RB Editor’s Selections: Cultural Chaos, Cheating Mozzies, and Geotagging Snaps

Sarah Kendrew Sarah Kendrew selects interesting and notable ResearchBlogging.org posts in the physical sciences, chemistry, engineering, computer science, geosciences and mathematics. She blogs about astronomy at One Small Step.

[Cross-posted from ResearchBlogging News]

The longest day of the year is round the corner, and summer is officially over in Western Europe. These physical sciences selection are brought to you from winter-coat-weather Germany.

Is cultural creative transmission governed by chaotic processes? This rather weighty question is the subject of an unusual but blog post on A Replicated Typo, in which author Sean Roberts talks about chaotic sampling of birdsong and other creative processes.

Mosquitoes may be the arch-enemy of a good night’s sleep, but for much of the world, avoiding their bites is a matter of life and death. Paige Brown discusses exciting new work that shows promising results in warding off these and potentially other bothersome critters by confusing their sensory systems, so they can’t locate their next meals.

Location based services are all the rage in social networking, and geotagging of images is a prime example. On Sciencetext, David Bradley looks at recent research into the usability of several image geotagging systems, used by popular services like Flickr and Panoramio.

Finally, I was happy to see several bloggers from the ResearchBlogging community on the list of Winners of the 3 Quarks Daily science blogging prizes, announced today. Congratulations SciCurious, Anne Jefferson, Sean Carroll and Ethan Siegel! I’ll be back next week with more picks.

A Nobel prize for creative physics

The 2010 Nobel prize for Physics has been awarded to two Russian-born scientists, Andre Geim, of the University of Manchester and Radboud University Nijmegen, and Konstantin Novoselov, also in Manchester, for their work on the monolayer carbon material graphene. Graphene is basically a flat sheet of carbon atoms connected in a honeycomb lattice, that displays some interesting properties: it’s flexible, strong and is an excellent conductor for heat and electricity.

Geim and Novoselov’s work to separate the material from bulk graphite has opened up a whole new area of research, into potential applications of graphene or simply to test our understanding of the basic physics of materials on this exciting new material.

[Read more...]

Another accolade for CMB scientists

In another snippet of news, the Shaw Foundation that administers the annual Shaw Prize – the $1 million “Nobel Prize of the East”, on Thursday announced that the 2010 prize for astronomy has been awarded to Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins and Lyman Page and David Spergel of Princeton. The trio have received the award for “for their leadership of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experiment, which has enabled precise determinations of the fundamental cosmological parameters, including the geometry, age and composition of the universe”.

Cosmic Microwave Background scientists have been real favourites on the prize circuit – take a look:

  • Penzias & Wilson, 1978 Nobel Prize, for their CMB detection
  • Peebles, 2004 Shaw Prize, predicted the CMB
  • Alpher, 2005 National Medal of Science, predicted the CMB
  • Smoot & Mather, 2006 Nobel Prize, for their work on the Cosmic microwave Background Explorer satellite (COBE)
  • Mather & COBE team, 2006 Gruber Prize
  • Bennett, Page & Spergel, 2010 Shaw Prize, for their work on WMAP.
    (… and I’m sure I’ve missed some…)

And quite right too – CMB studies of the last couple of decades have been massively influential in our understanding of the Big Bang, the earliest epochs of the Universe, and the origin of structure. I wonder if the Planck team will be just as successful?

Incidentally, nice to see that the 2010 Shaw Prize for mathematics was awarded to Belgian mathematician Jean Bourgain, who’s at Princeton. I don’t know him or his work, but as I haven’t seen it mentioned in any of the Belgian media I thought I’d flag it up here. Congrats!

Image: NASA / WMAP Science Team

3 Quarks Daily Science Blogging Awards

The excellent multi-disciplinary 3 Quarks Daily blog has announced that following the success of last year’s prizes, it’s starting its second cycle of blogging awards. First up are the science prizes, judged by none other than Richard Dawkins. Other categories to be awarded later this year are politics, philosophy and arts & literature. All the info is on 3QD, here, and nominations can be made by just posting a link in the post’s comments section. The nominations will be closed at the end of the day in EDT on 31 May.

Do you have a favourite sciency blog post – your own or someone else’s? Go nominate it quickly!

Vote for your favourite Research Blogs

Following the Oscars news online reminded me that the voting for the Research Blogging Awards opened officially this week. Voting is only open to those registered with the site, but if you’re a blogger and you enjoy writing about peer-reviewed science, you should go sign up – immediately, if not sooner.

There are some great blogs up for awards and I will certainly cast my little vote in the categories where I have my favourites. This blog is a finalist in the category for Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, so if you like what you read here from time to time, consider voting for me. As well as $50 I’d probably get some kind of badge to put in my sidebar, and I totally want one of those. I think it would look really nice next to the Dopplr duck. Help me fill that gaping hole in my sidebar y’all.

See the list of finalists here and follow the link in the invitation email to exercise your democratic rights. If you need reminding of the research I’ve written about in the last few months, here are all my posts tagged “researchblogging”.