Michael Massing at The NY Review of Books weighs in on the future of news organizations in the era of blogs:

A couple of months ago I wrote here about the first observation of a process called "diboson production", a quite rare occurrence in hadronic collisions: for the first time, the CDF collaboration could observe that rare process in events containing hadronic jets, which are usually riddled by enormous backgrounds.

Because I have played guitar some 30 years, I have always been interested in guitar construction.   I have multiple guitars because they all have different tones and are used for different things - that doesn't always make sense to people because a guitar is a guitar but I am not even in the top 50,000 guitarists obsessed with tone.    

Eric Johnson, most famous for "Cliffs of Dover"(1) says he can hear a difference in the batteries he uses in his gear - and I believe him.  There are too many instances of elite (yeah, I used that word) people doing extraordinary things to pass it off as placebo effect.

GLASGOW, August 13 /PRNewswire/ -- In the future social sites will cease to become a place on the internet and start becoming the internet itself.

That's the key conclusion from an authoritative industry report, End of the beginning for social media, published by social media agency Yomego.

The report (http://www.yomego.com/insight) suggests that the momentum behind social media is unlikely to slow down anytime soon and points to the convergence of critical factors creating a pivotal moment for the online phenomenon.

According to Steve Richards, Yomego managing director, the end of the beginning is nigh - and more importantly the future of social media is starting to take shape.

He explains:

LONDON, August 13 /PRNewswire/ --

- Survey Sheds Light on Patients' Concerns About Life-Threatening Complications

As the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes continues to rise significantly, with over 125,000 new cases diagnosed a year(1), new survey results show that those affected are now realising the wider implications of the condition and the fear associated with its complications. While people increasingly recognise that the condition is strongly linked to lifestyle factors such as a poor diet and lack of physical activity, the results highlight that it is not just those already diagnosed who could be affected, but that loved ones could also be impacted by the complications.

Cancer impacts millions of lives for the worse every year. Despite this difficult reality, it appears that we are becoming increasing successful in our efforts to stem the tide of patients who fall victim as time goes on.

According to a recently published report in the journal Cancer Research, cancer mortality rates have been steadily dropping over the last three decades.

“Our efforts against cancer, including prevention, early detection and better treatment, have resulted in profound gains, but thesegains are often unappreciated by the public due to the way the data are usually reported," said Eric Kort, M.D., one of the study’s authors and former research scientist at Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Diesel and gasoline fuel sources both bring unique assets and liabilities to powering internal combustion engines. But what if an engine could be programmed to harvest the best properties of both fuel sources at once, on the fly, by blending the fuels within the combustion chamber?

Such an engine just might be possible thanks to the University of Wisconsin-Madison engine research group headed by Rolf Reitz. The research team is developing a diesel engine that produces significantly lower pollutant emissions than conventional engines, with an average of 20 percent greater fuel efficiency as well. 

Researchers who want to include surgeries in studies have to make first contact through non-medical administration staff who act as roadblocks, says a group of researchers whose planned leg ulceration study was hamstrung by a physician recruitment rate of 2% and who have published the reasons why so many surgeons did not participate.

The qualitative information, featured in the open access journal BMC Medical Research Methodology, may be of use to those designing trials of their own.  Given the current health care debate in America, another layer of bureaucracy and the impact on research studies is one facet of the discussion that has been least considered. 
 

Early modern humans living on the southern Africa coast employed pyrotechnology, the controlled use of fire, 72,000 years ago,  to increase the quality and efficiency of their stone tool manufacturing process, according to a report in Science.

The international team of researchers deduces that "this technology required a novel association between fire, its heat, and a structural change in stone with consequent flaking benefits." Further, they say their findings ignite the notion of complex cognition in early man.

If their findings hold up, it could mean humans' ability to solve complex problems may have occurred at the same time their modern genetic lineage appeared, rather than developing later as has been widely speculated.

A real life Alice In Wonderland story is a little closer to reality now that researchers in China have created the first tunable electromagnetic gateway.

In a new paper,  researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Fudan University in Shanghai have described the concept of a "a gateway that can block electromagnetic waves but that allows the passage of other entities" like a "'hidden portal' as mentioned in fictions."

The gateway uses transformation optics and an amplified scattering effect from an arrangement of ferrite materials called single-crystal yttrium-iron-garnet that force light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation in complicated directions to create a hidden portal.