Most researchers regard their work as vital to society, even if that value is only higher order and the chain to societal benefit is tenuous to outsiders.  That's no different than any other job - people at the Department of Motor Vehicles feel like the entire state would halt without them and, in an elaborate food chain, they are right, and the same holds true for environmentalists who worry that some obscure critter going extinct will have a butterfly effect on worldwide ecology.  In a domino world, they are also correct.

But researchers are different than those other examples because they can't just do their jobs, they have to not only show they are doing their jobs, they have to prove they should continue doing them, and then raise the money to do it.

Scientific American features an excellent article by Garrett Lisi and James Owen Weatherell, with title "A Geometric Theory of Everything". It is a rather clear explanation of the ideas behind the recent articles published by Lisi on the E8 group and how this exceptionally rich mathematical structure could embed the representation of all particles and forces of nature.

A new study reveals that ‘introspection’ (thinking about our own thoughts or behavior) is anchored in a specific part of our brain.

The research by scientists from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London examined people’s accuracy when reflecting on decisions they had made.

An exoplanet orbiting a star that entered our Milky Way from another galaxy has been detected by astronomers.  This Jupiter-like planet is unusual because it is orbiting a star nearing the end of its life and could be about to be engulfed by it.   Over the last 15 years, astronomers have detected nearly 500 planets orbiting stars in our cosmic neighborhood, but none outside our Milky Way has been confirmed.

The planet has a minimum mass 1.25 times that of Jupiter and is part of the so-called Helmi stream — a group of stars that originally belonged to a dwarf galaxy that was devoured by our galaxy, the Milky Way, in an act of galactic cannibalism about six to nine billion years ago. 

Some studies show that estrogen is 'an elixir for the brain', sharpening mental performance in humans and animals and showing promise as a treatment for disorders of the brain such as Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia.  And don't get us started on what it's doing to males through pollution.

Atoms of antimatter have been trapped and stored for the first time by the ALPHA collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN. 

ALPHA stored atoms of antihydrogen, consisting of a single negatively charged antiproton orbited by a single positively charged anti-electron (positron). While the number of trapped anti-atoms is far too small to fuel an matter-antimatter reactor (sorry, "Star Trek" fans), this advance brings precision tests of the fundamental symmetries of nature a little closer. Measurements of anti-atoms may reveal how the physics of antimatter differs from that of the ordinary matter that dominates the world we know today. 

The federal government rarely succeeds in its attempts to legislate what I would call positive things - this is because the government has no power beyond restricting money and every effort to exceed that is met with resistance by constitutional scholars and states.

A progressive culture like the US wants more government whereas a liberal culture like the US wants freedom, and I would argue the best way to implement both goals is that, rather than attempting positive change (and failing - see American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and Affordable Health Care for America Act) , government stick to punitive actions.

A team of researchers has created an alternative to conventional logic gates, demonstrated them in silicon, and dubbed them "chaogates." 

They used 'chaotic' patterns to encode and manipulate inputs to produce a desired output, in that they selected desired patterns from the infinite variety offered by a chaotic system. A subset of these patterns was then used to map the system inputs (initial conditions) to their desired outputs.

It turns out that this process provides a method to exploit the richness inherent in nonlinear dynamics to design computing devices with the capacity to reconfigure into a range of logic gates. The resulting morphing gates are 'chaogates'.

There's a neat piece on tweaking versus invention, written by two law professors (Kal Raustiala of UCLA and Chris Sprigman at UVA) over as a Freakonomics guest blog.  Their bit on Geeks, Tweeks and Innovation talks about how Tweaking is good, but the law is against it.

Pioneering = making something totally new.
Tweaking = making something better.

A Linguistic Paradox

In science and law, we try to use words in a very precise fashion.  Accordingly, we define our terms as precisely as possible.  This gives rise to a paradox: each new definition of a word is added to the list of its existing definitions.  Our efforts to reduce the ambiguity of a word serve only to increase its ambiguity.