Not long ago, many scientists had the belief that after the age of about three, the brain was pretty much fixed in function. You could imprint new memories and learn new skills, but that was about it.  There was an opposing belief too, that said the brain was a 'blank slate' upon which the various human parameters were written almost ad lib as life went on - an idea, of course, that Steven Pinker refuted in his famous book of the same name (Pinker, 2002).

W bosons have been thoroughly studied at the Tevatron collider. Discovered by the UA1 experiment at the CERN SppS proton-antiproton collider in 1984, these particles have since been produced also in electron-positron collisions at LEP II (in pairs), and recently at the Large Hadron Collider. But the CDF and DZERO experiments have some of the most precise measurements of the physics of these particles, thanks to their now very large datasets.

About 18 months ago, in late January 2009, during the tempestuous cyclone Klaus in France, which killed 26 people and wreaked enormous damage to the nearby once ancient region of Aquitaine, a new island suddenly appeared, 7 miles out to sea in the mouth of the Gironde estuary in the Bay of Biscay.

The French have called it the l'île mystérieuse or "the mysterious island," after the Jules Verne novel and film as depicted in youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os0l808oM9g but officially the newly formed mysterious island remains unnamed, and does not appear on maps of the region.

You must be quite familiar with what happens when you toss a pebble into a pond. You might describe the simple event as a massive rotating object splashing into a deformable fluid. Or, you might… not. However, astronomical bodies are like these pebbles sloshing around in a deformable fluid, called space-time, and this interaction, too, can produce those expected waves extending out from where the pebble drops.

Propaganda - An Application Of The Forgetting Curve

Learning curves,  forgetting curves, adjacency and the scientific roots of the black art of propaganda.

The responsibility of Twitter updates got you down? D'you think about tweeting but never actually get around to it? Never fear, Adam Wilson is here. The University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering grad student removes the clunky and outdated interface of keyboard and lets his brain tweet for him.

That's right, he straps an electrode-coated swim cap to his head and watches as letters scroll across his computer screen. When his brain recognizes the letter he wants, the swim cap knows and uploads it directly to Twitter.

Sexual images trigger chemical reactions in your brain, which in turn compel us to act in specific ways, or be drawn to certain things, or motivated to engage in particular behaviors. It's common nowadays to have consultants whose job it is to find out exactly how your brain interprets images in order to invoke the greatest possible sexual response. Sounds like a fun job, eh? Sex Research Consultant: Totally hot job in 2011.

The mind is a very complex thing, but when it comes to sex, it's really pretty simple. How simple? This is your brain on sex...

How did the first stars and galaxies form? Are there other planets like Earth? What is the universe made of? These are the fundamental questions that astronomers hope to answer in the next decade with a new generation of space- and ground-based telescopes. Today an expert panel presented a detailed plan prioritizing which telescopes should be funded to maximize the expected scientific returns while fitting within realistic budget expectations.

This week a computer science researcher named Vinay Deolalikar claimed to have a proof that P is not equal to NP.

Let’s set aside what this means for another day, lest I get distracted.  The important thing now is that this is big. Huge, even!

If, that is, he’s correct.

But correct or not, that’s the kind of thing one expects to see in academia. Tenure gives professors job security and research freedom, exactly the conditions needed to enable them to make the non-incremental breakthroughs that fundamentally alter the intellectual landscape. (And in the case of P not equal to NP, to acquire fame and fortune.)