Dmitry Podolsky has got his PhD from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He currently works as postdoc at Case Western Reserve University. He is also one of the editors of NEQNET.

Relaunching NEQNET

Dear all, After 1.5 years I finally consider myself settled down and ready to return to more or less active blogging. NEQNET will be relaunched within the next 30 days with new design and hopefully lots of new content. Also, as it seems, there will be new team members working for NEQNET together with me [...]

Saturday’s photoguess: what does this monkey symbolize?

There are two questions for this week’s photoguess: 1) What exactly does poor monkey symbolize? 2) Where is this strange artefact located? (Answering this question will also help you to find answer for the question 1). Hint: the topic of this photoguess is directly related to the subject of one of this week’s posts on [...]

Dynamics of space storm

A team from the U. of Alberta was able to observe a space storm in its full dynamics – at least during first minutes from its birth. For that, they used a network of cameras located in multiple places within Canada – you can see exact location of vertices of the grid on the video [...]

One step for a Man

Nature News has decided to start running a Twitter microblog devoted to the history of Apollo 11 mission – the first manned mission to the Moon. They will basically twit all the steps of the mission, to the Moon and back, day after day, event after event as if it was happening today, in 2009. [...]

LISA technology and instrumentation

Oliver Jennrich (European Space Agency) has prepared a large review on technical aspects of LISA (space laser interferometer) mission – the project is extremely complicated for realization, many technologies are not even yet fully developed, and various prototypes will have to be launched. Yet, possible payout is so huge – even including possible detection of [...]

Test beam for LHCb

Video about LHCb experiment and the recent test of their detector using Super Proton Synchrotron. LHCb experiment is one of six particle detector experiments aimed to measure CP violation in the interaction of b-hadrons (hadron containing b quarks).

A bit about climate change

Recently, an idea that sharp terrestrial climate change might be directly correlated to spiral arm passages of the Solar system became very popular. Namely, certain correlations of times of spiral arm passage with timing of ice ages and abundance of in fossils were claimed to be found (in the latter case, effective abundance of grows [...]

Susskind’s lectures on cosmology

Another amazing set of 8 lectures by Lenny Susskind – cosmology this time. Thanks for sharing this, Stanford! P.S. If you were unable to see embedded video, here is the link to the playlist I’ve created for you. Live Football

Other interesting things in ArXiv (12 Jun 2009)

Wayne Hu. Acceleration from modified gravity: lessons from worked examples. The main question Wayne Hu discusses in this minireview is “How can we distinguish dark energy from modified gravity theories if the former and the latter provide the same predictions for cosmological dynamics?” He is particularly focused on DGP and models. His answer is the [...]

How to use technology to teach undegraduate biology

Explanations by Stony Brook U. professor William Collins: it was fun to watch for me. The video brings up a lot of great points that would be useful for college degree courses online to implement. Technology will surely be an important addition to all college courses in the future.