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.

Witten interviewed by Ira Flatow on Big Ideas: video of the day

.. and a very clear introduction into string and M-theory for dummies

Fermi telescope does not confirm DM claims

Fermi Space Telescope (image by NASA) Fermi gamma-ray space telescope was unable to predict the presence of the 300-800 GeV peak in the distribution function of high energy electrons in cosmic rays. Let me remind you that the anomaly we are talking about was claimed to be found by the ATIC team and generated recently [...]

387. Gapminder and dynamical visualization

Nowadays, in statistical analysis of various economic or social factors we mostly use plots where time is just another coordinate along another axis. In real life we do feel time and dynamics of various processes in a different fashion – time is more like a sequence/collection of snapshots taken at its different moments, in the [...]

386. Saturday’s photoguess

The questions related to this photoguess: a) what is the physical phenomenon on the photo? b) who made it? (where it was made?) Seek and thou shalt find! Update: kudos to hukrepus , according to him/her this is larger than average (>5m) lumps of material in Saturn’s rings with the Sun shining almost edge on [...]

385. NEQNET: Last two weeks of April

The last month of the spring 2009 has started. Like all crazies, who usually get a bit more active during spring, I want (need) to become more active – my spirit requires some change. In this respect, I would like to ask you – what do you want to see new on NEQNET? New design? [...]

384. More news from NASA

First, it seems that Orion will generally (that is, not just on missions to the Moon) carry 4 astronauts instead of 6, as was initially planned. This is fantastic news for the Russian Space Agency, since NASA will have to use Soyuz spacecrafts as an escape module for ISS – the number of crew members [...]

383. Puzzling kinetics of Bose-Enstein condensation

Just finished reading a really review “Magnon BEC and spin superfluidity” by Yu. Bunkov and G. Volovik, which left me with quite a bit of material to think about… Probably the thing that stroke me most after digesting the review is how poorly I (or in truth – it’s better to say “we”) actually understand [...]

382. Lester Lyles is not to be the next NASA administrator

Lester Lyles, retired air force general, has confirmed yesterday that he has taken his name out of consideration for the NASA administrator post. He was clearly a favorite in the run started on Jan 20, to the point that Obama administration pushed him to take the post. I think it would be fair to say [...]

380. Lightest exoplanet found: video of the day

… as announced on Apr 21. Discovered planet is only about twice as massive the Earth.

379. Thermonuclear fusion: list of posts

Before proceeding to the discussion of hydrodynamic instabilities in plasma, let me list for further reference all the posts I wrote so far about thermonuclear fusion and thermonuclear reactors: 1. Thermonuclear fusion: some basic facts about thermonuclear reactions, where I start explaining why such phenomenon as thermonuclear fusion can even take place in Nature I [...]