Biased? It May Just Be Your Low Self-Esteem

Feb 23 2011 | comment(s)

Think all Republicans are anti-science or religious people are stupid? You may look for data to rationalize your bias but a new study in Psychological Science says it may just be your own low self-esteem; when people are feeling badly about themselves, they're more likely to show bias against people who are different from them.

Jeffrey Sherman of the University of California, Davis, who wrote the study with Thomas Allen, used the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a task designed to assess people's automatic reactions to words and/or images, to investigate this claim.

Ben Allanach: Impact Of The CMS Supersymmetry Search On Global Supersymmetric Fits

Feb 23 2011 | comment(s)

Ben Allanach is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge. Before that he was a post-doc at LAPP (Annecy, France), CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), Cambridge (UK) and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK). I noticed a recent article of his in the arxiv, and asked him to report on it here, given the interest that the recent LHC results have stirred in the community. He graciously agreed.... So let us hear it from him!

Blimey, I'm tired. I'm also elated and excited and grateful to my lovely girlfriend, who's not only putting up with my long hours, distracted head and general ensuing grumpiness, she's even looking after me.

Cassiopeia A - Superfluid Found In Neutron Star's Core

Feb 23 2011 | comment(s)

Supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) is the remains of a massive star 11,000 light years away that would have appeared to explode about 330 years ago as observed from Earth.

Neutron stars like Cas A contain the densest known matter that is directly observable. One teaspoon of neutron star material weighs six billion tons. The pressure in the star's core is so high that most of the charged particles, electrons and protons, merge resulting in a star composed mostly of uncharged particles called neutrons.