Physics Buzz

The European Commission – the executive body of the European Union – recently launched a campaign to encourage more young girls to study science and engineering in school. Good idea, right? Of course. Unfortunately, they decided to release a teaser video for the campaign (embedded below) featuring girls doing "science" in stilettos and short dresses, random shots of lipstick tubes, and a seemingly bewildered male scientist onlooker. The "Science: It's a Girl Thing" video, as seen below, has angered a lot of people who have rightfully argued that the sexist video demeans scientists of all backgrounds. The campaign took the video down shortly after the initial wave of criticism. The video is pretty revolting, but the actual campaign website seems innocuous at worst, and it includes several great profile videos of women in science. Maybe the teaser video was a PR stunt, but generating this much bad press around launch will cast a permanent shadow on the camp

Photo by Heidi Schellman, Higgs by Particle Zoo A science essay in Tuesday's New York Times made big waves in the physics blogosphere. Science essay, you ask? I think the editors decided to use that label as a sort of implicit disclaimer, letting readers know, right up front, to not expect a trim, carefully-researched report of a new scientific breakthrough, something that the author, Dennis Overbye, an MIT-educated science journalism vet and deputy editor of the Times science section, can do with his eyes closed. "The Collider, the Particle, and a Theory About Fate" goes out on a limb—a really long limb—and discusses a fringe idea a couple of theoretical physicists posed to explain why the LHC has been plagued with troubles: the Higgs doesn't want to be found. To quote Overbye: A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that it

This is a guest post by astropixie, one of our intrepid SPS interns, who contributes to the educational physics site Physics To Go When I was sixteen, I visited Australia. The first thing I did once I checked into the hotel was fill up the sink in the bathroom, throw a gum wrapper on the surface, and drain the water, watching to see which direction the wrapper would spiral downward. If it went counter-clockwise, everything I learned from public school and television would be vindicated. If not, I intended to blame the shape of the sink and continue to live in my fantasy world—a world where the turn of the Earth affects the water in my sink but curiously disregards almost everything else in my daily life. Those familiar with the Coriolis force will know that I was a moron in high school (and can rightfully wonder what I am doing writing for a physics blog today). But it is not my fault. For some reason, my eighth grade science teacher told us with certainty that this experiment was