By Alaina G. Levine On 21-26 June 2014, 4500 delegates from 75 nations assembled in Copenhagen, Denmark for an amazing event- the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF). This all-purpose conference seeks to engage the STEM-hungry public about as many areas of science and engineering as possible, with talks, workshops and even a special outreach festival called...
By Alaina G. Levine While many were fawning over the Nobel Prizes in the last few weeks, I became excited over a seemingly innocent paper published by PLOS One that, in fact, stinks big time. In the first comprehensive scientific study of stress sweat, Dr. Pamela Dalton, an experimental psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses...
By Alaina G. Levine While many were fawning over the Nobel Prizes in the last few weeks, I became excited over a seemingly innocent paper published by PLOS One that, in fact, stinks big time. In the first comprehensive scientific study of stress sweat, Dr. Pamela Dalton, an experimental psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses...
By Alaina G. Levine It was less than a year ago that I sat in the back of a conference room at the storied Santa Fe Institute (SFI) listening to lectures on garbage, slums and cell phones. I was the only reporter invited to a workshop that converged scholars from realms as diverse as...
By Alaina G. Levine It was less than a year ago that I sat in the back of a conference room at the storied Santa Fe Institute (SFI) listening to lectures on garbage, slums and cell phones. I was the only reporter invited to a workshop that converged scholars from realms as diverse as...
By Alaina G. Levine Like Ice? Recognize its importance to the health of the planet and the very existence of humankind? Then prepare to be horrified and generally freaked-out by a new documentary that shows in shocking detail how fast our glaciers are retreating, melting and disappearing. It’s history in the making, says James Balog,...
By Alaina G. Levine In my continuing mission to better understand what’s going on “down there”, specifically in the sediments under the sea in the planet’s basement, an exciting finding has caught my eye. According to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America...
By Alaina G. Levine Lindau, Germany- At 11am 4 July 2012, Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced that results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) show that “We have discovered a new particle. It is a boson….We have found the last missing corner stone of the standard model....
By Alaina G. Levine If there is a nerd heaven on Earth, it’s in Lindau, Germany. That’s where I am this week, honored to participate in the 62nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, with 27 Nobel Laureates in physics and 596 young researchers from all over the world. This annual week-long love affair with science, takes...
By Alaina G. Levine Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, so I am getting ready to say goodbye to my home world. I will miss it. Sure I will see it again with my telescope, but there’s nothing like witnessing its pass in front of the Sun. This transit won’t happen again...
By Alaina G. Levine There’s buried treasure beneath the sea. James Cameron isn’t looking for it, it’s not the Heart of the Ocean, and it’s not near those fabulous deep sea vents we’ve come to adore. Rather, the prize of which I write is literally under the ocean – it’s the creatures that inhabit the...
I have always been interested in how seemingly unrelated areas of science interface. Whether it is the connections between physics and cancer, optics and oceans, or agriculture and space sciences, finding, exploring, and reporting on these junctions and the pioneers who dabble in these disciplines is a real and regular delight of mine. And there’s...