Huffington Post has a piece up on whether parents of obese children are in denial. Of course, the comments are typical for Huff; there are the usual close-minded asses who assume that all obesity is a result of fat parents "sharing the misery" (as one commentator wrote).

Like most things in life, childhood obesity exists for multiple reasons, and judging these parents to be unloving or abusive misses the complex factors that combine to create obesity in individuals.

What does chessboxing have to do with science? Let me tell you a little story...
It all started last November with this tweet:




There was a Twitter conversation about politics, and I suggested the candidates decide a winner over a chessboxing match. I had heard about chessboxing a few years prior, but didn't give it much thought, other than marvel at how difficult and unlikely a combo sport it was. 

Cellebrite, a developer and manufacturer of mobile forensic solutions, has rejected claims in the recent WikiLeaks "Spy Files" exposé that it is among companies that develop and supply equipment to governments and dictators "to spy on their citizens via mobile devices and computers." 

 The WikiLeaks page referring to Cellebrite states, "The Spy Files (open) thousands of pages and other materials exposing the global mass surveillance industry."

It is by now public that Rolf Heuer, the Director General of CERN, in announcing for December 13th two back-to-back talks of the CMS and ATLAS experiments on their Higgs search results with 2011 data, warned that the results might not be conclusive yet. Besides, nobody really could expect them to be, since the sensitivity expected by both ATLAS and CMS in the still not excluded region of the Higgs mass, with 5/fb of data per experiment and 7 TeV running conditions, ranges from 2 to 4 standard deviations in the rosiest circumstances.

If on occasions you dream about owning the world's largest particle smasher, I have good news for you. The Superconducting Super Collider is for sale "at a significant discount". However, to stand a chance in beating the LHC in the race for the Higgs, you better act quickly. And uhh... did I tell you the sale is a 'BYOB' (bring your own beam) deal?

A new species of horned dinosaur, Spinops sternbergorum, was announced today by an international team of scientists nearly 100 years after the initial discovery of the fossil.

Yesterday I complained that none of the articles about the New Zealand squid fishery had any quotes from fishing reps. I had only to wait 24 hours for my complaint to be answered!

Queue the 'life on other planets' media buzz.  NASA's Kepler Mission has discovered the first super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of a star similar to our Sun.

Research on muscle fatigue has largely been confined to the muscle itself. That makes sense, where there is burn, there is fire.  But motivation and will power turns out to have a greater impact on muscle fatigue than previously believed, according to a joint research project between the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich has shifted the focus to brain research.

The researchers discovered neuronal processes for the first time that are responsible for reducing muscle activity during muscle-fatiguing exercise. The third and final part of this series of experiments, which was conducted by Lea Hilty as part of her doctoral thesis at the University of Zurich, has now been published in the European Journal of Neuroscience.

Kinect for Xbox 360 has an update coming today that brings voice control to living room entertainment. 

 They are launching an all-new Xbox 360 experience including the first group of new, custom applications from world leading TV and entertainment content providers on Xbox LIVE. 

 You Say It, Xbox Finds It 

How long does it take you to search and find your favorite movie or TV show? Do you find yourself searching hundreds of channels and multiple services and TV inputs? What if the entertainment you craved was simple, discoverable and exactly what you wanted at that particular moment?