CAN SCIENTISTS STOP OR REDUCE THE TORNADOES AND HURRICANES?

A view of Hurricane Sandy from GOES East satellite-Credit: NASA GOES East, Stuart Rankin via Flickr

To save lives and reduce costs, there would be tremendous advantage if science had a way to stop a devastating hurricane like Sandy. And scientists have thought of it before. One idea that rears its head almost every hurricane season recently is the notion of bombing a hurricane into submission. The theory goes that the energy released by a nuclear bomb detonated just above and ahead of the eye of a storm would heat the cooler air there, disrupting the storm’s convection current. Unfortunately, this idea, which has been around in some form since the 1960s, wouldn’t work.

ARE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHERS TOO INFLUENCED BY CORPORATIONS ?

We like to think academic researchers are motivated purely by the desire to make progress in the fields of science and medicine. But a new report published Tuesday finds that as many as 1 in 10 board positions at for-profit health care companies are held by researchers affiliated with a nonprofit or academic institution. While there aren’t any national guidelines set up to prevent these relationships, researchers and other experts say the overlap amounts to a huge conflict of interest and has the potential to influence academic work.

WHICH OF MODERN PHYSICS ARE WRONG?

Which of the Basic Assumptions of Modern Physics are Wrong?

There’s something unnerving about unifying physics. The two theories that need to be unified, quantum field theory and Einstein’s general theory of relativity, are both highly successful. Both make predictions good to as many decimal places as experimentalists can manage. Both are grounded in compelling principles. Both do have flaws — including an unfortunate tendency to produce the number ∞ — but those flaws remain safely behind the scenes, never undermining the theories’ empirical successes.

SOLAR ECLIPSE 2014

Solar Eclipse 1919

The US won’t See Another Solar Eclipse Like This Week’s Until 2023

JESSICA ORWIG SCIENCE  OCT. 22, 2014, 2:04 AM

Thursday’s partial solar eclipse will begin at 3:38 pm EDT (12:38 pm PDT) and last through 7:52 pm EDT (4:52 pm PDT).

The most spectacular portion of the partial eclipse, when the moon blocks out the most sun, will happen around 5:45 pm EDT (2:45 pm PDT).