Archive: Science

The dean of newspaper science writers is apparently retiring at age 98. Slacker! Plus a ransomware attack at KQED and CalBuzz calls it quits for now.

She remains at Caltech and will work more on the effects of climate change and global warming.

Big science news today from Caltech and other institutions: Ripples in the fabric of spacetime directly observed.

At the VA campus off Wilshire Boulevard, damaged birds and veterans are getting over their PTSD.

The Semidi segment of the subduction zone in the Aleutian Islands points right at us and is "too quiet."

The Wall Street Journal features Clifford V. Johnson, the USC theoretical physicist who is also a blogger and an adviser on plausible plot twists.

USGS disputes the surprise claim that the La Habra area would endure a substantial quake in the next three years.

The business columnist provides a new biography of Ernest Lawrence, the Berkeley physicist who played a big role in the envelopment of atomic weapons.

Meara, the actress and comedian, died in Manhattan. Nash, the mathematician portrayed in "A Beautiful Mind," was killed with his wife Alicia in a New Jersey taxi crash.

Tornado genesis from Jim Cantore at the Weather Channel.

Scientists observed the sailing stones of Racetrack Playa moving this past winter and think they have finally figured out the mechanism that moves heavy rocks across a dry lake bed.

It's Jia-Rui Cook, the former LA Times reporter and JPL media relations rep.

The UC Santa Barbara researchers who dissected tissue from the mysterious 18-foot oatfish that washed up last month on Catalina Island found some interesting parasites along for the ride.

The good news about the latest new tsunami study, says Lucy Jones of USGS, is that three quarters of the California coastline is cliffs. The not so good news is that the remaining, low-lying coast is home to a lot of people and some of the most valuable land in the state.

The Mars rover Curiosity landed on the red planet last August 5 — that's why you are seeing all the news packages out of JPL.

While the Mount Wilson web cam is out of service, you can get your fix of local mountain scenery with this video, "Above the Inversion Layer."

A Los Angeles County sheriff's helicopter crew flew 60 miles off the coast on Monday to rescue a scientist with a serious leg injury. A crew member taped the aerial rescue on a helmet camera.

The ambitious Megacities Carbon Project aims to monitor the greenhouse gas emissions of "the largest human contributors to climate change: megacities." They are starting with Los Angeles and Paris, and have sensing stations planted across the LA basin.

It's an internal hire: Geoff Mohan, who has recently been the editor for state bureaus and the immigration beat. He was previously the paper's environment editor, among other jobs. Memo to the newsroom inside.

A new study offers evidence that the massive fault that defines the geography of California could snap along its entire length, unleashing a whomper of an earthquake that would hit north and south. Up to now, seismologists have assumed that a portion of the San Andreas in Central California where the Pacific and the North American plates creep past each other fairly smoothly would protect us.

The Martian soil contains organic material of as-yet-undetermined origin, as the scientists already knew from previous missions. That was the big NASA reveal today, advance-billed a few weeks ago by a breathless NPR reporter as something sure to be historic.

An Italian court on Monday found six scientists and an official guilty of manslaughter for failing to properly warn residents about the risk of an impending earthquake that killed more than 300 people in 2009. "It's a sad day for science," said seismologist Susan Hough of USGS in Pasadena.

Anything that advances the science of seismology is news in Southern California, or should be. This week's lead entries in the journal Nature qualify.

The San Fernando Valley has been a major player in the Southern California aerospace legacy, dating from Amelia Earhart and Howard Hughes up through America's first moon rocket tests and the invention of the stealth warplane. The engines that blasted the space shuttle into the sky came, I think, from the Rocketdyne plant in Canoga Park. But no flyover.

The space shuttle Endeavour being placed on its transporter and rolled into its hangar at LAX. Photos and video.

The retired space shuttle Endeavour and its NASA 747 circled the Los Angeles basin for more than an hour on Friday, delighting tens of thousands of school kids, aerospace admirers and ordinary Americans and visitors.

