A National Renewable Energy Lab researcher at the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference in Tampa announced a 31.1% conversion efficiency for a two-junction solar cell under one sun of illumination.

A new paper published in
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review and based on a small experiment found that people who are blindfolded employ the same strategy to intercept a running ball carrier as people who can see, which suggests that multiple areas of the brain cooperate to accomplish the task.  Or they do what they learned when they could see.

Either way, chasing down a moving object is not only a matter of sight or of sound, but of mind.

Want to off someone but you are ethically against using anything made by Monsanto?

In September 2006 I was in Ponta Delgada, the main town of the island of San Miguel in the Azores, for a physics conference where I was presenting results of the CDF experiment.

I remember listening to a very nice talk by Guido Martinelli, who was discussing the status of flavour physics, and getting rather depressed at the view of a very consistent picture of agreement between B physics observables and Standard Model predictions. This came at a moment when the CDF experiment had been probing the high-energy frontier with very detailed measurements, none of which appeared to show even the smallest glimpse of a departure from model predictions.

Since posting this I have discovered that the difference signal I was looking at was not daily minimum temp, but daily maximum temp. A new analysis of minimum temps will be found here.

I am a firm believer that simulations improve reality.  If you want to launch a CubeSat, you should start with a fictional CubeSat, a very small orbiting satellite concept.  After deciding what you'd want to orbit the Earth (or Moon), you move to a 1:1 scale mockup.  Only after you've broken a fair amount of plastic and fake hardware should you begin 'bending metal' on the real ones.

The process of prototyping and mockups is a standard part of engineering.  The framework for doing so in an interesting manner is entirely based in the world of games.

The Science of Law

  Scattered throughout the pages of the history of the common law are many references to it being a science.  Science may be called the pursuit of fact by means of well-defined procedures.  Anyone who has ever visited any two courts of common law jurisprudence will have seen at first hand that their procedures inevitably differ somewhat.  The greatest difference will be found between English and American criminal courts.  Whereas in America the trial proper begins when the prosecutor addresses the jury, followed by the defence, in English Crown Courts the defence is not allowed to address the jury until all evidence has been shown or heard.

Attention, activist groups: Open-minded people don't change their view when you control what they learn and they only get one side of the issue, according to a new paper, so framing can only take you so far.

The results of a new paper in the Journal of Communication suggest that climate change deniers may be less effective in swaying public opinion than many scientists and advocates fear, and may even hurt their own cause among those who are most open-minded, according to the authors. 

Nuclear power is not an environmental issue.

There is just no way to spin that it is.  What started off with activists being anti-nuclear weapon has morphed into irrational, anti-science stances against all energy - even reactors that simply cannot have a meltdown and use old nuclear waste for fuel.  Who could protest against such a thing?

Well, when you have tens and hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and a lot of that money is coming from aging hippies who bought into the Ralph Nader/Jane Fonda hysteria that nuclear power was causing a cancer epidemic and the Apocalypse, you have to play along.

Dopamine, the neurotransmitter celebrity chemical du jour in brain stories, gets invoked a lot because it can make a lot of correlations possible - and that means fun for journalists who either want to highlight the ridiculous or scare you. 

Like guns? Dopamine. Are you a Democrat? Dopamine. But aside from its 'pleasure chemical' designation, dopamine has lots of roles in the brain. So if a man takes antipsychotic medication, he may lactate as a side effect, because those medications focus on dopamine. And if there is an addiction story, dopamine is invoked.