As I promised a week ago, I am posting answers to a few of the 42 questions which constituted the first part of an the exam selecting experimental particle physicists for the INFN (the italian institute of nuclear physics) four years ago. Next week, a similar exam will take place to "qualify" post-doctoral scientists which aspire at a temporary position with INFN.

Have a really smart kid who loves big trucks but you can't stand loud, growling voices with too much reverb in stadiums?   You're in luck.    MANTRA (The Manufacturing Technology Transporter) is a specially modified monster truck that is packed with the latest machinery and simulators rather than baseball caps and flannel shirts.

The 14 meter long MANTRA truck will take to the road with a dedicated team to demonstrate the manufacturing and assembly line technology of the future and help to inspire young people to take up careers in engineering.

Paperless office?  An optimistic pipe dream.    We use more paper documents than at any time in history despite the prevalence of the Internet and digital technology.    Part of the reason is lousy copy protection of scanned documents and storing them online.

But a new approach to archiving scanned documents that makes the text searchable and adds a watermark to images for copy protection and validation reported in the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems may herald some forward progress.

If you read internet science in 2006, you'd have thought former president George W. Bush's limitations of use of embryonic stem cell lines had killed science.  In reality, embryonic stem cell research only received $15 million in US funding when the restrictions were imposed and it grew to billions per year during his presidency so some of that rhetoric was designed simply to engage in cultural spin and mobilize votes for Democrats.

With a Democrat president and a bulletproof majority in the Senate, culturally-inclined science bloggers can now instead focus on religion and maybe the few Republicans still out there and the rest of us can tackle serious issues, like how to educate people on stem cell research so they can make informed policy decisions.

TEL AVIV and BERLIN, July 3 /PRNewswire/ -- German-Israeli cooperation brings together two complementary
approaches to the advancement of commercialization of tomorrow's
technologies. Germany Trade & Invest, the Israeli-German Chamber of Commerce,
and several partners will be hosting the 1st Israeli-German Conference on the
commercialization of future technologies in Tel Aviv on July 6, 2009. The
event is a response to the high level of Israeli interest in German high-tech
R&D.

ZÜRICH, July 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Solianis recently signed an investment agreement with a Swiss foundation
which invests its assets in Swiss companies. According to the agreement, this
foundation will put CHF 5 million, while the previous investors in Solianis
are investing another CHF 3 million.

"The CHF 8 million invested will enable us to increase our efforts to
complete the prototype of our non-invasive glucose monitoring device and to
prepare the clinical trials required for CE certification. The realisation of
our innovative product concept is now assured", says Mario Stark, managing
director at Solianis.

House of Straw
Use six straws to create the classic house shape (a rectangular body with two straws forming the roof, all laying flat on the table). Bet that you can make four equal triangles by moving only three straws. Try it! To all but the most creatively freethinking, this is impossible. The trick is to go 3D—pick up the three straws that make the bottom and sides of the rectangle and replace them so that one end of each straw is rooted in a corner of the triangle with all three moved straws touching above the center of the original triangle, like a tent or teepee—four, equal triangles, each the size of the original roof.

Paper Match

Astronomers have unveiled a new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way - that's our home galaxy, if you're from someplace else - and it's peppered with thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust, the potential birthplaces of new stars. Using observations from the APEX telescope in Chile, this survey is the largest map of cold dust so far.

This new guide for astronomers, known as the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL) shows the Milky Way in submillimetre-wavelength light (between infrared light and radio waves. Images of the cosmos at these wavelengths are vital for studying the birthplaces of new stars and the structure of the crowded galactic core. 

Do friends wear the same clothes or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, part of the reason they became friends or, once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors? 

Social scientists don't know for sure and are still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn't keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences. 

But the virtual world of "Second Life" does. Researchers from the University of Michigan have tried to use this information to study how "gestures" make their way through this online community. Gestures are code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting.

For some thousands of years “logic” was viewed as the “theory of inquiry” – “inquiry into inquiry” if you will. This was almost certainly the case with Plato, definitely the case with Aristotle, and by and large true throughout the history of Western thought right up to the revolution in symbolic logic that occurred with Frege, Dedekind and Peano in the late 19th Century. However, with these changes the notion of logic came to be swallowed up by formal and symbolic concerns.

Logic as the theory of inquiry was lost sight of leaving mathematical logic as the sole claimant to the title of “Logic.”