More people are seeking natural alternatives to medicine and products containing probiotics have flooded the marketplace. Probiotics are safe and tolerable but their value remains unknown. Studies are being done with specific illnesses to see if probiotics work and how.

A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial found that the probiotic Saccharomuces boulardii (S. boulardii) does not appear to have any significant beneficial effects for patients with Crohn's disease who are already in remission.

Time to take a break from philosophy of mind and get back to evolutionary psychology.

Note: this is the fourth, and last, part of a four-part article (see part I, part II, part III) on the five-sigma criterion for discovery claims in particle physics. If you haven't read the first three installments, the text below may or may not make much sense to you...

TERC, a gene which regulates the length of the telomere 'caps' on the ends of DNA and helps control the aging process by acting as a cell's internal clock, has been linked to cancer by a new study.

Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, found a genetic variant that influences the aging process among four new variants they linked to myeloma, one of the most common types of blood cancer. The study more than doubles the number of genetic variants linked to myeloma, bringing the total number to seven, and sheds important new light on the genetic causes of the disease. 

In 1937, Dirac made the bold conjecture that since the big bang, gravity has been weakening. The cold reception that greeted his highly speculative and numerology-based cosmology paper didn't seem to hurt him much. This was a decade after Dirac discovered the quantum relativistic equation for the electron, and his mega-stardom status could take a few hits without getting eroded significantly. Still, during the rest of his productive life, Dirac stayed away from cosmology and shrinking gravity models.

It was announced today that systemwide Academic Senate representing the 10 campuses of the University of California system had passed an “open access” policy.

Though the left-right culture war (all Republican bad, all Democrat gooooooood) is still raging in a small segment of the overall science population (some bloggers, whatever science journalists remain), the rest of America has moved on. People recognize that in the 1990s Democrats were anti-science and in the 2000s Republicans were and now that pendulum has swung again and it will keep happening. Today, food, energy and medical science, the three most pressing short-term issues we face, are vilified by the left.

But the right's subversion of science is not dead yet. Climate change is still a pesky issue for them and though the percentage of people who deny evolution is only slightly higher on the right, their efforts to subvert it are much greater. 

Kevin Hays, 19, of Renton, Washington, is studying math, in Arts  &  Sciences, and computer science at Washington University in St. Louis - and now he has a new world record in the Rubik's Cube, taking the top spot from ... himself.

Hays solved the “6x6” Rubik’s Cube in 1 minute, 40 seconds, 9 seconds faster than his previous record. The 6 x 6 cube has 36 squares per side; that’s a total of 216 squares Hays twisted and turned into perfect alignment. 

For comparison, most of us grew up trying (and failing) to solve  it did so with a standard 3 x 3 cube, which has nine squares per side.

Note: this is the third part of a four-part article on the Five-Sigma criterion in particle physics. See part 1 and part 2 to make more sense of the discussion below.

In my previous article, you learned how to build a hot liquid level indicator for the vision impaired to help them fill cups with hot liquids such as tea or coffee. The 555 test circuit was used to generate a tone when the liquid in the cup reached the desired level--when the liquid level reached the red and black snaps of the Jumper Wires inside the cup.

The liquid (my coffee) conducts electricity because tapwater contains small amounts of contaminants.