About a month ago I held a three-hour course on "Statistics for Data Analysis in High-Energy Physics" in the nice setting of Engelberg, a mountain location just south of Zurich. Putting together the 130 slides of that seminar was a lot of work and not little fun; in the process I was able to collect some "simple" explanatory cases of the application of statistical methods and related issues. A couple of examples of this output is given in a post on the fractional charge of quarks and in an article on the weighted average of correlated results.

Why I Am Peter Gleick

When your opponent has dipped his gloves in glue and glass and has kicked you in the nuts, most people would agree that if you depart somewhat from the Queensbury rules the other side has no right to complain about your ethics.

Before the telegraph was invented, messages could travel as fast as the fastest mode of transport available. Today, however, advanced communication technologies have changed the scenario to a great extent. Messages now travel at the speed of light through cables and optical fibers, and are delivered in the least time possible. Mobile phones have made communication an on-the-go process. Messages, emails, news, videos, status updates, tweets are all just a click away.

There have been several articles talking about opposition to GMO foods as being "anti-science" and raising the issue of the precautionary principle, but in fairness, we have to consider what the role of the precautionary principle is, before we just blow it off as an alarmist parlor trick.

Let's be clear.  ALL questions have scientific legitimacy and some may be well-thought out, while others may be totally off the mark.  This doesn't make them unscientific, it just makes them uninformed.  If a particular view persists after the proper information has been provided, then the individual could be accused of being unscientific, or at least obstinate.

While perusing the news last night, I was horrified to come across a set of articles telling me that less sleep is better for academic performance.  If that’s the case, I should be in tip-top mental shape right now, because the reporting on that study was bad enough to keep me tossing and turning in scientific consternation.

The Heartland Institute and Murdoch Media

The Heartland Institute story broke on February 14th.  The revelation that anti-science bunkum has been funded by corporate dollars was no surprise to those of us who have been investigating these propaganda mills.  Peter H Gleik has confirmed that he was the one who obtained the secret documents.  In confirming that he got them straight from the Heartland Institute he also confirms their authenticity.

In the midst of CNN's non-stop coverage of a deceased singer whose biggest career hit was a cover of a Dolly Parton song, there may be a ray of rational sunlight shining down on a person worthy of our time; an accomplished military veteran, test pilot, Mercury astronaut and Senator named John Glenn.  50 years ago the 40-year-old Marine lieutenant sat atop a building-sized rocket stuffed with solid propellant and left the confines of Earth - backwards.

Nobel Prize winner Jack Szostak recently wrote an opinion piece titled "Attempts to Define Life Do Not Help to Understand the Origin of Life" which was published in the Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics. (open access, so you can read it free of charge)
 
The view he expressed was given respectful coverage by Carl Zimmer in his widely publicised article "Can Science Define Life in Three Words", the only blemish from the usually perceptive Zimmer in an otherwise interesting and balanced article.

February 23rd 1987 is a day indelibly imprinted on the minds of everyone interested in astrophysics. At 7:36 GMT that day, now 25 years ago, the big one hit us. There was no escape. For 13 seconds a tsunami of neutrinos, emanating from a giant star eleven billion times more distant than the sun, flooded earth. This wave of neutrinos paled the steady stream of neutrinos reaching us from the sun by a factor of more than ten thousand.

Yet no one noticed.

A nice new search for heavy quarks has been completed by the ATLAS collaboration in 7 TeV proton-proton collisions data collected in 2011. The ideas behind the search are instructive to describe, so I will spend some time trying to do that before I discuss the results and their meaning.

Quarks: properties and decays