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Thanks for coming to visit my website. I write about science, technology, foreign affairs, and other subjects.
Follow me on Twitter: @kkakaesDrones and Aerial Observation
I edited and wrote part of a short book published by New America in July 2015 and freely available online, about how drones are being used in new ways around the world. It's meant to be useful to people who want to fly drones.The Pioneer Detectives
I published a short book with The Millions.
It's the story of the Pioneer Anomaly, a long-standing mystery. The book is short and fun—the length of a novella—but also, in the words of Amazon's reviewer, "powerful and sad". If you've got any curiosity about how NASA works behind the scenes or why scientists believe what they do, I think you'll enjoy the book.
It is available on Amazon as a Kindle Single and also on Apple's iBooks.Drone Wars
I wrote a chapter on the long history of drone technology going back to the early 20th century in this edited Cambridge University Press volume.
The outer solar system
20 March 2004
10 Planets, or 8?
A new object has been detected far beyond Pluto
Bounding information
6 March 2004
Hair today
String theory might reveal the internal structure of black holes
Towards the planck length
28 February 2004
Atto boy!
The shortest time, and smallest mass, yet measured
Climbing the periodic table
5 February 2004
Two new elements
A Russian-American collaboration has created two new chemical elements.
Modern-day aether?
5 February 2004
A cosmological conundrum
What if the dark energy and dark matter essential to modern explanations of the universe don’t really exist?
Gamma-ray mystery
3 November 2003
Bursting with controversy
Arguments continue about the biggest explosions in the universe–just what are gamma-ray bursts, and how do they work?
Exploring Jupiter
18 September 2003
Magnifico!
The life and death of Galileo, America’s Jupiter probe.
Lightspeed champion
22 May 2003
There was a young fellow called Bright…
Light can travel faster than light. Sort of.
What’s the universe made of?
10 April 2003
Seeing in the dark
A new computational model, unveiled at a meeting of the American Physical Society, finds that dark matter in the universe is highly organised.
Plus a box on the structure of the proton. >>
The Planck Scale
27 February 2003
The Long and the Short of It
Physicists have worked out how to look at the smallest sizes and shortest time that some of them believe can exist.
Better than fireflies
20 February 2003
An array of good things
Intense light trapped in a tiny fibre should have a bevy of uses.
Universal archaeology
13 February 2003
Just right
The age and composition of the universe have now been established by a NASA satellite.
General relativity
9 January 2003
Jupiter calling
Scientists have at last measured the speed of gravity. (This measurement is now controversial.)
Quantum computation
2 January 2003
Heads and tails
Practical quantum computers are another step closer.
Space-based telescopes
19 December 2002
A Webb of intrigue
Plans are afoot to build a replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope.
Orbiting telescopes
24 October 2002
Integral observations
A new gamma-ray telescope has just been launched.
Asymmetry in creation
12 July 2001
The fact of the matter
The first results of an experiment designed to find out why the universe is composed of matter have just been announced.
Bose-Einstein Condensates
5 July 2001
Cold, quickly
A new way has been devised to make a peculiar form of matter.