A recent talk by Adam Elga (Princeton University) at CUNY’s Graduate Center made me think a bit about what the author calls “suspiciously formed desires.”

When mother mice compete socially for mates in a promiscuous environment, their sons play hard - they also die young.

More urinary pheromones attract more females but smelling sexier shortens their lives.

An unusually large find, more 600 stamp seals and cylinder seals, have been found so far in an ancient sanctuary
of the storm and weather god Jupiter Dolichenus
in Turkey.

The stamp seals and cylinder seals as well as scarabs, made of glass, stone and quartz ceramics, were mostly crafted in a high-quality manner. Following the restoration work, the finds were handed over to the relevant museum in Gaziantep in Turkey. 

The FDA is investigating a multi-state outbreak of E. coli O157 illnesses possibly linked to pre-packaged salad products.  26 cases of illness were reported in 3 states, Arizona, California, and Washington.  

On November 10, 2013, the the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced that Glass Onion Catering, a Richmond, Calif. establishment, is recalling approximately 181,620 pounds of ready-to-eat salads and sandwich wrap products with fully-cooked chicken and ham because some of these products have been linked to the illnesses through epidemiological and traceback investigation.

You may wish to include a UV LED in your Science Play and Research Kit. Nowadays you can find inexpensive key chain lights that include a visible light LED flashlight, but also include a red laser LED and UV LED. The red laser can be used to demonstrate the Tyndall effect, and the UV LED can be used to demonstrate  a lot of stuff that becomes visible under UV light. I found this black light (UV) LED strobe light on clearance after Halloween for around $2.00 USD:

The famous Von Neumann-Day math problem, first described by mathematician John von Neumann in 1929, has gotten a geometric solution, according to Cornell University researchers. Graduate student Yash Lodha, working with Justin Moore, professor of mathematics, has described a geometric solution for the von Neumann-Day problem, first described by mathematician John von Neumann in 1929.

Posting the calorie content of menu items at major fast-food chains in Philadelphia, per federal law, hasn't change purchasing habits or decreased the number of calories that those customers consume, researchers reported Friday at the Obesity Society's annual scientific meeting, held in Atlanta. 

The results echo those conducted by the same researchers among low-income neighborhoods in New York City before and after calorie-labels were mandated there in July 2008, lending more evidence to the arguments that micro-managing food choice in the name of awareness doesn't work for the intended group.

In a paper appeared a few days ago on the Cornell Arxiv Campbell, Ellis and Williams discuss how the LHC experiments have a chance to obtain information on the Higgs boson width by studying four-lepton events at masses much above the 126 GeV region where they cluster when produced by Higgs boson decays. Here I am going to show the graph that is at the source of this idea, and the general conclusions that the theorists reach on the precision that ATLAS and CMS can obtain on that parameter.

First of all let me explain to outsiders what is the Higgs boson width. In order to do so I need to make a short digression.

Laboratory animals fed a modified version of a common genetically modified probiotic were completely cured of intestinal worms that belong to a family of parasites that currently infect 1.5 billion people, or almost one quarter of the world's population, according to new research presented today at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH).