There's a neat piece on tweaking versus invention, written by two law professors (Kal Raustiala of UCLA and Chris Sprigman at UVA) over as a Freakonomics guest blog.  Their bit on Geeks, Tweeks and Innovation talks about how Tweaking is good, but the law is against it.

Pioneering = making something totally new.
Tweaking = making something better.

A Linguistic Paradox

In science and law, we try to use words in a very precise fashion.  Accordingly, we define our terms as precisely as possible.  This gives rise to a paradox: each new definition of a word is added to the list of its existing definitions.  Our efforts to reduce the ambiguity of a word serve only to increase its ambiguity.

US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, according to a bold statement published in a BMJ press release.    The press release is about a paper called 'Retractions in the scientific literature:  do authors deliberately commit research fraud?' in the Journal of Medical Ethics.   How did he arrive at that conclusion?   Language and apparently poor understanding of statistics.

Oxytocin, dubbed the "cuddle hormone" because of its importance in bonding ,  is best known for its role in childbirth and breastfeeding, and animal studies have shown that it may also be important in monogamous social relationships. Recently, economic research in humans implicated oxytocin in trust and empathy.

Additional animal research shows that oxytocin may relieve stress and anxiety in social settings and may be more rewarding than cocaine to new mothers.

It's been the decade of metamaterials, with breakthroughs toward an invisibility cloak occurring every few months.   With conventional materials, light typically travels along a straight line, but with metamaterials, scientists can exploit additional flexibility to create blind spots by deflecting certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Basically, an image can be altered or made to look like it has disappeared. 

Under certain conditions vapor bubbles can form in fluids moving swiftly over a surface and those bubbles soon collapse with such great force that they can even poke holes in steel and damage objects such as ship propellers and fuel pumps.   

Warning! If you’re thinking this is going to be about gruesome punishments or such like, prepare to be disappointed! This is about teaching and learning electromagnetism.

Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, had a life-changing event occur almost one year ago.   On November 19th, 2009, a thousand e-mail messages and documents, many his correspondence, were released to the public.

Many stressed that those messages were stolen(1), as if the process vindicated the content (would it do so if damning emails had been from Exxon or BP?) but that was small solace because climate science was already suffering backlash and climate science detractors had a field day alleging the entire process was tainted.

Lee Smolin claims that AP is bad and favors a Cosmological Natural Selection view instead (on grounds of falsifiability).  I believe this is a false dichotomy and that they are really one and the same.  Here’s why:

1. Normally natural selection requires some form of “replication” or it’s not actually natural selection.   But replication is not needed if you start with an infinity of heterogeneous universes.  In other words replication is simulated via the anthropic lens over the life-supporting subset of all possible universes.

Many are troubled by dark energy. I will tell you first why dark energy is really crazy. Then I tell you that the crazy part is not actually the problem of dark energy, but one of basic general relativity. Many educated people are proudly critical of dark stuff, but when it comes to relativity, they do not want to be found hanging out in the crack-pot corner. In other words, my post is directed at the guys who go: “I know about relativity and agree it is more or less fine what those cosmologists did then, but this dark stuff now is going too far! Stop the wild guessing and go back to doing proper science.”