The CMS Collaboration has just released the results of a deep study of their sample of lead-lead collisions, produced at a center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon by the Large Hadron Collider.

Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning. Really, I recently had the good fortune to interview Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out. And it turns out that everything I thought I knew about learning is wrong.

Here's what he said.

In China, drinking alcohol is often still a vital part of doing business. Science is important in China, which has become the scientific leader in several ways, but science is business of course. At times, alcohol belongs to science here.

Scientists have developed a soap composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution.  That's right, magnetic soap.

But there is a practical side. The generation of this property in a fully functional soap could calm concerns over the use of soaps in oil-spill clean ups and improve industrial cleaning products.

A neuro-imaging study found that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered money to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.

Sacred values - those 'sell your soul' issues - prompted greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits, where selling out can be rationalized.

I think most people - certainly myself - get that grim "what, another one?" feeling when you first hear news that there has been a big earthquake.

But is it justified? In other words, have we recently been experiencing an increased rate of earthquakes? This from Beroza (2012),

One hypothesis goes that electric toasters became popular because something had to be done with electricity. So it may go with some vaccines.  Roche has set up a co -marketing agreement with private laboratory Unilabs-IHS to support greater access to HPV testing throughout the UK. 

Like global warming?  You can thank nuclear power protesters.  Since the 1970s, a full-scale public relations war on nuclear power has been waged, meaning a growing population became more reliant on fossil fuels instead of zero-emissions nuclear power.

 Now, a formal complaint about subsidies for nuclear power has been sent to the European Commission (DG Competition). If it is upheld, it unlikely that any new nuclear power stations will be built in the UK or elsewhere in the EU. The complaint may be followed by legal action in the courts or actions by politicians to reduce or remove subsidies for nuclear power. The complaint has been prepared by lawyers for the Energy Fair group, with several other environmental groups and environmentalists. 

Should researchers be obligated to publish null results?  Should they have to publish all trial data? Missing data distorts the scientific record, so that clinical decisions cannot be based on the best evidence, and that can harm patients and lead to futile costs to health systems, accoding to an editorial at BMJ.

It's no secret that a large proportion of evidence from human trials is unreported, and much of what is reported is done so inadequately but there is no real accounting for the consequences of unpublished evidence.