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Choosing Your Bets: The Selection Bias

As some of the long-time readers of this blog know, in this column I have occasionally discussed...

Have A Master In Science, Want A Post-Doc Position Directly?

Do you have a master in Science, and want to start a Post-Doc position directly? You can have it...

A Chess Study Requiring Backpropagation

The following position is a win for white. But how?It seems like white is able to grab a knight...

Co-Design Of Scientific Experiments

Next Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, you will find a new bulky paper in the arXiv. Titled "On...

Tommaso Dorigo

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

Rita Levi-Montalcini: 100 Years Old and Still Going Strong

Apr 22 2009 | comment(s)

Rita Levi-Montalcini, Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1986, turns 100 years old today: she was born on April 22nd, 1909 -before World War I had begun!

"Ok," you might say, "she's probably bedridden and demented by now." Not in the least. She is in full possession of all her wits, is a very active Senator, and has declared a few days ago that her brain works better now than it did when she was 20, because of her experience. I bet she is not kidding.

The Subtle Art Of Bump Hunting - Part I

Apr 20 2009 | comment(s)

If you have recently given a close enough look at the search results that the CDF and DZERO experiments have been producing at a regular pace on the Higgs boson - every six months, that is: for summer and winter conferences - and your exposure to particle physics results is not broad enough, you might have gotten a biased perception of how searches for new particles are performed nowadays.

Save Children Burnt by Caustic Soda!

Apr 19 2009 | comment(s)

In Sierra Leone mothers use caustic soda to home-make soap, and children often exchange it for water and drink it. During 2008 alone, 249 children have been admitted in the surgical pediatric unit of the Emergency center in Goderich, near Freetown - a number twice higher than that recorded in 2007.

Patients who ingested caustic soda are subjected to periodic esophageal dilatation, which is the only way to give them the hope of autonomous nutrition and thus a life.

Gates Foundation to chat with bloggers about World Malaria Day

Apr 17 2009 | comment(s)

My mailbox has an automated spam filter, but often some smarter messages seep through and end in there; since, however, I already receive hundreds of emails a day, I am not too happy to entertain myself with ones I do not need: so I have developed a sort of instinct to automatically ignore messages which are likely to be spam. Wrong!

Dark Matter: A Critical Assessment Of Recent Cosmic-Ray Signals

Apr 17 2009 | comment(s)

I participated with pleasure last month to a four-day conference devoted to neutrino telescopes, NEUTEL 2009, in Venice. Venice is my home town, and walking in the morning to the conference venue in Palazzo Franchetti (see left), a big and beautiful palace on the Canal Grande, was a pleasant change from my usual commute by train with Padova.

A Fascinating New Higgs Boson Search By The DZERO Experiment

Apr 16 2009 | comment(s)

Reporting on scientific results to a broad audience is difficult, in my opinion, not so much because of the need to explain things in a simple way -which is easy and fun, once you master the matter- as for the self-discipline you are forced to stick to.