Researchers say they have identified a genetic variation in people with type 2 diabetes that affects how the body's muscle cells respond to the hormone insulin.

Previous studies have identified several genetic variations in people with type 2 diabetes that affect how insulin is produced in the pancreas. Today's study shows for the first time a genetic variation that seems to impair the ability of the body's muscle cells to use insulin to help them make energy.

Until recently, I admired the autism parent community from afar. Like the parents who awakened and changed the schizophrenia treatment world, parents of autistic children have moved both treatment and public opinion about the disorder almost 180 degrees from where it had been.

They did it fairly quickly, too: bringing autism from an obscure and stigmatized issue to a topic discussed openly in less than a generation.

I’ve watched with wonder as the autism world has developed and changed. While public knowledge, research funding, and public services aren’t adequate, they’ve come so far.

I, personally, have very little background in physics compared to most other scientists. I am fairly young, so I suppose that is to be expected. I still can't help but be perplexed with what seems to me as over-complicating the system. These are just my thoughts on the matter. Feel free to correct any errors. I'll blame my ineptitude in the field and my youth.

Are DNA mutations random or purposeful?

For most of the last century archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists and even geneticists have argued about who the ancestors of Europeans living today were.

People lived in Europe before and after the last big ice age and managed to survive by hunting and gathering and farming spread into Europe from the Near East over the last 9,000 years, which boosted the amount of food that could be produced by as much as 100-fold. But the extent to which modern Europeans are descended from either of those two groups has eluded scientists.

ESA's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope has uncovered the first close-up of a white dwarf star, circling a companion star, that could explode into a particular kind of supernova.

Well, in a few million years.

Astronomers use these supernovae as beacons to measure cosmic distances and could one day help us understand the expansion of the Universe.   They've been on the trail of this particular mystery object since 1997 when they discovered that something was giving off X-rays near the bright star HD49798. Now the mysterious object has been tracked along its orbit and observation has shown it to be a white dwarf, the dead heart of a star, shining X-rays into space.  
 

One of the biggest axioms of management is “what cannot be measured cannot be managed”.

Unfortunately this is a truism that effects scientists as much as the rest of the world.  The latest trend in hiring committees, tenure review, promotions, etc., is to use statistics such as the H’ Index to quantify scientific productivity.  This sounds good and reasonable, but unfortunately the main source used for this is the ISI Web of Science by Thomson-Rueters.  This database is incomplete to say the least and misses many legitimate publications entirely.

It is obvious that life is filled with choices and we often go to great lengths to explore different possible outcomes or scenarios when attempting to make decisions.  However what is choice and how does it relate to free will?

It would seem that choices may be divided up into several categories, but in particular we have those that are:

1.  Direct choices, or command decisions where we intentionally make a determination about a particular outcome, perhaps after weighing options.

A few days ago I produced a summary of a poster I presented at Physics in Collisions this week, which dealt with the searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson that CMS will undertake, and the results it can obtain in a scenario when a certain amount of data is collected at the full design energy of the LHC.

Here, instead, I wish to summarize the other poster I presented at the same venue, which concerned the combination of the most sensitive search channels, the sensitivity of CMS with a given amount of data, and the derating of its significance reach or observation power entailed by the running of LHC at a smaller-than-design beam energy. But I will do this only as a way of introducing a more interesting discussion, as you will see below.

Flat-panel televisions are nothing new.   I think even my father has one in his toolshed by now.  But legitimate flat-panel loudspeakers are harder to come by.    

There are single-speaker surround sound systems, and those are admirable, but speakers, unlike today's televisions, require a great deal of old-fashioned physics, analog-style, because that's how sound reaches our ears - so flat panel ones, though a terrific concept in size, haven't been great in practice.   

Being a skeptic is a rather lonely art. People often confuse you for a cynic, and I’m not using either term in the classical philosophical sense, of course.