I am not a religious person, and I'm most certainly not spiritual either. Both of these statements get me into trouble in polite society, especially when they are coupled.

Apparently I'm not the only one, as anybody who has used an online dating service will readily testify. Typically, these web sites allow you to specify your religious beliefs (and to express a preference for the religious beliefs of your prospective dates). Try simply checking the "atheist" box (if there actually is one), and you'll be waiting a long time for your matches. But if you describe yourself as "spiritual but not religious" your chances are markedly improved (though the problem now is that you'll see a lot of new agey types showing up in your inbox). Why?

Biotransport and ocean mixing


Before I get into the 'bio' aspect of this article I want to put it in context by pointing to a means of ocean mixing that is not as well known as it deserves to be.  And to put that, in turn, in context: a new report from NSIDC confirms that there is a lot of open water in the central pack near the North Pole.  That open water was noted by one of my readers, Lord Soth in a comment.

Here is an abstract from the NSIDC report for July 20 2010:

Chaos is the disorder of a dynamical system but it is not completely unpredictable.   Researchers are convinced that locating the origin of chaos and watching it develop might allow science to predict, and perhaps counteract, outcomes.

Like having a heart attack. 

Writing in in the journal CHAOS, researchers say chaos models may someday help model cardiac arrhythmias (abnormal electrical rhythms of the heart) and help to understand the behavior of ventricular fibrillation, a severely abnormal heart rhythm that is often life-threatening, in order to mitigate it.

The Atlas collaboration made public, just in time for the 2010 ICHEP conference in Paris, the projected reach of their searches for standard model Higgs bosons. This is a whole set of interesting new results which, although necessarily still based on simulations, tell us a lot about what we might see toward the end of next year at the LHC.

Here I will just flash a couple of the results, because the plentiful online documentation that ATLAS provided makes it a worthless exercise on my part to just echo it here. However, maybe I can comment the most relevant plots for those of you too lazy to browse the information-thick ATLAS pages.

BeautifulPeople.com, the dating site where ugly people need not apply, has launched a virtual sperm (and egg) bank for people who want to have beautiful babies.   Really.

 They call it the Beautiful Baby service and they have also made it available to non-members  because, let's face it, the only way for more beautiful babies to be created is to have pretty men impregnate ugly women too, so take one for the team, fellow awesome men who are both smart and hot. 

Crying is a waste of perfectly good water. So why we do it? I have no idea, so I would like to hear your ideas. To get the ball rolling, here are eight hypotheses, each surely inadequate and probably false.

The Geneva Protocol was ratified the 17 June 1925, banned the use of biological weapons but Japan refused to approve the contract and the U.S. to ratify it.

Therefore in 1936 Shiro Ishii (1892 -1959) physician, microbiologist and general Japanese, guided the biological weapons program of the Empire of Japan, under the command of a military unit called Research Unit 731.

Bridges That Build Themselves

The two oldest types of bridge are the arch bridge and the corbel bridge.  It takes a lot of time and effort to build them, but they can last for thousands of years.

Rockfalls can make natural bridges over streams, but the 'design' is very inefficient.  The water channels are easily blocked, with resultant flooding of the adjacent banks.

If I told you that a tornado could pick up rocks and drop them across a river so as to form a perfect arch bridge, you wouldn't believe me.  I hope.  The only way to build a stone arch bridge is to set up a type of scaffolding, shuttering, or former - more properly known as centering.

I  don't get why science writers don't cover science education.

They cover whatever cool science is the flavor of the moment, they cover disasters and the science behind them, they cover scientists but they don't cover the kids who are going to replace them and what they're being taught. Call a science publication land ask it to do a story on science education - they'll tell you they do something once a year. Read them - you'll see what I mean. Read the regular national press and you'll find very little too.

I was relaxing out back, watching fireflies flash, when a buddy, dad to boy and girl 11 year old twins, called to catch up with news and relate a funny (still unfinished) story.

Growing crankier by the weekend with trespassers holding court on the porch steps and sneaking around bushes on the property (to pee or worse) after bar-closing-time, he and the kids opted to make fun of this annoyance and concocted a silly yet safe deterrence plan.