The Higgs boson, whose discovery was confirmed by CERN on July 4th to the exacting 5-sigma level required in particle physics (meaning that the probability that the bulge in the data indicating a particle with mass-energy in the range of ~125 GeV is a random fluke is less than 1 in 3.5 million), is the first and only boson to be predicted to be a very bad ballerina--it can't twirl around! 

Recently several posts have played the "race" card and elicited all manner of responses, but at its root, the fundamental premise had not actually been examined.  Is "race" a valid concept?

I know that many people will immediately experience a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of discussing "race" as pseudo-scientific, because they either have a vested interest in advancing their own "race", or because they wish to use it as a lever against other "races".

Led by 100-meter world record holder Usain Bolt, Jamaican men swept the sprinting events at the London Olympics. It was a stunning feat for the small Caribbean nation. But as part of a broader trend, it’s hardly surprising. Runners of West African descent are the fastest humans on earth.

For decades, a bushel of developing countries—Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Kitts, Barbados, Grenada, Netherlands Antilles and the Bahamas in the Caribbean and Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Namibia in western Africa, as single countries, have each produced more elite male sprinters than all of white Europe and Asia combined. Yet West African descended runners are laggards at the longer races.

Living Forever - Boring?

A recent article ["Would it be boring to live forever"] raised the question that if science could resolve the problem of dying and prolong human life indefinitely, in a healthy state, would we become bored with such an existence and look at death more favorably.  

The two perspectives are essentially expressed in the following quotes.

Ekso Bionics has begun shipping an upgraded version of their Ekso bionic suit that powers up patients with spinal cord injuries and pathologies to get them standing and walking again. Each Ekso now comes equipped with three new walking modes for progressive rehabilitation options, and EksoPulse, a wireless networked usage monitor. Patients will have new challenges as they master each level and more control of the suit as they become more adept. 

Most people claim they don't make judgments about people based on appearance, and most people who say that are lying. 

'First impressions' became a term for a reason. Everyone knows appearance counts in first impressions, and first impressions count overall, that is why it is better to wear a tie to a job interview than pajamas but how much are people really able to tell about someone else based on physical aspects, aside from whether or not they are wearing pajamas instead of a tie or if they look like George Clooney? 

What does “Uh(m)” mean?
Professional linguists from a selection of highly respected international academic institutions have pondered the question in some detail over the years, but now a new paper from Emanuel A. Schegloff, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, goes considerably further towards consolidating the answer(s).

Oxford BioMedica plc biopharmaceuticals and its partner Sanofi announced a positive interim review of the RetinoStat(R) Phase I study in neovascular "wet" age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and the StarGen(TM) Phase I/IIa study in Stargardt disease by the Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB); an independent panel of specialists in the fields of ophthalmology, virology and vectorology. RetinoStat(R) and StarGen(TM) were designed and developed by Oxford BioMedica using the Company's proprietary LentiVector(R) gene delivery technology. 

The US Food and Drug Administration says requiring special labels for foods that contain ingredients from genetically modified crops would be "inherently misleading" to consumers - that is exactly what proponents of GM food labeling are hoping for. People inherently side with the precautionary principle and there is no requirement that ballot initiatives be written clearly or well; the assumption is the public will figure it out.

The American Medical Association agrees with the USDA and wrote two months ago, "There is no scientific justification for special labeling of bioengineered foods."

And yet we are going to get it, and the cost, because spin doctors are calling it 'awareness'.

The Large Hadron Collider is delivering as expected a large amount of integrated luminosity of proton-proton collisions to CMS and ATLAS, running at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. The total collected in 2012 by CMS has just now crossed the mark of 10 inverse femtobarns: this is twice as much data as that collected in 2011. And the CMS detector is working like a charm, with all subsystems collecting data flawlessly.

Physicists need large integrated luminosity to explore rare phenomena, and high energy to probe processes which may only "turn on" above a certain threshold. So given the x2 luminosity so far collected (but we will get to x5 by the end of the year!) and x1.14 energy, the discovery potential of 2012 data is already several times larger than that of 2011 data.