Babies love to communicate and they're great listeners, even early on.
New research shows that during the first year of life, when babies spend so much time listening to language, they're actually tracking word patterns that will support their process of word- learning that occurs between the ages of about 18 months and two years.
A recent article titled "Our Brains Can't Evolve Any Further" drew my attention which ultimately lead me to the paper "Why Aren’t We Smarter Already: Evolutionary Trade-Offs and Cognitive Enhancements" (Thomas Hills and Ralph Hertwig; University of Basel).
Fortunately, this offered some interesting insights into the assumptions and conditions surrounding human intellect and its evolutionary implications.
Every once in a while Lubos pleases with one of his straight-leg tackles, as he deals with stuff he shouldn't be a-messing with (I am still giggling at an incident of a few years ago, when he publically apologized after a week of nonsense). Today it's one of those blessed moments.
It is so annoyingly sweet to be right, when being right means that one's job is not going to become more exciting in the near future... Today CDF published their analysis of CP violation in the Bs sector, where a very exciting three-sigma deviation from the Standard Model predictions had been a bit prematurely and uncautiously claimed by a group of phenomenologists in 2008.
Infinity is a useful concept but it is often used inappropriately by being assigned as a trait to some object or another. Briefly, nothing can be infinite, since in order for something to "be", it must be defined and measurable. If it isn't, then the object would exist in a perpetual state of creation and couldn't be said to "be" anything at all ... yet.
Germany can again be recognized as a very special place regarding the sciences:
The advantage of a hazelnut rod ... is the possibility to attach test-nodes (Testnosoden) at the tip. This allows to search more aimed at different oscillation patterns. … on my left pinky finger, there is a polarization ring made from ferrite material; this serves the determination of polarization, which means, whether the water vein spins right or left handed.
As everybody knows, next Tuesday we will be treated with a CERN webcast of the analysis results on the Higgs boson searches by ATLAS and CMS. I imagine many of you will want to tune in, but fear you will not grasp much given the typically technical jargon that physicists use to communicate the details of their analyses.
So I thought I would provide here a very short glossary of terms you are likely to hear, and which you might have a hard time understanding correctly. Let me see if I can do a decent job.
The anticipation among physics enthusiasts is almost palpable: In three, four days from now, December the 13th, the discovery of a rather light Higgs particle is going to be officially announced - well, at least the "observation" or whatever the official term will be. Fitting to the ‘lucky’ number 13 date, this could well spell the end of the world, literally!
Let me begin by saying that I bleed blue. Not Yankee blue or horseshoe crab copper — IBM Blue. I was raised on a corporate paycheck and through all the years my mother worked for the computing giant (and the months I spent in sales internships with them) I never once shook an unfriendly hand or doubted a coworker’s ethics. We were all good people, selling a good product that we believed in — that I still believe in.
But we were also part of corporate America, hard at work building the fortunes of the 1 percent.
How can I reconcile what I know about the personhood of employees with the faceless and troubling power that big business wields on Wall Street and Capitol Hill?
A common belief among club-going men is that women choose less attractive friends to make themselves look better. See this clip from that important anthropological documentary "Hall Pass" for context:
Not so, says a group of scientists who have observed the opposite strategy in the Trinidadian guppy, a species of small freshwater fish - instead, the uglier friends are choosing the prettier females to avoid unwanted male attention.
