Cedarhurst native on Science Friday

Ryan Mandelbaum, a science writer at Gizmodo, a design, technology, science and science fiction website, was a guest on the nationally syndicated Science Friday show with host Ira Flatow on National Public Radio on Aug. 11.

The Cedarhurst native who now lives in Brooklyn spoke about astronomers finding more support for Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, this time using 20 years of telescope data on the orbits of three stars circling  the center of the Milky Way. The work will be published in The Astrophysical Journal, and it essentially checks the consistency of predictions made by Einstein’s theory as they apply to very massive objects — and, at least so far, the predictions appear to hold up to scrutiny.

Mandelbaum also discussed the sale of transgenic salmon in Canada, a study finding an increase in the incidence of colorectal cancer among younger people and the naming of a tremendous-sized dinosaur — the 122-foot long Titanosaur that is on display at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.