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Then please consider it a plea to write to your Congress critter protesting the major cuts to the science budgets across multiple federal agencies, particularly NASA and NSF. :)

I agree with your predicted outcome but I disagree about your other point. NASA centers are not even all in blue states -- Marshall certainly is not, and it gets plenty of work. (It will be disproportionately harmed by the budget, too.) Moreover, NASA contractors fed by those centers are...

argh, double post.

I cannot overemphasize how catastrophic the president's budget request for NASA, the NSF, the DoE etc. is for science. The project I work on, which is perfectly healthy and providing data used by many other researchers around the world, will vanish in a puff of billionaire tax break smoke...

but not without cause, like poor performance. This message really needs to be spread more widely -- these mass firings are not consistent with the conditions of even probationary employment. They are (probably) not legal.

What's special about dark energy is its equation of state, which describes how its pressure is related to its density. As the universe expands, the density of dark energy remains constant. The effect of this on the expansion of the universe is to speed it up -- it grows exponentially with a...

Yeah, this is what I was wondering about. Eric, did you cover what the method of conversion from IR back to electricity is?

I agree, for me this is the first claim that really passes the laugh test. Previous attempts I haven't believed have largely relied on velocity dispersion measurements in relatively coarse bins, with fairly discrepant results between different analyses in the innermost regions of various...

First we spotted. Magnetar giant flares have a tremendously bright leading pulse, and then much fainter, oscillating tails. Galactic MGFs are so hellishly bright that these tails can be observed in detail (revealing all sorts of fun stuff about the neutron star), but when you put them as far...

That does look like a nice discussion, particularly of the observables!

I can't see a reason why the mass of the SMBH would be correlated only with the length scales that ultimately form galaxies. To avoid fine tuning you'd need to make BHs associated with a wide range of length scales, and so far we haven't observed anything like that. You'd have monster 10^13...

I'm assuming you mean very small-scale fluctuations. (You can't change the spectrum of primordial quantum fluctuations very much at all without changing a whole bunch of other observations. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a great tracer for these. If there were large-scale...

One of the things scifi often gets wrong is depicting black holes as vacuums. Their gravity is exactly the same as anything else (thanks, Einstein!), so you're right, they're not inherently more scary. One main difference is how compact black holes are. Because you can get close to them...

Indeed. IMBH means "10^2 to 10^3 solar mass black hole in a globular cluster" to some people, or "10^5 solar mass black hole at the center of a small galaxy" to others. And probably yet something else to others... (Anyway, the former is still very much in doubt; the latter almost certainly...

It is (comfortingly?) not so easy to get stuff into a black hole. It has to lose its orbital angular momentum, which means there has to be other stuff around to help it cool. THEN, that also means it tends to heat back up as it converts that orbital angular momentum into heat, and that can...

My $0.02: in my field, Science is a lot better than Nature in terms of both reliability of results and completeness of presentation. This hasn't been true over all time -- Nature in the 1960s was incredible -- but nowadays I really do take most Nature papers with an unpleasant heaping of salt...

LISA Pathfinder springs to mind. But it was more of a validation (and ESA!), and I think what you're suggesting would end up the same way. Flying a demonstrator would (presumably) have led to a sufficiently mature design and implementation that the overage would have turned up on the ground...

To be fair, NASA has many programs that support developing and advancing the TRL of components. These range from the development of the concept in the lab, through implementation of practical devices, to environmental testing, to space qualification (e.g. by deployment to and operation on the...

Absolutely not! Sunlight only reduced by about a factor of 2, you'll still fry your eyes.

Reviewers generally only have access to the manuscript and supplementary materials describing e.g. experimental methodology. But even with a thorough description of methodology, it's still only ~20-30pp of material. There's simply no way for a reviewer to ascertain e.g. whether the postdoc who...