Quantum Matter: if you use your own adversion to colder temperatures, high angular momentum collisions at absolute zero seems counter intuitive, oxymoronic, and a contradiction if not in terms, at least of conventional wisdom.

Plants...photosynthesis...Stevie Wonder...nuff said.

Astronomy is the oldest known science on earth. The discovery of the fastest rapid spinning star may be to some "yawn" fodder. But this was by the European Southern Observatory, not McDonald Observatory (US). Things that make you go: "hmm!"

Plus, I used it as a double entendre mention of by box turtle (artist conception kind of reminded me of her shell).

2D Superconducting...Islands: I feature this because I had the privilege to meet Dr. Nadya Mason at the joint conference of the National Society of Black Physicists and National Society of Hispanic Physicists in Austin, Texas this September. Her work in nanoscale devices is Nobel Prize material. It's interesting to note: blacks have won 13 Nobel Peace Prizes, and one Nobel Prize in Literature (Toni Morrison). NONE in the hard sciences.

Dr. Mason has my enthusiastic backing, and her own considerable acumen...keep up with her name!

2nd Planet on the Right, Straight on Til Morning: well, we know it's "2nd star on the right..." (etc., etc.). It was fun to see SyFy take a classic tale like this and give some plausability to the "magic" of essentially travel through a wormhole. After all, Arthur C. Clark said:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Ode to Science and vicariously, science fiction, largely inspired by science.

In the Zeitgeist, there seems to be a disdain for expertise, intelligence, assigning such to "elitism," or in the words of Senator Jim Demint of South Carolina (in clear, political dog whistle fashion): "uppity."

They probably would have HATED Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Talents" had they read it:

Realize: she wrote this before the millennium, before the moment of now...may she rest in peace. I feel poetry as well as fiction when it is insightful, almost prophetic, to the human condition...TGP

Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler © 1998, pages 7 – 8 paperback:

FROM Memories of Other Worlds

BY TAYLOR FRANKLIN BANKOLE

 I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as “The Apocalypse” or more commonly, more bitterly “the Pox” lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.

      I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.

      Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

      Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.

      What is left of it now, what it has become, I do not know.

Like the Walking Google: it was meant as a compliment, but the scary connotation (to me, at least) was the lack of apparent need to memorize anything beyond the superficial concerns of 13 - 19 year olds fixated on technology, but unwilling to take the time to master, or advance it. Sadly, most considered offline reading "boring" as well.

Longer Lasting Lasers: I don't know if at our perception range as humans we can notice a pulsed versus a continuous laser. However, this is some good information if your fiction requires it as a background.

I actually pulled this off in a high school physics class demo of total internal reflection (though, I'm not sure the kids appreciated it):

Only 600 LY Away:

OK, that's a grip! Obviously, the human species is "below impulse speeds" let alone FTL travel.

However, it is evidence that we're not alone in the universe, and that life is not so unique to our globe.

I just hope they (if there is a "they") survived their own Drake Equation.

Nanoscale Infection Fighters: part of the asset speculative fiction lends is asking not only can we, but should we? I think of Michael Crichton's novel Prey.

I did not originate the title (just the resuse of the 80s phrase "I kid you not"): Marilyn Monrobot,  

A double entendre post on the Higgs Boson: "Ender's Game."

"That Used To Be Us" (redux)...: There was a commentary on Physics Today that the German economy is far superior to ours, and that part of their controversial means was the temerity to use GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT!

See once you read my essay if you see the dangerousness of the "silly season" our politics may bring, and the real possibility of a science denier succeeding President Obama. It could even sensor speculative fiction if it doesn't fit the dogma.

Vibrations + Electrons = "Phoniton": this research proposes a new way to form a hybrid quantum entity (gotta love theorists) called a “phoniton,” a particle that combines a phonon—the quantum form of vibrations—with a matter excitation, such as an electron that transits between two levels.

I had fun also posting The Black Panther series embed (Reginald Hudlin produced and directed it). T'Challa - the name of the king of the mythical Wakanda nation - apparently goes back 3,000 years. It means "the one," and is given to each successive king of a dynasty. I guess Marvel took license, since his father's name was T'Chaka, which has no meaning at all. "Chaka" -- on the other hand -- means "life" in Arabic/Hebrew.

The Black Panther was the first black modern super hero, even before Luke Cage: Hero for Hire.

Electronics From Your Ink-Jet is a post regarding the usage of carbon nanotubes in the manufacture of thin films (like the one behind your smart phone).

An essay I posted yesterday: Aquarius at Noonday. An observation born of my experience as a physics & math teacher; as previously a process, device, manufacturing and product engineer. I consider myself -- a man of a 'certain age' -- one of Sputnik's Children. My fear is this generation's Sputnik moment may be [to use a track metaphor] after the gun, 40 meters to the rear of the rest of the globe, just getting out of the blocks.

Black Hole Cygnus X-1 is a double-star system (really, the majority of black holes are found as such systems, literally one collapsed star cannibalizing the other). I have a link to Space.com and a video embed from You Tube at the link above.

The term "black hole" was coined by John A. Wheeler, while a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Read more on Dr. Wheeler in this NY Times article on his epitaph.

More at: The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, Langston Hughes
1926, The Nation, Courtesy of University of Illinois English Department

Tommie Smith, John Carlos, '68 Olympic Games