As the 23 faithful readers of this blog already know, I recently wrote a book that describes the searches for new physics undertaken by a glorious particle physics experiment, CDF, during the eighties and nineties. The book, titled "Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab", is coming out at the end of November. More information and reviews on the book can be obtained at this link. Or you can directly pre-order the book via AMazon by following the link on the right column here (you may have to scroll down) -->

In a world where individuals have ranked preferences, it is not possible to create a voting procedure that is guaranteed to yield a fair selection between more than two alternatives. This is a mathematical certainty: in 1951 Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow gave the mathematical proof.

Researchers are exploring ways to help clinicians and investigators use and share routinely collected medical data (such as information in electronic health records) to improve care and advance clinical research.

In a recent article, experts note that with the development of platforms enabling the use of routinely collected clinical data in the context of international research, scalable solutions for cross-border and cross-domain interoperability need to be developed.

"We provide insights on the requirements needed to achieve this and the need for a rigorous governance process to ensure the quality of data standardization," said Dr. Christel Daniel, lead author of the Learning Health Systems article.

Proximity is an important influence in consumer decisions on everyday purchases, according to a new survey.

In the survey, 93.2 percent of respondents said they typically travel less than 20 minutes to buy groceries, clothing, gas, and other routine transactions, while 87 percent said they won’t travel beyond 15 minutes for such purchases. For purchases that consumers make at least once per week, the distance they’re willing to travel shrinks even further to ten minutes.

A paper by researchers at LSU Health New Orleans in a little known journal called Translational Cancer Research suggests that age is an important factor in the association between cancer and sugar-sweetened beverages and recommends that intervention programs to reduce consumption of added sugar be focused on lower socio-economic status, young males, as well as cervical cancer survivors. Sugar intake or sugar-sweetened beverage consumption has also been associated with obesity, diabetes and cardio-metabolic diseases, and just about everything else. As more people are surviving cancer, the consumption of added sugar will be an increasingly important risk factor.

According to a music researcher, discrimination of women is common in the club scene. Female DJs don’t get gigs because the music they play is “too feminine.”

It's no secret that elite clubs are fast-tracking customers that fit the "vibe" they are trying to create, but it isn't just the young, pretty ones. If the clothes are wrong, they will not get past the velvet rope, and that's discrimination, argues Tami Gadir, a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, who is researching women’s experiences in the electronic music scene. She is studying female DJs in particular, but in her experience, the gender differences pervade the electronic club scene in its entirety.

Scientists have measured the catastrophic genetic damage caused by smoking in different organs of the body and identified several different mechanisms by which tobacco smoking causes mutations in DNA. The researchers found that smokers accumulated an average of 150 extra mutations in every lung cell for each year of smoking one pack of cigarettes a day.

In rare cases, someone who is thin could still end up with type 2 diabetes while an obese person may be surprisingly healthy. Some Asian countries have a higher diabetes rate than the United States even though the obesity rate is relatively low. New research points toward an answer to the riddle of the obesity paradox: An accumulation of a toxic class of fat metabolites, known as ceramides, may increase the risk for type 2 diabetes.

Among patients in Singapore receiving gastric bypass surgery, ceramide levels predicted who had diabetes better than obesity did. Even though all of the patients were obese, those who did not have type 2 diabetes had less ceramide in their adipose tissue than those who were diagnosed with the condition.

We power humanity mostly by burning fossil fuels, thereby turning chemical energy into heat that ultimately gets radiated into space. In doing so we achieve some results deemed useful: we cook food, we keep our homes and offices at comfortable temperatures, we watch television, listen to music, take hot showers, generate light during dark hours, and move from A to B and back.