Just like some people are overweight but healthy - an obesity paradox - some people are thin but have a three-fold higher risk of mortality and/or cardiovascular events.

Weight is not the best way to understand metabolic health, according to an analysis of lean, overweight and obese people.

A new paper claims that ~20 percent of normal weight adults are still metabolically unhealthy and have a higher risk of mortality and/or cardiovascular events than metabolically healthy obese subjects. Oddly, a reduced accumulation of fat in the lower body puts lean people at risk.

One size does not fit all

A new analysis by the ATLAS collaboration, based of the data collected in 13 TeV proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC in 2016, finds an excess of X-->4 lepton events at a mass of 240 GeV, with a local significance of 3.6 standard deviations. The search, which targeted objects of similar phenomenology to the 125 GeV Higgs boson discovered in 2012, is published in ATLAS CONF-2017-058. Besides the 240 GeV excess, another one at 700 GeV is found, with the same statistical significance.

Shrinking travel budgets and the availability of online training have conspired against today's professional associations, the typical first-victims of operational austerity.  Public institutions eager to appease their elected leaders are especially quick to freeze travel during challenging economic times.  This, however, may be a grave mistake.  Why? Because there are hidden, undisclosed benefits to membership associations that are worthy not only of discussion, but of careful consideration by corporate and governmental executives trying to save a buck.  

This is the second part of a section taken from Chapter 3 of the book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab". The chapter recounts the pioneering measurement of the Z mass by the CDF detector, and the competition with SLAC during the summer of 1989. The title of the post is the same as the one of chapter 3, and it refers to the way some SLAC physicists called their Fermilab colleagues, whose hadron collider was to their eyes obviously inferior to the electron-positron linear collider.

Satellite data have detected widespread water within ancient explosive volcanic deposits on the Moon. That means its interior may contain more indigenous water than previously believed. The ancient deposits are believed to consist of glass beads formed by the explosive eruption of magma coming from the deep lunar interior.

A cold beer on a hot day or a whisky nightcap beside a coal fire. A well earned glass can loosen your thinking until you feel able to pierce the mysteries of life, death, love and identity. In moments like these, alcohol and the cosmic can seem intimately entwined.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the universe is awash with alcohol. In the gas that occupies the space between the stars, the hard stuff is almost all-pervasive. What is it doing there? Is it time to send out some big rockets to start collecting it?

Last week-end Padova researchers tested the first calorimeter and tracker prototypes of the iMPACT project at the APSS/TIFPA Proton Therapy Facility in Trento (Italy).

iMPACT (innovative Medical Proton Achromatic Calorimeter and Tracker) is a project led by Piero Giubilato, who won an ERC consolidator grant from the European Union. The project aims to develop a high resolution and high rate (>100 kHz/cm2) proton Computed Tomography (pCT) scanner. The scanner will combine a highly-segmented range calorimeter made of PVT scintillators, for energy measurements, and a silicon pixel tracker, for trajectory reconstructions. 

There is ongoing concern about species extinction but it isn't just the fact that 99.999% of species have never been cataloged, so it's impossible to know how many are extinct, it's that Mother Nature may cause it long before we could.

A new study suggests nature's ecological web is so tenuous that it's amazing anything survived this long; even the smell of a predator can have disastrous effects in populations of small size in flies. They spend less time eating, more time being vigilant, have less sex, and produce fewer offspring. 

The Trump administration is regularly accused by green activists in media as being opposed to science, but only the science they accept. On one recent policy decision the opposite is true and EPA is taking a stand against junk science by greens who had been unchecked before. That decision is related to the pesticide chlorpyrifos.

Everyone has heard about bisphenol A (BPA).  It’s primarily used as a raw material to make polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins, both of which are high performance materials<