The United States of America hasn't been interested in building big new physics collaborations, such as the Large Hadron Collider, in the last 20 years, since the Clinton administration canceled the Superconducting Super Collider. The James Webb Space Telescope overruns and President Obama canceling NASA's Constellation program confirm why America has a crisis of confidence about building big and there is a belief that maybe we should stick to small experiments like cute robots on Mars.

6,000 years ago, farmers were truly organic - and the diseases that can bring were even more prevalent then. But prehistoric people can be absolved of any guilt, they had no way to know that agricultural irrigation systems could add to their disease burden.

Researchers recently found what might be the oldest evidence of man-made technology inadvertently causing disease outbreaks, thanks to the discovery of a schistosomiasis parasite egg in a 6200-year-old grave at a prehistoric town by the Euphrates river in Syria. 

The Brus, written by John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, in about 1375, covers the Wars of Independence waged by Robert the Bruce, and includes a vivid, early description of the Battle of Bannockburn, which will have its 700th anniversary this week.

It is one of the best-known works written in early Scots and its central theme - that freedom is a prize worth winning at all costs - has resonated in Scotland through the ages and is a poignant reminder before the Scottish Independence Referendum.

IAstronomers have discovered a bright, mysterious geologic object in 
radar images of Ligeia Mare, the second-largest sea on Saturn's moon Titan.
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Scientifically speaking, this is a transient feature. They want to call it a magic island and so do we. Titan, the largest of Saturn's 62 known moons, is a world of lakes and seas. The moon – smaller than our own planet – bears close resemblance to watery Earth, with wind and rain driving the creation of strikingly familiar landscapes. Under its thick, hazy nitrogen-methane atmosphere, astronomers have found mountains, dunes and lakes. But in lieu of water, liquid methane and ethane flow through riverlike channels into seas the size of Earth's Great Lakes. 

The Higgs boson was detected using its decay into bosons but scientists from the CMS experiment at  the Large Hadron Collider have found evidence for the direct decay of the Higgs boson into fermions.

If the Higgs particle can decay into both bosons and fermions, we can exclude certain theories predicting that the Higgs particle does not couple to fermions. As a group of elementary particles, fermions form the matter while bosons act as force carriers between fermions.  

The Cornell arxiv is known to not accept preprints without a minimal screening of their contents. Still, I am sometimes led to wonder if a similar attention is paid to the liberty that authors at times take with the titles of their papers.

I am officially on vacation since yesterday, so you should not expect the list below to be a very comprehensive one. I just offer four examples of titles that might have been considered for some form of moral suasion toward the author by the arxiv managers, but apparently haven't. I just quote some titles below which struck me as kind of odd.

Lung cancer causes more deaths in the U.S. than the next three most common cancers - colon, breast, and pancreatic - combined, for a simple reason: poor detection.

You can be living your life with no symptoms while it is metastasizing uncontrollably and it reaches the point of no return. 

A  research team has revealed conflicting climate change patterns between the middle latitude areas of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in relation to glacial and interglacial cycles which have been a puzzle for the past 60 years.

Their study collected samples from the stalagmites and flowstones in limestone caves which are called 'hard disks' containing the past climate change data and revealed how much they grew in which eras through isotope analysis and age dating, and traced the past climate changes by applying them to global climate change over 550,000 years.

Anesthesia works, we know that. Properly done, patients can be temporarily rendered completely unresponsive during surgery and then wake up again, with their memories and skills intact. Improperly done, of course, can be very bad.

But little is understood about the processes used by structurally normal brains to navigate from unconsciousness back to consciousness. Anesthesia leads the world in retracted papers.

Previous research has shown that the anesthetized brain is not "silent" under surgical levels of anesthesia but experiences certain patterns of activity, and it spontaneously changes its activity patterns over time.

If the world will have 9 billion people or more by 2050, we'll probably be okay.

The scare stories of food riots and mass famine once promoted by 1960s Doomsday Prophet Paul Ehrlich are today only promoted by, well, Paul Ehrlich. Even organic farmers say they can feed the world now.

In the last 30 years, America has led the world in science and nowhere has that been more evident than in food. American farmers have successfully dematerialized in a world of materialism - they grow more food on less land using fewer pesticides than ever thought possible. And the future looks even brighter.