It used to be that a species name was only official if it was printed in a journal - and the print was quite literal, it had to be a print journal.

I've been feeling a bit inspired about our prospects in space, lately.  Foremost (of course) by the incredible competence displayed by the makers of the Curiosity probe that landed on Mars, last week, and the JPL controllers and the citizenry that backed such a wonderful venture.  

The physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote in 1984:

“...the most revolutionary discovery in science is yet to come! And come, not by questioning the quantum, but by uncovering that utterly simple idea that demands the quantum.” Wheeler, 1984 [1]

Here is where a “modal realist version of Einstein”, while contemplating the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox involving the infamous Alice and Bob characters, could have stumbled onto Wheeler’s “utterly simple idea that demands the quantum”:

“Ears are a particularly appealing approach to noncontact biometrics because they are relatively constant over a person’s life and are unaffected by expressions, unlike faces.”

There was an interesting study published recently that addresses the changes that occur to gut bacteria in pregnant women and the role this fulfills in maintaining a healthy pregnancy.

There are two primary points that need to be addressed in order to appreciate these findings.

During a recent American political convention, two networks carried real-time Twitter 'data', what they called a meter, based on the commentary on the social media service.  While election polls have not been accurate for the last few decades, some technologists believe Twitter can be.

As evidence, they say the have devised a means to predict the outcome of other election-based processes - TV talent shows - through their big data analysis of tweets. Analysis of Twitter is not new, it is built into their API, but Fabio Ciulla from Northeastern University in Boston, USA and colleagues say their method shows that the elimination of contestants in TV talent shows based on public voting, such as "American Idol", can be anticipated. 

According to WHO, "Although it is a vaccine-preventable disease, rabies still poses a significant public health problem in many countries in Asia and Africa where 95% of human deaths occur even though safe, effective vaccines for both human and veterinary use exist." 

Obesity is not just happening in New York City 7-Elevens(1), it is also happening in aging bones.

Bone marrow stem cells, which are adult stem cells, are in their fifth decade of uncontroversial new discovery. But they can still surprise us.  Our bones may be getting fatter as we age, and it could lead to osteoporosis, the condition where bone mineral density is 2.5 standard deviations below the mean (62%). The NIH estimates that up to 50% of women and 25% of men over the age of 50 will break a bone due to osteoporosis. 

An 8.6 magnitude earthquake occurred 62 miles off the coast of Sumatra on April 11th, 2012. 

Along with being severe by any measure, in one way it was the largest earthquake in observed human history; it originated within the plate rather than at a plate boundary.

The quake originated under the Wharton Basin in the Indian Ocean, where hundreds of miles of rock were under crushing tension, causing the plate to deform at its base. This 'deforming zone' was also absorbing tension as two plates, the Indian and Australian plates, rotated toward each other. 

A new ATLAS search for supersymmetric signatures in 2011 LHC data has appeared last week in the arxiv. The result ? No hint of a signal, not even for ready money.

So if you are on a hurry, you can just have a glance at the graph below, which summarizes the measurement in terms of excluded regions of a slice of the complicated parameter space of SUSY theories.

Otherwise, if you want to know a bit more of what this is about, I can provide some detail.