Stories tagged Scientific World View


Triangulum galaxy (M33)
Triangulum galaxy (M33)Courtesy NASA

Universe may be 15.8 billion years old

The Hubble constant, formulated by Edwin Hubble in 1929, has remained fairly constant since the 1950's. Kris Stanek, associate professor of astronomy at Ohio State, and his coauthors are publishing a paper that may change the accepted value of the Hubble constant and also the accepted size and age of the universe.

They studied two of the brightest stars in M33, which are part of a binary system, meaning that the stars orbit each other. As seen from Earth, one star eclipses the other every five days.



Astronomers crunch numbers, universe gets bigger

This new method took 10 years to develop. To make such a drastic change to the accepted view of the universe will require additional experimentation.

"Our margin of error is now 6 percent, which is actually pretty good," Stanek said. Next, they may do the same calculation for another star system in M33, to reduce their error further, or they may look at the nearby Andromeda galaxy. The kind of binary systems they are looking for are relatively rare, he said, and getting all the necessary measurements to repeat the calculation would probably take at least another two years.

Soure article: Ohio State University Research Archive


Connections between politics and science were clear during the State of the Union address on January 31, when President George W. Bush outlined his priorities for the nation. "We see great changes in science and commerce that will influence all our lives," Bush said, expecting the United States to "lead in oppportunity and innovation for decades to come."

Here are some of the scientific objectives the President discussed:

  • Increased science and math education—to make the United States a leader in nanotechnology, supercomputing, and the development of alternative energy sources.
  • An end to the spread of the HIV-virus, and assistance internationally to people with HIV/AIDS or Malaria.
  • Ethical regulations in science and medicine (specifically in the area of human cloning).

A visitor to this website recently posted this question:


Here is the Science Museum of Minnesota's official position on evolution.









OK, so what is evolution?


The theory of natural selection is based on three principles:

  • Organisms produce more offspring than can survive and reproduce.




Even more evidence of evolution

Here are other examples of evidence for evolution:


The US Postal Service will release 4 new stamps this month to commemorate important American scientists of the last century.

4 American Scientist StampsOne of my favorite science thinkers, Richard Feynman, will be featured on one of the stamps. Feynman was famous for his discoveries about Quantum Electro Dynamics, which allowed us to understand more about the very strange properties of light. While Feynman was a ground breaking scientist he also excelled as a remarkable teacher. To get a sense for his teaching abilities and to learn more about light, you should watch one of his lectures on Quantum Electro Dynamics

The stamps will also feature:

  • Geneticist Barbara McClintock - McClintock's work on genes in maize (corn) earned her the Nobel Prize in 1983. She was the first person to discover that genes are genes are transposable--they can move between chromosomes.
  • Mathematician John von Neumann - von Neumann's mathematical discoveries helped establish the field of cellular automata and many of the principles that drive modern computers today. He even extended his thories to the field of mining, proposing futuristic ways of mining the moon.
  • Thermodynamicist Josiah Willard Gibbs - Gibbs, who lived from 1839-1903, studied the physics and mathematics involved in how complex fluids move around in space. His work provided a foundation for future discoveries such as vector analysis (a type of math), quantum mechanics, and even the behavior of comets.

Do you think you will buy stamps because they have scientists on them? I will, but I'm kind of a nerd.





On February 8, the British government gave a team of scientists permission to clone human embryos for medical research. Legal in the UK since 2001, this is only the second cloning project the government has allowed.

Led by Ian Wilmut, the creator of Dolly the sheep, the team plans to study motor neuron disease, or MND. The disease kills motor neurons—cells in the brain and spinal cord that control movement. MND affects about 350,000 people, and kills 100,000 each year. Wilmut's team wants to study what goes wrong in the afflicted nerve cells.