Featured Articles

Climate Change: Different Tree Ring And Oxygen Isotope Data Are A Good Thing

Climate Change: Different Tree Ring And Oxygen Isotope Data Are A Good Thing

Jul 02 2012 | comment(s)

If you want to understand the larger spatial patterns and timing of drought in the arid and semiarid areas of the American West, you will need to look at tree ring and oxygen isotope data.

Estimates of past precipitation are made from proxies like tree rings, which can record amounts of precipitation and temperature. But tree rings are better at recording what happens during the spring and summer, when the tree is growing, than in the winter when the tree is not. To people outside science, the fact that they do not provide the same information on past precipitation is a concern, but the differing results are a good thing to geologists.
Sciurumimus Albersdoerferi Dinosaur- A Feathered Theropod But Not Related To Birds

Sciurumimus Albersdoerferi Dinosaur- A Feathered Theropod But Not Related To Birds

Jul 02 2012 | comment(s)

Dinosaurs are starting to look less and less like they were portrayed decades ago. The fossil of Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, which lived around 150 million years ago, is the first evidence of feathered theropod dinosaurs that are not closely related to birds.  

Theropods are bipedal, mostly carnivorous dinosaurs. In recent years, scientists have discovered that many extinct theropods had feathers but feathering had only been found in theropods that are classified as coelurosaurs, a diverse group including animals like T. rex and birds.

OxyContin for 6-year-olds

OxyContin for 6-year-olds

Jul 02 2012 | comment(s)

Purdue Pharma, makers of the painkiller OxyContin, are going to seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to label it for use by children as young as 6.

Oxycontin earned them $2.8 billion last year but drug companies have a tiny window in which they can make any money so they are always looking for creative ways to extend that. Even a 6-month extension is a billion bucks so Purdue is putting together a pediatric trial which will involve 154 children ages 6 to 16 that would finish in August, 2013.
Can Lawyers Investigate The CDC?

Can Lawyers Investigate The CDC?

Jul 02 2012 | comment(s)

A recent air leak from a laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, a lab that studies dangerous pathogens like influenza, tuberculosis and rabies, is a very serious issue because it has the potential to harm both employees and the public. 

Leave it to Congress to put on some political theater and declare they will investigate - using lawyers.  

It's not that there are no people in Congress with expertise,  Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., is a microbiologist.  She just isn't on the committee of 54 law school graduates figuring out what went wrong.

Thanks, Congress.  I feel safer knowing you will be posturing and grandstanding about this. 

This Week's Topic:

Higgs Boson

Higgs Live Blogging 3 - Fundamental Bits To Decrypt The Seminars

[ The first two entries of this live blogging series are available here (part 1) and here (part 2) ]...

Higgs Live Blogging 2 - Observation Versus Discovery: Myths And Truths

This is the second post of a series of blogs that I am writing this morning, July 4th, to describe...

Higgs Boson, Where Is The Queue ?

5.30 AM. Getting in at CERN through the B entrance I see no living soul. "Ha" -I tell myself- "I...

Preparations For The Higgs Seminar At CERN

By now it's been written on so many newspapers and magazines -including Nature (the magazine, not...

A 2.5 Sigma Higgs Signal From The Tevatron !

Robbing the LHC experiments of media attention for 41 hours, the CDF and DZERO experiments are...

Ideas On Higgs Couplings

A very interesting paper appeared one week ago in the Arxiv. It is titled "Higgs Self-Coupling...

Basic Education For Particle Hunters: Significance And Rate Error

I am endlessly amazed by observing, time and again, that even experienced colleagues fall in the...

Higgs Discovery Rehabilitating Despised Einstein Ether

Firm evidence for the discovery of a Higgs particle has now been officially announced. This means...

New ATLAS Limits On Higgs Mass

Much awaited, the results of searches for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider have been...

Notes On Higgs Branching Fractions

In my latest instantiation of the "Guess the plot" series I offered a clipped part of a graph showing...

Will The Standard Model Die By The Hands Of Its Dearest Child ?

