It's statistical polling...for science. 

A paper in Nature Climate Change uses structured expert elicitation and mathematically pools experts' opinions to forecast future sea level rises from melting ice sheets. Soliciting and pooling expert judgments is used in eruption forecasting and the spread of vector borne diseases - with questionable accuracy - and in their paper Professor Jonathan Bamber and Professor Willy Aspinall from the University of Bristol try to model the uncertainties in the future response of the ice sheets. 

Planetary systems with very distant binary stars are particularly susceptible to violent disruptions, more so than if they had stellar companions with tighter orbits around them, according to a new paper.

While diet and exercise are guaranteed to eliminate obesity, there can sometimes be a biological issue that arises, making it harder to lose fat. 

Pop culture diet doctors selling books have done a lot of damage by recommending people not just diet because they claim the metabolism 'slows down' and stores more fat and burns less energy. It happens, but not enough for most people to not simply diet.  

When people talk about sustainable food in 2013, they really mean something with an 'organic' label that they can attribute all kinds of other ethical and environmental traits to - sustainable food the way those people mean it is not sustainable at all, there is no way organic food can feed anyone except the rich 1% (the economically rich and the food gentry lucky enough to be born into agriculturally rich lands) but if food enthusiasts mired in such first world guilt really want to try sustainable food there is a new solution published in PLoS One.




Boxing has been in the news lately, what with this young lady (Nicola Adams) becoming the world’s first female Olympic boxing champion.  So when I saw claws like the ones in the next picture two days ago, I immediately thought they might be used for combat, like the outsize claw of the male fiddler crab. 


On the Kelvin Scale, the absolute temperature used by physicists, it is not possible to get colder than zero degrees kelvin. The physical meaning of the temperature of a gas is determined by chaos, the disordered movement of its particles. The colder the gas, the slower the particles and at zero kelvin (-459.67 F,  -273 C) the particles stop moving and all disorder disappears. That is why it is called absolute zero.

Genomic research will transform medicine but progress has been slower than expected, leading critics to charge that the promise of genomics was hyperbole to get funding mandates and that while research should continue, the bulk of the money earmarked because of its applied science potential might instead be better spent elsewhere.

Proponents argue that the slowness shows the complexity of the relationship between medicine and disease and argue for more funding.

Kareus Therapeutics SA has announced the start of a Phase I clinical study following the Investigational New Drug (IND) approval from the US Food and Drug Administration for the development of KU-046, a first-in-class disease modifying new chemical entity discovered for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease using Kareus' proprietary bioenergetics and KARLECT platforms. 

 The Phase I clinical trial is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled two-part study to assess the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of single ascending oral doses and of multiple ascending oral doses of KU-046 in 54 healthy young volunteers. The study is being conducted by Quintiles at its Phase I Unit at Overland Park in Kansas. 

Guilty feeling Germans doubting all, asking the profound and not accepting the silly answers, starting out thinking that science, physics is important.  Muhō decided to live as a homeless monk in a park in central Osaka in 2001.  Since then he sits, in order to sit, and he achieved perhaps more that way than all my science can ever do.