A new gene called AP2gamma has been discovered to be crucial for the neural development of the visual cortex in a discovery that can have implications for the therapeutics of neural regeneration as well as provide new clues about how the brain evolved into higher sophistication in mammals. The article will come out in the journal Nature Neuroscience¹ on the 14^th of September.

The buried town of Venta Icenorum at Caistor St Edmund in Norfolk is one of the most important, though least understood, Roman sites in Britain.

Caistor lies in the former territory of the Iceni, the tribe of Boudica Celts who famously rebelled against Roman rule in AD 60/61.

The survey revealed numerous circular features that apparently predate the Roman town.  These are probably of prehistoric date, and suggest that Caistor was the site of a large settlement before the Roman town was built. This had always been suspected because of numerous chance finds of late Iron Age coins and metalwork, but until the survey was carried out there had never been any evidence of buildings.

How would you know if your water in space were infected with something?  Water is easy enough to clean but it requires some precision and current methods only examine water cleanliness after the fact.   

University of Utah chemists developed a two-minute water quality monitoring method that just started six months of tests aboard the International Space Station.

The new method involves sampling space station or space shuttle galley water with syringes, forcing the water through a chemical-imbued disk-shaped membrane, and then reading the color of the membrane with a commercially available, handheld color sensor normally used to measure the color and glossiness of automobile paint.

Over one third of American pre-schoolers live in homes where the television is on most of the time, even if no one's watching, and a new study says the effect of background TV on interactions between parents and young children is definitely negative.

The researchers studied about 50 1-, 2-, and 3-year-olds, each of whom was with one parent, at a university child study center.   Half of the one-hour session, parents and children were in a playroom without TV; in the other half-hour, parents chose an adult-directed program to watch , like Jeopardy. The researchers observed how often parents and children talked with each other, how actively involved the parents were in their children's play, and whether parents and children responded to each other's questions and suggestions.

Today I wish to bring to your attention a figure recently obtained by the CDF collaboration, one which really tells a thousand words. Before I describe it to you, however, I would like to discuss at an elementary level a few basic concepts of particle theory which the figure well summarizes.


A Crash Course on Feynman Graphs


Let us start with a few elements on Feynman graphs -the diagrams that physicists use to draw on their blackboards to picture what really happens when particles react, and that actually enable the computation of the probability of those processes.