Tomorrow, we are attending a mixer called The Science of Fine Wines.  This is a seminar/fundraiser for the Discovery Museum Science&Space Center in Sacramento so we're there to help with the science.  Sure, you can tell by the title the science is not the paramount issue, the wine is, but I'm always going to take the opportunity to get a little smarter and if other people listen, that's great too.

The figure shown below represents the best measurement of the top quark mass ever obtained by a single experiment, and it is a determination with a less than 1% total uncertainty. It has been approved last week by the CDF experiment at Fermilab.

The CDF experiments collects proton-antiproton collisions delivered by the Tevatron collider, which imparts the projectiles with 1 TeV of energy each, for a center-of-mass energy of 2 TeV. This is still the highest energy ever achieved by a collider, although the record is going to be soon stripped off Fermilab by the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to start colliding protons with other protons at 7 TeV of energy this coming fall.

The Lockerbie Injustice

To those victims’ relatives who can bear to hear me say this: they continue to have my sincere sympathy for the unimaginable loss that they have suffered.

To those who bear me ill will, I do not return that to you.

Abdul Ali al-Megrahi


Today, Abdul Ali al-Megrahi was released from prison on compassionate grounds.  I rejoice at that decision.  Ever since he was named as the Lockerbie bomber I have had exceedingly strong doubts that he was even so much as implicated, let alone the bomb-builder.  I would like to share my thoughts about this.

What is the difference between "intelligence" and "genius"?  Creativity, of course!

Premier League clubs who have long-term managers are more successful than those who change their managers on a frequent basis, say business school researchers.

Because there's nothing sports clubs want more than advice from  academics who examine past trends and draw conclusions  based on the fact that elite clubs fire people less.

The lowly appendix used to get no respect and was simply regarded as a useless evolutionary artifact but two years ago researchers at Duke University Medical Center proposed that it actually serves a critical function as a safe haven where good bacteria could hang out until they were needed to repopulate the gut, like after a nasty case of diarrhea. 

Now a group writing in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology claim something even more aggressive; that Charles Darwin was wrong and the appendix is a whole lot more than an evolutionary remnant. Not only does it appear in nature much more frequently than previously acknowledged, but it has been around much longer than anyone had suspected. 

Annoyed that your child schleps home 35 lbs. of books and settles in for 3 hours of homework per night?   Dreaming of an ancient time when teachers teached during the day?

Nope.  Contrary to common belief, parents are okay with the homework load,  according to a new study from University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers.

Students are spending considerable time doing homework but parents are generally supportive of homework practices, their study says. They're also involved in homework, usually in minimal but supportive ways, said Ken Kiewra, UNL professor of educational psychology and an expert on learning strategies, homework and study methods.

Researchers at Virginia Tech believe they have solved the controversy over how the oldest complex life forms, which lived more than 540 million years ago, ate.    Osmosis, they say.

The researchers studied two groups of modular Ediacara organisms, the fern-shaped rangeomorphs and the air mattress-shaped erniettomorphs. These macroscopic organisms, typically several inches in size, absorbed nutrients through their outer membrane, much like modern microscopic bacteria.  The rangeomorphs had a repeatedly branching system like fern leaves and the erniettomorphs had a folded surface like an inflated air mattress to make tubular modules.

Science fact or urban legend?   If you get lost, you will walk in circles, just like you have seen in too many movies and TV shows to count.

Fact, say researchers from the Multisensory Perception and Action Group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen writing in Current Biology, though there was no scientific evidence to back that up until now.

And those circular paths are rarely systematic, the researchers say. The same person may sometimes veer to the left, then again to the right, before ending up back where they started from, which rules out one potential explanation for the phenomenon, namely that circle-walking stems from some systematic bias to turn in one direction, such as differences in leg length or strength.

As I start my 5th semester here at Auburn University, I will again be teaching introductory labs. I would not say I have a passion for teaching, but it is my deepest desire for the students I teach to learn something about their planet and maybe even consider Geology as a career. However, with the hundreds of students that have passed through my classroom, Only a small handful have been enthusiastic about it. Even a smaller number have switched to major (or minor) in it.