For his HuffPost Live segment advancing the space shuttle Endeavour's flight over Los Angeles, host Jacob Soboroff got an exclusive guest in studio: His dad, Steve Soboroff, the former candidate for mayor in Los Angeles who's in charge of the move for the California Science Center. "I think this is the most meaningful thing to happen to Los Angeles since Staples Center," says the senior Soboroff.

Friday's low-level flyover of the Los Angeles basin by the space shuttle Endeavour (atop a jumbo jet) is expected to occur between 10 and 11 a.m. The FAA and NASA haven't revealed the exact route, but did announce that the shuttle would fly over or near about a dozen landmarks.

The view from NASA's Curiosity rover of the Mars crater and the mountain, more than three miles in height, that the scientists call Mt. Sharp. The image has been "linearized" to remove the fisheye effect of the camera's lens.

Confirmation of the craft's complex soft landing on the surface of Mars came in to Pasadena at 10:31 p.m. PDT, about 14 minutes after it happened. (It takes that long for the communications data to burst across space.) The first thumbnail photos flowed a couple of minutes later, including scenes of the Mars horizon and a picture of a shadow cast on the surface by Curiosity.

Alexei Kitaev is among the first winners of the new Fundamental Physics Prize, funded by a Russian millionaire. It's worth three million bucks, but first you have to give your bank info to a guy on the phone with a Russian accent.

Sally Ride, who grew up in the Encino and graduated from Stanford, became in 1983 the first American woman to work in space. She was also the youngest American at the time to fly into space for NASA. She died today of pancreatic cancer.

The only Griffith Observatory figure we usually hear about is Edwin Krupp, the longtime face of the institution who has done a thousand interviews if he's done one. Westways goes another way for its May Space issue.

China's dust seems to create more snow than California dust. Though the data is still incomplete.

Turns out we might keep our own little mental map inside our heads. That's no surprise. But where it's pointed did make researchers think.

The line of California nerd-dom remains unbroken from Howard Hughes and hotrodders to Steve Jobs and the aerospace engineers who made surfing culture possible.

Live Talks Los Angeles has Tuesday night tickets for LA Observed readers.

Wesleyan biology professor Frederick M. Cohan and his Little League pals sat in the stands at Dodger Stadium on Sept. 9, 1965 and watched Koufax pitch a perfect game.

The Falcon, an unmanned experimental space plane launched this morning at Vandenberg, is designed to fly 13,000 miles an hour, or 20 times the speed of sound.

The current wave of departures from the Los Angeles Times newsroom isn't nearly over.

The Los Angeles Fire Department tweets: No need to call 9-1-1.

Did this month's revelations of an arsenic-eating microbe in the mud at Mono Lake really upend our basic understanding of how life works? Not so much, a growing chorus of scientists is saying.

King wants to name the successor to Vin Scully as Dodgers' voice.

The science story of the day is that one of the basic assumptions about life on Earth — and potentially elsewhere (get it?) — has been upended by a discovery at Mono Lake, the briny prehistoric lake in the Eastern Sierra.

Anyone who's ever gone to the beach in the Santa Barbara area knows that oil and tar can be part of the experience.

I have to wonder if the Times' near-total surrender of its award-winning tradition of covering a major local industry — cutting-edge science — helps explain why the New York Times beat the locals on the apparent suicide of a world-class Caltech scientist.

Today is departure day for some of the Los Angeles Times staffers who were laid off this week or who retired and/or took buyouts. Arts reporter Suzanne Muchnic sent a...

JPL scientist Amy Mainzer explains the importance and cool factor of today's WISE satellite launch up at Vandenberg, in a video on the project's YouTube channel. (It's not embeddable, or...

JPL scientist Amy Mainzer has been blogging the run-up to this morning's launch of a Delta II rocket with NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite on board. She's the deputy...

As Discovery astronauts readjusted to earth's gravity, scientists at JPL in La Canada Flintridge (yes, despite Pasadena datelines, the research facility isn't actually there) levitated some unhappy mice. From Reuters:...