Amateur Scientists in the News

"Amateur Time Hackers Play With Atomic Clocks at Home" is a fine story by Quinn Norton in Wired about Time Nuts, a loose group of around 400 or so amateur scientists who specialize in keeping time. This story is must reading, if only to find out more about Tom Van Baak's home time lab and John Ackerman's web site http://www.febo.com/time-freq/index.html.

Discovery News reports on the discovery by amateur scientist Allen West of significant evidence that large mammals were killed or wounded by meteor fragments some 13,000 years ago. West purchased a mammoth tusk at a fossil show in Arizona that contained a small fragment of meteorite. He later found more such tusks in the dealer's warehouse. More details are available here.

The Times of India reported on 18 December 2007 about observations of the Gemini meteor shower conducted by amateur astronomers of the Akash Ganga Centre for Astronomy (AGCA). The organization is headed by Bharat Adoor, who bought the observing site 20 years ago when he was a senior scientist at the Nehru Planetarium. According to the story by Priyanko Sarkar, "As vice-president of the Amateur Astronomers' Observation Club at St Xavier's College, [Adoor] set up AGCA in 2005 to indulge his passion and inspire youngsters to follow the music and movements of the spheres." You can learn more about this story here.

Forrest M. Mims III.