A new paper on the ArXiV caught my attention this evening for several reasons. First of all, because...

A 2.5 Sigma Higgs Signal From The Tevatron !

A 2.5 Sigma Higgs Signal From The Tevatron !

Jul 02 2012 | comment(s)

Robbing the LHC experiments of media attention for 41 hours, the CDF and DZERO experiments are presenting today the results of their searches of the Higgs boson in the full datasets of proton-antiproton collisions acquired in the course of the last 10 years. You can follow the live streaming of the Tevatron seminar at this link.

UPDATE: the live streaming is here.

Below I will give some introductory notions on Higgs physics at the Tevatron; at the bottom of this post I am discussing the actual results.

Introduction
More Coffee Linked To Lower Risk Of Skin Cancer

More Coffee Linked To Lower Risk Of Skin Cancer

Jul 02 2012 | comment(s)

Want to lower your risk of developing the most common form of skin cancer, basal cell carcinoma? Drink more coffee, says a new study. 

Basal cell carcinoma is the form of skin cancer most commonly diagnosed in the United States. Even though it is slow-growing, it causes considerable morbidity and places a burden on health care systems.

The researchers generated their results by conducting a prospective analysis of data from the Nurses' Health Study, a large and long-running study to aid in the investigation of factors influencing women's health, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, an analogous study for men. 
A Graphical History Of LEDs

A Graphical History Of LEDs

Jul 01 2012 | comment(s)

LEDs are the future of lighting but they aren't new.  British experimenter H. J. Round reported a light-emitting solid-state diode in 1907 while Oleg Vladimirovich Losev published the paper "Luminous carborundum [[silicon carbide]] detector and detection with crystals" in Telegrafiya i Telefoniya bez Provodov (Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony) but they were truly basic research and  no real work was done with them for decades.

In 1962, Nick Holonyak, Jr. of the General Electric company patented the first practical LED and by the late 1960s they were in common use.
Blindsight: In Every Day Life, Your Brain Sees What Your Eyes Do Not

Blindsight: In Every Day Life, Your Brain Sees What Your Eyes Do Not

Jul 01 2012 | comment(s)

Even if you are not aware of everything you take in, your eyes are sending visual information to your brain.  This unconscious seeing is evidenced in a phenomenon called "blindsight", where people have no awareness, but their brains can see - even in subjects with visual impairment, caused by damage to a part of the brain called the visual cortex. 
Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells: Skin Becomes Brain Cells

Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells: Skin Becomes Brain Cells

Jul 01 2012 | comment(s)

Researchers have created "Huntington's Disease in a dish" by generating stem cells from skin cells obtained from a person with a severe, early-onset form of Huntington's disease  and turned them into neurons that degenerate just like those affected by the fatal inherited disorder.
Solid-Oxide Fuel Cell: Hydrogen Energy Plus A Battery

Solid-Oxide Fuel Cell: Hydrogen Energy Plus A Battery

Jul 01 2012 | comment(s)

Materials scientists at Harvard have demonstrated a solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC) that converts hydrogen into electricity but can also store electrochemical energy like a battery. This fuel cell can continue to produce power for a short time after its fuel has run out.

The finding in Nano Letters will be most important for small-scale, portable energy applications, where a very compact and lightweight power supply is essential and the fuel supply may be interrupted.
Organic matter in the soil and organic farming

Organic matter in the soil and organic farming

Jun 30 2012 | comment(s)

Biodiversity loss and deforestation in tropical climatic conditions is sustained by the natural regeneration process during monsoon rains but what I observed this Saturday is not permissible or sustainable. 

I participated in the sad demise and funeral of our beloved grandmother in my extended family. I was deeply shocked to see that there was no wood available for making a funeral pyre.   It is a very touchy and emotional matter to discuss,  but what  I witnessed was the worst possible solution to this problem. Cow dung cakes were being used to make the funeral pyre.  
RoboBee: Tiny Robots Mimic The Symbolic Communication Of Bees

RoboBee: Tiny Robots Mimic The Symbolic Communication Of Bees

Jun 29 2012 | comment(s)

Bees use mathematical prowess to communicate the exact location of nearby food to other bees via a technique dubbed the "bee dance." It is the only known instance of symbolic communication in the animal kingdom (unless we consider there are deeper metaphors in "Real Housewives of New Jersey") and today a group of scientists are building a robot that can mimic that behavior of bees.

