"Organic" food and products is a $29 billion big business and its marketing power is very strong: studies have shown that this simple label can lead us to think that a food is healthier, what is known as the 'health halo effect'.  Marketing attempts to penalize conventional food would also capitalize on that bias, making genetically modified food seem less healthy.  

A new paper by Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab out to to determine if an organic label can influence much more than health views: they found hat perceptions of taste, calories and value can be significantly altered when a food is labeled "organic". And certain people are more susceptible to 'health halo' marketing.

Men with Lynch syndrome, an inherited genetic condition linked to a higher risk of several types of cancer, face a higher lifetime risk of developing prostate cancer and appear to develop the disease at an earlier age, according to a new study.

People with Lynch syndrome have up to 80 percent lifetime risk of colorectal cancer and are also more likely to develop endometrial, gastric, ovarian, urinary tract, pancreatic and brain tumors. Overall, about 1 in 440 people are carriers for the genetic mutation, making it one of the most common inherited cancer conditions.

An experiment using microvesicles generated from mesenchymal bone marrow cells to treat cancer, neurological researchers at Henry Ford Hospital have discovered a novel approach for treatment of tumor.

Specifically, the research team found that introducing genetic material produced by mesenchymal bone marrow cells significantly reduced a particularly resistant form of malignant brain tumor in living lab rats.

This is a fairly new problem, being traced back to as recently as 2003. However, it also has the kind of counter-intuitive solution that has made it a favourite on mathematical websites and forums. In its various retellings, it sometimes suffers from a lack of stringent conditions that result in rather imaginative solutions; perfectly legitimate solutions within the parameters set but not always the ‘classic’ one. If you’ve seen this before, then speed-read to the end where we take the side of the jailer!

The problem

What looks like a tantalizing signal of the rare two-muon decay of the Higgs boson has been evidenced in an analysis of 2011+2012 data just sent to PRL by the CMS collaboration. This analysis targeted supersymmetric neutral Higgs bosons, whose decay to muon pairs is enhanced for some values of the SUSY parameters, but was not expecting to see any signal in the 25 inverse femtobarns of collisions that the CMS experiment has so far collected.

So you want to be in the energy biz. Do you have what it takes? It’s April Fools' Day--- test your energy IQ and find out where you belong in the dynamic energy sector.

Prefabricated Housing
1) Is prefabricated housing cheaper and/or greener than stud built construction?
2) Did a Chinese developer build a prefabricated 30 story hotel in 15 days?

Oil Pipelines
3) Canada has a glut of oil and gives the United States bargain pricing. So, why does the United States buy oil from Venezuela?
4) For the Keystone XL Pipeline, what does the XL stand for? Hint, don’t confuse pipelines with men’s boxer shorts.

Globally existential threats due to ‘overpopulation momentum’ together with the top-heavy age structure leave by now no alternative to radical technological adaptation for anything that wants to survive 'long term'.  It is strictly too late to ‘go green’ except via a novel take on what constitutes ‘green’, including synthetic biology.  Hyped for a long time, nanoscience is still largely in its pioneering phase.  However, it matures as we speak and soon, as it becomes true nanotechnology, it will leave the hype far behind.

When I was a kid, I would happily play around with both words and numbers – I still do. Both have their aesthetic appeal. Whether it is constructing and deconstructing mathematical puzzles or cryptic crosswords, they appear as small artefacts that reveal a grander architecture. Combine this with the serendipity of the internet, and Pi Day was just a hop, skip and jump away from Richard Feynman and pilish poetry.

Cross-disciplinary  academic progress in vagueness has recently been augmented  with a paper from Prof. PhDr. Jarmila Tárnyiková CSc. at Palacký University, in Olomouc, Czech Republic.

The professor has authored one of the very few papers to examine and compare English and Czech Non-numerical Vague Quantifiers (also known as Vague Non-numerical Quantifiers – VnQs).
Some examples from the paper :

• Piles of
• Oodles of
• Mountains of
• A Smidgen of
• A Dash of
• A Pinch of