Researchers say they have ruled  the cosmic bubble theory, an alternate theory on the nature of dark energy, after recalculating the expansion rate of the universe to unprecedented accuracy.

The universe appears to be expanding at an increasing rate and some believe that is because the universe is filled with a dark energy that works in the opposite way of gravity. One alternative to that hypothesis is that an enormous bubble of relatively empty space eight billion light-years across surrounds our galactic neighborhood. If we lived near the center of this void, observations of galaxies being pushed away from each other at accelerating speeds would be an illusion.

Polar bears’ noses are phenomenal. They smell a seal’s fart through a light year of snow and ice or something like that. Polar bears are cute, strong, beautiful, pure awesomeness all the way. Come on: they sleep on snow then swim a few rounds in ice water to cool off! I adore them, I love ‘em, I really do.

Now they disappear. Also the number of lions is drastically plummeting, due to poaching and other factors. What to do about it?

Third graders enjoy clay and pipe cleaners. It might sound cruel to teach them graduate level graph theory most math Ph.D.’s have not seen, but I might get away with it if I uses the right craft supplies. Tell kids spinach is good for them. Children are right to skeptical, as I expect of my reader.

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... Not really.

What startled me most was that a colleague of mine at the University of Padova even sent a message to my departments' mailing list, saying that the new result is very important. But it clearly isn't! In fact, the exclusion at 95% CL in the range of Higgs boson masses that CDF and DZERO could put together from the analysis of additional data is almost exactly the same as the one that they published last Summer.

But maybe I should make a step back and explain the matter from the start, to let you judge by yourself the relevance of the new Tevatron bounds on the rate of Higgs boson production in proton-antiproton collisions.

CDF and DZERO are analyzing the proton-antiproton collisions at 2 TeV that the Tevatron collider is producing since 2001.

Everyone's heard of the Darwin Awards, right? It's where some poor soul dies in such a monumentally stupid way that it can be considered that they have done the human gene pool a great favour by inadvertantly altruistically killing themselves and removing their genes. Well, I have a candidate from the fossil record; a late famennian placoderm, that definitely deserves such an accolade.

Firstly though, a quick primer on placoderms. In short, they were big armoured predatory fishes that were widespread in the Devonian. But, by big, I mean really big. Some of these dudes were as big as a double decker bus and would have pretty happily chomped through a car like it was a ham sandwich.