In the 1940s, ethologist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch became the first person to decode the bee dance.

A Weapon That Shoots Lightning - Insert Norse Reference Here

A Weapon That Shoots Lightning - Insert Norse Reference Here

Jun 29 2012 | comment(s)

Since "The Avengers" is a giant movie this year, when you think of something that shoots lightning, you might think of Thor.  If so, perhaps your clever joke would be "Can we name that Laser-Induced Plasma Channel "Mjolnir"?

If you're old like me, "Star Trek" will be more your thing and "Set your phasers to fry" will be more your speed.(1)
Our Global Capacity To Observe Earth – Too Much Or Too Little?

Our Global Capacity To Observe Earth – Too Much Or Too Little?

Jun 29 2012 | comment(s)

Today you'll find a myriad of different Earth observation systems covering all from local to global areas, collected from sub-sea to ground to air and of course space. Providers of these Earth observation services come from both public and private sector. Some of the collected data are required through national regulations while others are in demand because of global challenges such as climate change etc. The need for Earth observations permeates the entire global society.

Answering this need for Earth observation capacity several Earth observation systems have been built.

Curious George Will Give You Lung Cancer

Curious George Will Give You Lung Cancer

Jun 29 2012 | comment(s)

Sigmund Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" - he meant not everything was about sex, which must really frustrate evolutionary psychology grad students(1), being as he is the most famous psychiatrist ever and was wrong about almost everything else but correct on that point.

But that also means a cigar isn't always just a cigar, even in the literal sense.  In an era where progressive busybodies have taken to micro-regulation of choice (grocery bags, Big Gulps, goldfish, Happy Meals, golf), it was only a matter of time before the cultural mullahs who want to ban cigarettes (but legalize pot) turned their sights on cigars.
 
Abound Solar Saves Taxpayers $330 Million By Declaring Bankruptcy

Abound Solar Saves Taxpayers $330 Million By Declaring Bankruptcy

Jun 29 2012 | comment(s)

Sometimes declaring bankruptcy is a good thing. In the case of Abound Solar Inc., a U.S. solar manufacturer that had American taxpayers on the hook for $400 million, the good thing is they closed the doors after only losing us $70 million in Department of Energy funds.

Chump change, I know, since we have committed $72 billion on alternative energy in the last few years, but $330 million here and $330 million there, and pretty soon we are talking about real money.
Fruit And Vegetable Juice Concentrate May Improve Insulin Resistance In Overweight Boys

Fruit And Vegetable Juice Concentrate May Improve Insulin Resistance In Overweight Boys

Jun 28 2012 | comment(s)

A new study shows that supplementation with an encapsulated fruit and vegetable juice concentrate (Juice Plus+® Orchard Blend and Garden Blend) was associated with an increase in serum beta-carotene concentrations, reduced abdominal adipose tissue and improved insulin resistance in overweight boys compared to the placebo group. These study results add to the existing body of research about the role of nutrition in promoting children's health.

Being Gluten-Free 'Is Determined By Evolution', Says Gastroenterologist

Being Gluten-Free 'Is Determined By Evolution', Says Gastroenterologist

Jun 28 2012 | comment(s)

The evolutionarily recent over-reliance on wheat-based products could be a reason behind the current increases in dietary problems related to gluten, according to an expert in digestive disorders. 

Chasing UFOs: You Know You Want To

Chasing UFOs: You Know You Want To

Jun 28 2012 | comment(s)

Who hasn't thought about Chasing UFOs?  

When I saw "Independence Day" in 1996 I first thought, "A Mac can bring down an entire alien civilization? Their users really are creative!" but then I wondered if some day, someone might actually get paid to find aliens.

Well, that day is here.  But I have to warn you, the language is bad in this UFO stuff.