Let's be honest - in the 21st century the wussification of men has been in full force.   Being a man is out if that means not being a politically correct, hyper-sensitive, asexual, homogenized follower of all that is cool and popular among the cultural intelligentsia.

But testosterone levels are dropping and that could mean any number of consequences for the future of our species. Now you have one more science excuse to sack up and stop identifying as a metrosexual; a group of researchers concluded in 2010 that modest males endure social backlash because they are not 'macho' enough. We may not like arrogant people but meek people are annoying too.

The Judge Rotenberg Center is on trial, legally, for negligence in the 31 shocks and hours of restraint that Andre McCollins suffered at the hands of JRC staff and in the court of public opinion, finally, for its decades of use of skin shocks by a device Matthew Israel created.

  Abbott and Enanta Pharmaceuticals announced complete data from the study known as "Pilot" - Abbott's initial interferon-free study of its direct-acting antiviral agents for the treatment of hepatitis C (HCV) - showing that 91 percent of genotype 1 infected, treatment-naive patients taking ABT-450/r and ABT-072 combined with ribavirin administered for 12 weeks, achieved sustained viral response at 24 weeks (SVR24). 82 percent of patients achieved SVR36. This is among the first 12-week, interferon-free HCV regimen with 36-week post-treatment data in genotype 1 patients. Results were presented today at the International Liver Congress 2012 (ILC 2012), the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL), April 18-22 in Barcelona, Spain.

Can software automatically recognise celebrities? Hewlett-Packard (motto: Let’s do Amazing) believes so, and has recently published a paper on the feasibility of ‘Wikipedia-based Online Celebrity Recognition’.
Researchers Demiao Lin, Jianming Jin, and Yuhong Xiong, from HP Labs China have been investigating so-called Smart-Browsing on the www, and point out that : “Obviously, recognizing celebrity names is important for smart browsing.”

A couple of weeks ago the CDF and DZERO experiments have produced a combination of their measurements of the W boson mass. Besides two older determinations of this fundamental parameter of the Standard Model, the new 2.2/fb measurement by CDF and the 4.3/fb measurement by DZERO have been averaged together, accounting for correlated systematics. [x/fb is a shorthand for the amount of collisions from which the W boson datasets have been extracted by the experiments: 1/fb is about 80 trillion proton-antiproton collisions.]

On March 22, I called on Autism Speaks and the Autism Society of America to stand up against the abuse, restraint and torture occurring at the Judge Rotenberg Center. Today, I received an official statement from Autism Speaks through Marc Sirkin, Autism Speaks Vice President, Social Marketing&Online Fundraising:

I am just back from a vacation to Greece, where last Sunday was orthodox Easter. My fiancee Kalliopi is Greek, and it was about time for me for me to experience a bit of Greek customs. So we flew to Athens, and then headed to Salamina, where I had a lot of fun the Greek way in the company of a very cheerful dozen of relatives and friends.

Among the obligatory ingredients of a Greek Easter is the roasted lamb. It is cooked all in one piece, on a huge skewer, by rolling it for hours over hot coals. Its appearance is a bit disturbing at first, that is until the smell start to turn from that of a corpse to that of delicious food.  Below you can see me in front of the thing as it was already in the good-smelling and edible-looking phase.

Widely accepted theories of dark matter,  a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts, expect the solar neighborhood to be filled with the stuff - but it isn't, at least as far as can be detected.

Tenzin Gyatso, who some call “Dalai Lama” and other funny names, has been awarded the 2012 Templeton Prize, as announced here, and if you look at the given justification, you could be excused for mistaking the Templeton Prize for a straight science award and Tenzin for a scientist. Tenzin has supposedly a

“long-standing engagement with multiple dimensions of science”

 

“Specifically, he encourages serious scientific investigative reviews of the power of compassion and its broad potential to address the world's fundamental problems”

Don't get too excited but 200 activists are going to jump off Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

These aren't the usual pesky environmentalists, these are hang-gliding global activists, which really sounds like just an excuse to go hang-gliding but get permits to do it in cool places but it's still going to raise money for a worthy cause.