What picture should we draw of the quest for new phenomena after the presentation of a wealth of new results at the international conference on high-energy physics in Paris held last week ? I am speaking in particular of results coming from the experiments at the Tevatron and LHC, which are all studying hadron collisions in search for still unseen effects to both confirm (with the discovery of the Higgs boson) or break down (with the observation of Supersymmetry, new particles, extra dimensions, or still other effects) the present theoretical understanding of fundamental physics which the standard model provides us with.

Anemia is a common blood disorder characterized by low hemoglobin levels and has long been associated with those suffering from colorectal cancer, but researchers at Tel Aviv University  say that low hemoglobin levels can actually indicate a potential for colon cancer years before it's diagnosed. 

Graduate student Inbal Goldshtein, who works with Dr. Gabriel Chodick and Dr. Varda Shalev of Tel Aviv University's School of Public Health, says that paying close attention to routine blood test results can be an effective screening system for colon cancer which, when diagnosed early enough, can be treated effectively. More than 50,000 people in the U.S. will die from colon cancer in 2010. Better screening could significantly reduce those numbers, Goldshtein says. 

I am often asked questions about my musical picosatellite, Project Calliope. Easy questions have concrete answers. "What are your sensors?": I-CubeX magnetic, thermal, light. "What magnetic field is expected?": ."How are you going to distribute the tracks?": as free remixable MIDI files via web.

Others are either vague or awkward. "When will the satellite be done?": obviously 'by launch'. "What will it sound like?": whatever the musician wants. "What's your downlink bandwidth?" I'm still working on the radio parts.

Drug trials conducted by the very pharmaceutical company with an obvious vested interest in a positive result are far more likely to yield a... positive result!

Perhaps not earth-shattering news to anybody with a gram of cynicism in their body but is still an orchestrated effort to undermine the credibility of science as anything higher than the distortion of data in the name of money.

“John is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, John is mortal.” This argument from two premises to the conclusion is a deductive argument. The conclusion logically follows from the premises; equivalently, it is logically impossible for the conclusion not to be true if the premises are true. Mathematics is the primary domain of deductive argument, but our everyday lives and scientific lives are filled mostly with another kind of argument.

Not all arguments are deductive, and ‘inductive’ is the adjective labeling any non-deductive argument. Induction is the kind of argument in which we typically engage.

Imagine you are tasked to build the ultimate computer memory. You are provided with an unlimited budget and all the resources you need. 

How big a memory capacity could you build? 

Variations in the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen levels may be closely linked to the evolution of life, with feedbacks between uni- and multicellular life and oxygen, say scientists from Royal Holloway, University of London and from The Field Museum in Chicago.    Writing in Nature Geoscience, they say over the past 400 million years, the level of oxygen has varied considerably from the 21% value we have today and the amount of charcoal preserved in ancient peat bogs, now coal, gives a measure of how much oxygen there was in the past.

Arctic Ice August 2010

Arctic warming and global warming.

The year up to July 31 has produced many examples of anomalous weather events globally.  We have seen fires, floods, droughts and sandstorms on an immense scale.  A new report shows that 10 out of 10 indicators of global warming are trending in the direction predicted when global warming was merely a theory, rather than a self-evident fact.

After the issuing of new top mass results by the Tevatron experiments, it is time for another look at global electroweak fits of standard model observables. The Gfitter group has produced new fits for the standard model in search of the most probable value of the Higgs boson mass, given the new measurements of top quark mass and other quantities, and the huge amount of existing information on sensitive observables from the standard model.

Unfortunately, I could find no update including the new Higgs search results yet. I guess such a fit will be ready in a few weeks... But the new released information is already interesting enough that we may meaningfully spend a few words around some figures here.

Researchers have reported the creation of pseudo-magnetic fields far stronger than the strongest magnetic fields ever sustained in a laboratory, just by putting the right kind of strain onto a patch of graphene.

Graphene is a form of carbon that consists of a single layer of carbon atoms.  A carbon atom has four valence electrons.   In graphene (and in graphite, a stack of graphene layers), three electrons bond in a plane with their neighbors to form a strong hexagonal pattern, like chicken-wire. The fourth electron sticks up out of the plane and is free to hop from one atom to the next. The latter pi-bond electrons act as if they have no mass at all, like photons. They can move at almost one percent of the speed of light.