Researchers have discovered the probable cause of  several infectious agents at the same time. Paramyxoviruses originate from bats and from there the pathogens have spread to humans and other mammals. In total, the new study tested 9,278 animals for viruses, among them 86 species of bats and 33 rodent species, leading to the discovery of an enormous number of new virus species. This could make eradicating many dangerous diseases significantly more difficult than had been thought. For bats provide a reservoir from which viruses could come back after vaccination campaigns. 

No, unfortunately not yet the discovery of the century. Still, the new particle found by CMS in its 2011 dataset is a very important piece of the puzzle of low-energy spectroscopy. Here "low" should be taken with a pinch of salt: the new particle, an excited state of the Ξ_b series, has a mass only slightly lower than six GeV, and is thus "heavy" if compared to most other hadrons.

Both testosterone and cortisol levels increased for Spaniards who watched as Spain beat Holland during the 2010 World Cup. 

In this study, they analyzed the psychobiological response of men and women watching sports - when the competition’s outcome, victory or defeat, is basically out of their control. Fifty supporters of the Spanish team watched the final in a public space or at home, with their families or friends. The researchers asked for their expectations and feelings before the match, and they checked their testosterone and cortisol levels before, during and after the match.

Mathematical theory describing the problem of four-legged wobbly tables stretches back at least as far as 2005, when a paper on the subject of  “The Intuitive Table ‘Theorem’ “, was published in the math journal Viniculum.

Every once in a while, I like to go for a run on the beach. One of my favorite spots to hit the sand is San Gregorio State Beach – it lies just across the Santa Cruz range, is invariably quiet early on weekday mornings, and offers a good stretch of hard-packed sand along a southern route toward Pomponio State Beach.

At least, when the tide is out.

When I started a career in particle physics, joining the CDF experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron proton-antiproton collider about two decades ago, the search for a particle decay signal into hadronic jets was not something one would undertake lightly at a hadron collider: jets are omnipresent when you collide hadrons at high energy, so they constitute a irreducible background. Just as a detective looking for a blonde thief with swedish accent in Sweden, you would be close to clueless.

I was away from the site for a while now. I have a good excuse for it since all this while- I got my Ph.D. award, my work recognized by my peers and took up a new job – all at one time. Dynamics of my life were seemingly distracting me from writing. However, now I have settled, I am back to writing and blogging. Reading the opening lines, you may have realized that I was quite stressed up with my life, grappling all the frontiers together in a single time frame.

In an open science community like Science 2.0, people will feel like they can just sign up and babble about anything and if you protest that what they are doing is not really science (wormholes, brand new theory of everything, social psychology, etc.), they will object with a few predictable responses certain to make everyone chuckle. They go something like; Galileo was oppressed too, Einstein did his best work as a patent clerk, etc.

Researchers have documented the first fossil-based evidence supporting an evolutionary theory of aging, which predicts that species evolving in low mortality and resource-limited ecosystems tend to be more long-lived.

But that is not an endorsement of banning guns and caloric restriction. It's a little more complicated than that.

Although the jury had the case, the Judge Rotenberg Center settled with Andre McCollins' mother yesterday. Fox 25 News in Boston has covered this case diligently, and its article about the settlement writes, "But the attorney representing the Judge Rotenberg Center is not owning up to any mistakes."