Galileo's Pendulum

Mars Science Laboratory on its rocket, blasting off.

With Thanksgiving in the United States last week, a lot of stuff happened that I didn’t blog about. I’ll be doing a bit of catch-up now, seeing if there’s anything I must write about NOW. Meanwhile, take these links and may they serve you well:

• If you missed it yesterday, my latest post at Double X Science is up: There Will Never Be Another Curie…And That’s a Good Thing. Bonus: Double X Science is now on Facebook—come “like” us!
• Since science is obviously for boys, if you make science kits for girls, they should be BRIGHT PINK. (Was that sarcasm too thick for you?) Geologist Evelyn Mervine takes the whole sales pitch to pieces, pointing out the problem with segregating by gender and giving girls lame experiments as a kind of consolation prize for not being boys.
• Speculation about the equivalence between matter and energy predated Einstein, but that doesn’t mean Einstein’s work wasn’t important. Greg Gbur goes all 19th century to explore the roots of the most famous equation in physics, E = m c² .
• We learn in school that water freezes at 0° C or 32° F (and if you’ve got a good teacher, 273 K), but strictly speaking that’s only true at the average atmospheric pressure at sea level. Deviations from that temperature aren’t usually enough to make a difference in our daily lives, but just as you can keep water from boiling by pressurizing it, you can prevent water from freezing by supercooling it. Chemists Valeria Molenero and Emily Moore at the University of Utah discovered that there is indeed an ultimate freezing point, however, that occurs at -48° C (225 K). Below this temperature, water must solidify. (Original Nature paper is here.)

On Saturday, the next Mars rover, the Mars Science Laboratory (AKA Curiosity), was launched toward the red planet. Here’s a great collection of videos and photos from the launch, but to whet your appetite, a short video of the final booster separation that sent the probe on its way: