The diffusion of advanced graphical tools that we have witnessed in the course of the last two decades has caused a corresponding evolution in the way physicists display their data. True, there still exist pockets of resistence here and there; but these are usually due to old farts who are unwilling to learn the new tricks. To them the old cynical sentence by Max Planck unfortunately applies, and it can be paraphrased as follows:

"A new data display tool does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them use it, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

What is the origin of bird digits? This question has caused a lot of head-scratching and beard-stroking in evolutionary biologists. Paleontological evidence suggests that the three digits in birds develop from digit position 1, 2 and 3 (thumb, index and middle finger). Embryological evidence points towards digits 2, 3 and 4 (index, middle and ring finger). Vertebrates are ‘programmed’ to develop five digits on each limb, but there are exceptions. Such as birds, which have three. But which three?

Feel lazy?  Maybe you can blame your genes.

Specially-bred mice which had two genes removed, which control the protein AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), an enzyme that is switched on when you exercise, didn't want to run a ny more.

"Mice love to run," said Gregory Steinberg, associate professor of medicine in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University.  "While the normal mice could run for miles, those without the genes in their muscle could only run the same distance as down the hall and back. It was remarkable. The mice looked identical to their brothers or sisters but within seconds we knew which ones had the genes and which one didn't." 

People communicate in bursts. In communication, our behavior does not happen in a homogenous way over time, but rather there is universal behavior in which there is no communication, followed by short intervals, says a new study.

A new study analyzed around 9,000 million calls throughout a nearly one year period and identified  features of the communication process and attempted to quantify their impact in the diffusion of information.  

Everyone agrees what the LHC needs is more art.

Okay, no one actually thinks that.  What the LHC needs is to find a Higgs boson or a whole bunch of Europeans outside physics are going to be annoyed they spent $10 billion to find the "God particle" and will now be told 'we advanced science by not finding it'.   Most people don't think in terms of negatives, they think in terms of positives, so in a bad economy the political questions will be 'why did we spend billions of Euros to confirm the non-existence of something a lot of physicists didn't think existed anyway?'

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), a free, online collaborative tool, is expanded in its second edition released today, offering information on more than one-third of all known species on Earth.

EOLv2  has 20 times as many pages as when the EOL.org first launched in 2008 - 700,000 today. The global partnership of 170 content providers behind EOL.org wants to build a site with 1.9 million pages, one for every species known to science. 

Breast-feeding mothers are far more likely to demonstrate a 'mama bear' effect', aggressively protecting their infants and themselves , than women who bottle-feed their babies or who are non-mothers, says a new study in Psychological Science.

To help mama bear out, breast-feeding mothers register lower blood pressure than other women when behaving aggressively - the researchers say suggests breast-feeding helps dampen the body’s stress response to fear; breast-feeding mothers are more likely to be courageous.

A hadron collider is a really nice toy to play with. Sometimes when I look at all those scientists busying themselves with the design, the construction, and the operation of the Large Hadron Collider and its experiments, as well as the analysis of the produced data, all I see are kids who play with their toys - bigger toys, as big as possible in fact, because their craving is always growing and cannot be satiated.

I of course see myself that way, too. To me my job is a game -well, I see my life that way too!  But I am divagating into philosophical observations which deserve another place to be discussed. Instead, here I want to show you why I think these detectors are marvelous toys. Give a look at the graph below, courtesy ATLAS.

Sitting for hours at your desk is bad for you, even fatal in the long run. Paul Knoepfler has recently again made me aware of this – read his Thinking on your feet: practical suggestions for creating and using a standing workstation. There is no point in writing yet another article, because you will have forgotten everything about it after five minutes. So, this here will be different.

Chemistry space refers to the combinatorial and configurational space spanned by all possible molecules (i.e. those combination of atoms allowed by the rules of valence in energetically stable spatial arrangements). It is estimated that the total number of possible small organic molecules populating chemistry space could exceed 10⁶⁰ — a number that exceeds the total number of atoms in the known universe, and is vastly greater than the number of molecules that have actually been isolated or synthesized.