Tangential Science: it's not necessarily science, but it's still funny.

Last month New York’s Attorney-General Andrew Cuomo criticized banks – including Citi, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase – for paying large (okay, huge) executive bonuses when the companies were losing money.

He called this an illicit transfer of shareholder wealth to the pockets of individual managers. 

Cuomo’s report spurs me to tell you about a certain illicit transfer of taxpayer money to private pockets, one that’s been bothering me a lot... 

What would you do with 3/4 of a kilogram of gear in space? For the price of a Harley-Davidson Sportster 883, you can now go to space.

InterOrbital Systems (IOS) has announced their TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit. This is 'complete', giving you the basic interface bus for your payload and including the launch costs.

If I were a salesman, I'd point out that launches alone typically cost five times that price!

The previous low-access route to space was the CubeSat, which is still an active and viable program. TubeSat just adds competition, which can only be good. IOS even mentions "the new IOS TubeSat PS Kit is the low-cost alternative to the CubeSat."

Organic solar cells that can be produced easily and inexpensively are the perfect solution to future 'personalized' power generation.  

Major obstacles remain, such as coaxing these carbon-based materials to reliably form the proper structure at the nanoscale level - tinier than 2-millionths of an inch - and be efficient in converting light to electricity,  transforming at least 10 percent of the sunlight that they absorb into usable electricity.

There's an irrational belief held by some about economics that if a technology is subsidized, the magic of capitalism will make it cheaper even though there being no benefit to consumers or industry to do so, since it is already cheap for one and profitable as is for another.

So it goes with hybrid vehicles, though you can insert ethanol or wind power or solar panels and the math is the same.  Despite major costs to taxpayers in the U.S. and Canada, government programs that offer rebates to hybrid vehicle buyers are failing to produce environmental benefits, according to a new University of British Columbia study.

Researchers at the University of California Riverside (UCR) have developed a new mid-season maturing variety of tangerine. They call it DaisySL, for for Daisy seedless. It is made from an irradiated bud of the seedy diploid mandarin cultivar 'Daisy,' that is a hybrid of the mandarins Fortune and Fremont

Supervised by staff scientist Timothy Williams, the planting of the trees and performed evaluations and selections of promising varieties were meticulously monitored. It was 'DaisySL' that had the right characteristics he and Mikeal Roose, a professor of genetics in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at UCR, were looking for in a new variety: beautiful appearance, exceptional flavor, and hardly any seeds.

Electromagnetic radiation (light, radio waves, X-rays, and microwaves) contains a varying electric field. When we talk about Polarization of this field, we refer to its direction. A new satellite named the Gravity and Extreme Magnetism Small Explorer (GEMS),  will be the first to systematically measure the polarization of cosmic X-ray sources. It is a new astrophysics mission led by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Professor Declan Murphy and colleagues Dr. Michael Craig and Dr. Marco Catani from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London say they have found differences in the brain which may provide a biological explanation for psychopathy.

Psychopathy is strongly associated with serious criminal behavior (rape, murder, etc.) and repeat offending but despite its heinous aspects the biological basis of psychopathy has remained poorly understood.  Some investigators also attribute social causes in explaining antisocial behaviours. To date, nobody has investigated the 'connectivity' between the specific brain regions implicated in psychopathy. 

The Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology lists three cases of patients suffering from the adverse affects of steroid-enriched dietary supplements.  The cases reported by researchers at Henry Ford Hospital include patients with liver injury and renal failure. 

Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning regarding the use of over-the-counter body-building supplements that are illegally enriched with anabolic steroids. 

Readers familiar with this blog know that I am a die-hard skeptic on the issue of physics beyond the Standard Model. However, today I am wearing my fluctuation-enthusiast hat, and I will be trying to argue in favor of the possible signal of new physics that is coming out of the Tevatron data. Please do not get confused: everything is still in order. Maybe.