Wolf-Rayet stars. Astronomers know of about...
The sad, sad story of U.S. weather satellites
My colleague Chase Davis (who unfortunately has left the Chronicle for the Des Moines Register) had an outstanding story this weekend on the red tape and cost overruns that have hindered efforts to modernize the fleet of weather and climate...
The world headquarters of nanotech ... in Pearland?!?
Houston scientists do an excellent job of conducting basic research. But report after report has confirmed that it does fairly poorly at the difficult task of carrying lab work forward into commercial products. That's partly because it's so difficult to...
In honor of 50,000 comments, a prize. (A cool one, at that.)
Sometime during the next day or two one of you will leave the 50,000th comment on this blog, which now is more than three years old. It seems almost impossible to me that, during the last three-plus years, I've read...
Stormy, frigid December on tap?
So says Chris Hebert, of ImpactWeather, who is pretty good at making such predictions. First come the storms, he says, perhaps in a week or so: Details are not clear yet, but I'm seeing strong indications of a storm system...
The future of war. Not good.
War is hell. As nanotechnology refines and redefines battlefield weaponry, will it lead to a deeper circle of hell? In a recent talk Mike Treder, executive director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, outlines some of the global movements that...
Who are the top global warming experts in Texas?
Earlier this month, via post, I received my copy of the "Journalist's Guide to Global Warming Experts" from The Heartland Institute, a skeptical think tank. You can see an online copy here. Needless to say, the first thing I did...
For the short term, women like men with scars
A British scientist says women prefer men with scars over non-scarred faces for short-term relationships, but not long-term ones. Here's a news release touting the findings: Dr Rob Burriss, from the University's School of Biological Sciences, explains: "Male and female...
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