She does. Actually, it's not much of a galaxy, it's more of a sub-galaxy, a dwarf galaxy, or maybe not even any kind of galaxy at all, maybe just a cluster of stars. It's hers because she found it, hanging around the edges of the Milky Way. That's it, above. If you look with the eye of love, you can see in the left-middle what she calls a "slight overdensity" of dim blue stars. It's named Willman 1.

Beth Willman is now a member of the astronomy faculty at Haverford College. When she found Willman 1, though, she was a postdoc at NYU (astronomers have long childhoods that don't [...]

After several days of hoo-ha brought on by a vague NASA press release about mysterious life forms that will change how we see alien life, the story finally was published in Science and announced by NASA and so, okay, I'll bite. It turns out that a geomicrobiologist found a bacterium in a California lake full of arsenic, and the bacterium was full of arsenic too. The arsenic atoms were being used by the bug in place of phosphate atoms; and if you'd paid attention back when you were supposed to, you'd know that phosphate atoms are crucial to 1) DNA which is the molecule that makes up [...]

Poor Alan Turing proposed a test by which you'd know whether The Machines are thinking: converse with someone you can't see and who might be a human or might be a machine, and you'll always know which. Test after test, we always know; machines are inferior conversationalists. But recently from the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-an extremely large, ruthlessly intelligent, highly organized professional association-comes troubling news. Change the test from conversing to killing, and all hell breaks loose: machines are indistinguishable from humans.

Ann Finkbeiner's A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In A New Era of Discovery documents the founding of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-and is out today! "Delightful," says Publisher's Weekly! "Totally awesome," says The Awl! The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, begun ten years ago, is mapping 100 million celestial objects-and measuring distance between a million galaxies, giving us the first real map of where we live. And here, an excerpt!

The room is 100 percent physicists, 75 percent of them are likely to be under age forty, under 10 percent of them are likely to be female. They're all unusually quiet, no scrooching, no whispers, motionless.

On two screens is the broadcast from CERN, the physics institute in Switzerland, of a scientific talk. Invisible in the air is the theory called the Standard Model, or at least one of its articles of faith, which you can read like it's liturgy: the first fundamental particles in the universe had no mass; but as the universe cooled, it changed, and during this change a force called the Higgs field condensed [...]

"I think this is funny because it explains a problem I’ve had with math all along, which is that math just makes stuff up: makes up numbers, and space between numbers, and relations between numbers, and I’m not even mentioning zero. Also I know that the horizon problem went something like, the universe shouldn’t have been born as uniform as it was because it was farther across than light—which created the uniformity—could have traveled by then. Something like that. So AG’s mathematicians solve the problem by making light travel faster than light." —I'm with Awl pal Ann Finkbeiner: Math sucks! (Especially zero!) After that, she kind of [...]