I’m shamelessly going to attribute at least some of the quietness of this blog to the Olympics going on in China right now, so if you were also with us around the Euro2008 you won’t be surprised to know that we’re quite into sports in general. So what could be better than a look at what science related stuff is going on at the olympics? Not much if you ask me…

First off, if you were watching the opening ceremony or any of the athletic games, you have probably been amazed how cool the stadium, the Bird’s Nest, looks. That’s because it is cool! Just take a look at this show from the Man Made Marvels series on Discovery Channel. It’s in the usual sensational Discovery style with detours around other non-scientific stuff about the Olympics in Beijing, but they certainly do their job telling you exactly how cool it is, and what incredible engineering had to be done for everything to fall into place.

But what good is such a nice stadium and an amazing opening ceremony if the weather is bad? China is also prepared in this area, as several measures have been taken to forecast and actually control the weather above certain areas when desired. High sensitive weather satellites have been launched and supercomputers have been prepared to give detailed forecasts on an hourly basis, and when rain seems inevitable, there’s nothing like shooting silver iodide into the sky and doing some old fashioned cloud seeding.

And show me someone who isn’t amazed by the 8-gold-medals-and-7-world-records-at-the-same-olympics sensation of a swimmer in Michael Phelps? I sure am! But behind every true sensation stands sensational science…. or did I just make that up? Well anyway, there’s a lot of debate going on about how some new high tech swimsuits from Speedo (yes, the company that gave name to the original Speedo swim briefs, and made the name impossible to take seriously) makes the competition uneven. In fact the Speedo LZR swimsuit was developed with help from NASA, giving evidence for the relatively deep level of science that has gone into the sport.

And to finish it, so we can all go back to watching some random sport that we hardly knew existed, I’d like to direct you towards another brilliant post on the Cosmic Variance blog about some oddities in the point system of decathlon, and some ideas to make your favorite nerdy mathematician actually win the race. You don’t want to miss out on this one!