How do you test the effects of weightlessness in space without risking lives and a lot of money?

Use a bed. People in bed with their heads 6° below the horizontal for long periods causes their bodies to react in similar ways to being weightless and so bedrest studies are being used to answer questions on how our bodies adapt to living in space and and even how our bodies adapt to growing old. Like Tang and pens that write upside down, findings from bedrest studies may apply directly to people on Earth.

The Hadron Collider Physics symposium opened yesterday in Kyoto. I am not following the works very closely, but I did give a peek at today's talks, which were on the topic of top quark physics.

Suicidal doctors have excellent access to health care but appear to be under-treated for mental health problems, according to a new University of Michigan analysis.  

More physicians than non-physicians in their analysis had known mental health problems prior to suicide but that didn't translate into a higher rate of antidepressant use. Major depression is a known risk factor for suicide, particularly for female physicians.

Stigma, lack of confidentiality, and desire to self-treat may explain why physicians don't seek formal treatment for mental health problems, says lead author Katherine J. Gold, M.D., M.S.W., M.S., assistant professor of family medicine and of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Adverse childhood experiences, such as being raised in poverty, can be detrimental for cognitive development often leaving children struggling in school and trapped forever in a cycle of hardship. But a study is now suggesting a innovative (and easy) way to help.

The Synapse Gel that Tiffany was daubing on my forehead and temples looked and felt, but did not smell, like hand lotion. It carried with it the crisp and dainty musk of Science: a sterile, singeing pong that induced the slightest of nose-wrinkles and conjured up images of aseptic test tubes. I sniffed and glanced around nervously. Though the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center’s exhibit hall appeared to be properly ventilated (not that I actually had any conception of proper ventilation), the scalp massage seemed a bit risqué for public. And yet nobody in the masses around the Intific tradeshow booth seemed to notice the quasi-sensual temple massage Tiffany was administering to an unsuspecting undergraduate interested in her company’s neurotechnology.

In the wake of Italian scientists being sentenced for not having sufficiently warned the public about the risks of a severe earthquake of L'Aquila 2009, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the French Académie des sciences have published a statement trying to head off possible situations in their own countries Their statement concerning the handling of risks situations by scientists is below.

Genetic blending between Europeans and Asians occurred over 2,000 years ago in the Altai region of Mongolia, according to a new analysis.  The remains of ancient Scythian warriors indicate that this blending was not due to an eastward migration of Europeans, but to a demographic expansion of local Central Asian populations and that was due to the technological improvements the Scythian culture brought with them. 

The Scythians were an Indo-European people dedicated to nomadic pasturing and horse breeding. They crossed the Eurasian steppes from the Caspian Sea until reaching the Altai Mountains during the 2nd and 7th century BCE. We know about them primarily due to ancient texts written by the Greek historian Herodotus.

A device capable of amplifying the information in a single particle of light without adding noise has been created.  The researchers were able to amplify the noisy quantum state of a single photon subjected to loss, without adding noise in the process - their amplification actually reduced the noise in the quantum state. 

It is expected the results will stimulate further interest in the fundamental laws that govern how well amplifiers can work and in developing uses of noiseless amplification techniques for other quantum information technology applications.

I was impressed by the extensive damage done to an Indiana home and surrounding structures a few days ago. It really did look like a bomb blast.

The obvious explanation is that a gas leak was the cause, but could it have been an explosive device?

One way to sort this out is to compare the energy content of natural gas with other types of explosions. Intuitively, one might expect that a 100 kg (220 pound) bomb would do this kind of damage. The energy content of 100 kg of TNT is 400 million joules, so how much gas would contain a similar amount of energy?

It has taken a while, but the rare decay of B_s mesons (particles composed of a bottom and an anti-strange quark) to muon pairs has finally been seen. The authors of the find -we cannot yet call it an observation given the scarce statistical significance of the signal- are the members of the LHCb collaboration, one of the four experiments working with the proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.