Academic discussions of citizen science are all the rage right now (for examples, see here, and here, and here). While most describe the successes of individual projects, none (to my knowledge) have taken the long view and examined where this genre of research fits in to the history of science--until now, that is.

San Francisco Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera, coming off an an All-Star Game MVP award, had unusually high testosterone levels to go along with his .346 batting average and 11 home runs.  These are not the days of Steve Howe (1), when baseball could try to ban players only to have the unnaturally powerful Player's Union block any efforts at a drug policy, Cabrera was suspended for 50 games.

An ongoing legal battle regarding gene patents began in 2009 when the ACLU representing numerous clients sued Myriad Genetics and the USPTO. The dispute is over patents on two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, discovered in the 1990s which have a correlation to increased rates of breast and ovarian cancer.

The case subsequently went to the Federal Appeals Court that handles biotechnology patents, the Supreme Court, and was earlier this year remanded back to the Federal Appeals Court. On August 16, 2012 the Federal Appeals Court reaffirmed that gene patents are legal. So, why did the activists lose the legal battle?

Perhaps a bit too simple, but certainly appealing. Extensions of the Standard Model which imply the existence of a new U(1) gauge group to complement the SU(2)xU(1) structure of electroweak interactions have been put forth in a number of slightly different versions. All imply the existence of a new Z' boson, a heavier version of the Z0. For those not yet introduced to the latter, the Z0 is the neutral vector boson hypothesized by Glashow, Salam and Weinberg in the sixties to complete a triplet of weak currents and thereby allow the unification of weak and electromagnetic interactions.

A version of this article with less scientific details (so easier to read) can be found here.

A team of Portuguese researchers have developed a mathematical tool that can classify any region in the world according to its pattern of development into one of 5 types, each with specific characteristics and predictable behaviours that call for different interventions and policy measures. The discovery, just out in Nature’s Scientific Reports,  represents a major step towards a new type to city planning - objective and most importantly,  independent of personal visions, interests and politics.

There’s a band of people in the northwest hills of Italy who are fishing for the big one in the sky.

They’re not a religious sect trawling for a deity. They’re part of a Turin-based startup called Kite Gen Research and, as their name implies, they want to generate electricity by flying kites — really big kites, really high.

The basic idea is simple: Unreel a huge piece of fabric into mile high winds that will haul the thing along at expressway speed. Tether the fast spinning string to earthbound alternators and crank out megawatts of power.

As the prevalence of obesity rises around the world, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease(NAFLD) is a growing concern, especially among the vulnerable Hispanic population.  Perhaps most alarming is that NAFLD, traditionally a disease of middle age, has become increasingly prevalent in childhood, where studies show that ~38% of obese Hispanic children and adolescents have liver fat levels in the range of clinically diagnosed NAFLD.

The fourth circuit element called “memristor” [1] is an intriguing case for the sociology of science [2] and it still unfolds. Especially annoying and I think entirely unnecessary are the detractors who do not grasp the trivial core issue. There are certain engineers that peddle mere technicalities as huge discoveries on the vixra crackpot archive after having been kicked out of the real (mostly non-crackpot) archive, claiming that the “memristor” is incomplete. So what? Being incomplete does not make it bad science, on the contrary. They hand easily refuted charges on a silver platter to Goliath so he can point to them laughing: “Look, all that criticism is mere confused schoolboys not getting it”.