In Jim Arnold's blog, we have been having an occasionally enlightening, occasionally exasperating discussion about whether gravitational waves (GWs) exist.

The evidence strongly supports the interpretation of the mathematics of general relativity that says gravitational waves do indeed exist and are, in principle if not yet in practice, observable.

That leads to a question that hasn't come up in Jim's blog but I'd like to raise here: What is the spectrum of gravitational radiation?

Another blogger here, who is generally so far off the mark that I don't want to point to his earlier discussion, had some odd things to say about the "Pioneer anomaly," the unexplained deviation of the two Pioneer spacecraft from their predicted trajectory as they pass through the outer reaches of the solar system.

A much more cogent discussion has just appeared.

Read on for my review of Avery Gilbert's new book What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life. Who says science has to be dull?

See my latest published book review. Only a Theory is written by the scientist/author whose testimony was most critical in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case in which community members challenged a school board's decision to include Intelligent Design in the science curriculum and won.

People who read my blog entries and comments on others know about my great concern for science education.

I've even posted a few blog brags about my children's science books and my school visits. But this blog entry brags about work that my son is involved in.

Read on, please!

I comment on an article in the Washington Post that discusses the United States' loss of stature among scientists and explain why I have high hopes that it is only a short-term phenomenon.

In the middle of the fourth century AD, a series of earthquakes struck the port of Kourion on the southern coast of Cyprus. The town had no doubt experienced its share of seismic events, but nothing prepared its inhabitants for the major earthquake and tsunami that struck just after dawn, most likely on July 21, AD 365.

When archaeologists excavated the site, among the many discoveries was the heartbreaking tableau of a skeletal family. The man holds his wife protectively while she cradles their one-year-old child. The image, both poignant and instructive, graces the cover of Stanford University Earth Science and geophysics professor Amos Nur's new book, Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God, written with the assistance of his graduate student Dawn Burgess.

Ever since Copernicus placed the Sun at the center of the universe instead of the Earth, scientific discoveries have been repeatedly making our home planet less special and more ordinary. But could the "principle of mediocrity" turn out to be wrong in one critical recent discovery--dark energy--and could that discovery really mean something other than what physicists have suggested?

I won't have time to post the latest newsletter for the Science Shelf Book Review Archive or mail it to subscribers for a few days, but here's a link.

Read on for a bit more.

When researching my history of physics in the twentieth century that was recently published by Facts On File, my best source of authoritative information was the American Institute of Physics Center for the History of Physics and the Neils Bohr Library and Archives.

The long-time director of that Center, Spencer Weart, is retiring, and I got the following notice of a symposium in his honor.