With all the huge (and sadly tragic, in some cases) storms we have had
in mostly the middle to eastern portions of the United States this Spring, many
opportunities arise to see natural events rarely witnessed. Some are obvious,
such as the bears in trees in the Louisiana floods (I heard on the radio they
can survive in the canopy for up to three weeks!) Other natural occurrences are
not so easy to observe – unless you know where to look.
A few months ago LHC took a special run of proton-proton collisions at 2.76 TeV. Why the lower energy, now that we are accustomed to searching for new phenomena at the highest available energy of 7 TeV ? Because of the wish to compare lead-lead collisions, taken last year at 2.76 TeV nucleon-nucleon energy, with proton-proton ones. The comparison allows to extract extremely interesting results.
The astrocyte, most common cell in the human nervous system, is finally getting some respect; researchers have used embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells to cultivate the star-shaped astrocyte.
Not just putty in the brain and spinal cord
The ability to make large, uniform batches of astrocytes, explains stem cell researcher Su-Chun Zhang, opens a new avenue to more fully understanding the functional roles of the brain's most commonplace cell, as well as its involvement in a host of central nervous system disorders ranging from headaches to dementia. What's more, the ability to culture the cells gives researchers a powerful tool to devise new therapies and drugs for neurological disorders.
The plot of the week is actually a table this week. A histogram with several background components can be extremely informative, but sometimes a table provides more detail and one can focus better on interesting features.
The table below has been produced in a CDF search for events containing same-sign lepton pairs: a striking signature of new physics, faked by very few processes. Because of the paucity of Standard Model sources, even relatively small new physics signals can emerge in such a sample. The CDF analysis is based on 6.1 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions collected at the Tevatron during Run II. Let us see what the table tells us.
The vaccine-injury crowd is inoculated against reason, evidence, and appeals to civic duty and compassion for the suffering of millions. Those of us who've spent time in the trenches with them know it all too well. You can acknowledge that vaccine injuries do occur. You can commiserate on how tragic those are, how we need to always continue to do more, to make vaccines as safe as possible, but it falls on deaf ears. As long as you follow those acknowledgements with the statement that the accumulated body of replicated science shows no connection between vaccines and autism, vaccines and asthma, vaccines and MS, vaccines and SIDS, you are the enemy. You are a pharma shill. Or a pharma whore. You're a sheople. Or you're blind to reality.
There are perennials in the plant kingdom, flowers that bloom each year, and in culture as well. Each year, for example, there will be a new go-to cliché in football. Many of us who have watched for a long time can even tell you what year a broadcast was made by which cliche was in use.
Quiz: If I say they play "smash mouth football", what year was I thinking?
Grímsvötn Ash Plume
Grímsvötn, an ice-capped volcano in the south of Iceland is currently erupting. The ice cap is quite extensive and thick, so unless there are unknown sub-surface fissures, extensive local flooding is unlikely to result from the eruption.
The volcano is likely to melt only the ice immediately over and adjacent to the caldera. Melt water intrusion into magma can increase the production of tephra, as happened with last year's eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. However, the ice cap of Grímsvötn is so thick that the erupting volcano will probably do no more than melt a hole through the icecap.
Quantum mechanics allows us to perform the following experiment (see the article by David Mermin in
Physics Today Vol. 38 No. 4):
