Astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe in a quasar called APM 08279+5255 - enough water to fill Earth's oceans more than 100 trillion times.

The distant quasar is one of the most powerful known objects in the universe and has an energy output of 1,000 trillion suns, about 65,000 times that of our Milky Way galaxy. The power of APM 08279+5255 comes from matter spiraling into the quasar's central supermassive black hole, estimated at some 20 billion times the mass of our sun. 

As I wrote in Like Freedom? Thank A Scientist - How Science Made America Possible, during the meetings of the the Continental Congress during independence discussions, Thomas Jefferson noted the temperature on four separate occasions.  Jefferson, like many others present, was a citizen scientist long before there was government funding for it.   The same climate of liberalism (liberals, not busybody progressives, as I have stated too many times to count) that makes science flourish made democracy possible.

Antonio Carusone, describing himself as "a little obsessed with finding vintage design materials", has a look at NASA Graphic designs, circa 1970s.  Specifically, he hunted up this 1976 NASA Graphics Standards Manual.  Amidst the glories of clean modern design is the famous NASA 'worm' logo, which in 1992 was replaced by the somewhat controversial NASA 'meatball'.

An orgy of new results has started. Let me just show a few of them concerning Higgs searches in CMS - I am on vacation after all, and I have little time left to comment these interesting new papers and plots after all the sunbathing and restaurants.

Let us start with the Higgs search in the diphoton decay mode by CMS (paper here). With 1.09 inverse femtobarns of data, CMS has a pretty good reach even to this very rare decay mode of the Higgs boson. Let me remind you that only a handful every thousand Higgs particles decay into two photons, in the most favourable circumstances.

Evolutionary psychology is a field that examines human psychological traits through evolutionary glasses. Most human psychological traits are considered adaptations, the functional products of natural or sexual selection. This is tidily summarized in a quote from Cosmides and Tooby, two of the founders of the field:

Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind.

The field, however, is quite controversial. Proponents tend to explain every aspect of the human psyche through evolutionary adaptation, whereas opponents often express the criticism that these are ‘just-so stories’. Between these two positions, of course, many more moderate ones are possible.

Impressive. If you had been seeking for top quarks in 4-inverse-picobarns datasets since 1992 as I have, and then rejoiced at the 7-event signal from which CDF extracted in 1994 mass and cross section of the long-sought sixth quark, you would now also be looking for adjectives upon having a look at the figures in the new CMS paper, which uses over one inverse femtobarn of proton-proton collisions to measure the tiny asymmetric kinematics of top quark pairs produced at the LHC.

The Wiedemann-Franz Law, named after German physicists Gustav Wiedemann and Rudolf Franz, is a ratio of the thermal to electrical conductivities of metals.   In 1853, the two studied the thermal conductivity, a measure of a system's ability to transfer heat, of a number of elemental metals and found that the ratio of the thermal to electrical conductivities was approximately the same for different metals at the same temperature.

The Redemption of Gus Grissom

The 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard's flight, the first American in space, was something of a big deal in pop culture.  The 50th anniversary of John Glenn orbiting the Earth, arriving this winter, will likely be a much bigger deal because Sen. Glenn has a lot of name recognition.

But between them in aerospace history, chosen to be among the "Mercury 7" test pilots who were picked when NASA was just six months old and who risked their lives flying into the great unknown, is a guy who doesn't get enough respect.  

Most previous neural networks consisted out of a physically connected network of neural cells. But can a soup of interacting molecules also show brain-like behavior? Apparently, it can.

The news finally broke last week, months after the first anxious reports of browning and dying trees near lawns and golf courses across America.  Unlike their wild cousins in the Rockies and British Columbia, these conifers aren’t dying of pest outbreaks – they’re suffering from pesticides.