The new PDG - a full-size copy of the glorious "Review of Particle Properties"- is on my desk since its arrival a few weeks ago, but only today did I get some time to browse it.

It is always awesome to observe how much information is contained in it. It is 1526 pages long, and I wonder how many typos and mistakes are contained in the data-thick pages... Probably much fewer than an ordinary book. Some of the review articles are of exceptionally good quality, because they have been passed from hand to hand in the last few dozen years, and constantly improved. If you want an example, for instance, go to the "Statistics" section - you will find a lot of new material which, along with the old one, still meets the highest standards.

While every study ever done shows that people who consume fewer calories than they burn will lose weight, it is as well known that some people cannot or will not eat less or exercise. For those people, laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding – lap banding – is a safe and effective long-term strategy for managing their obesity, according to the findings of 15-year follow-up study of patients treated in Australia. 

The follow-up study found a significant number of lap band patients maintained an average weight loss of 26 kilograms for more than a decade after their procedure.

In 2005, a decade and a half of environmental lobbying convinced President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress that corn ethanol was a promising fossil fuel substitute which would reduce both American dependence on foreign oil and greenhouse gas emissions. The 2005 energy bill mandated that 4 billion gallons of renewable fuel be added to the gasoline supply in 2006. That rose to 4.7 billion gallons in 2007 and 7.5 billion in 2012, to the delight of corn farmers, activists and almost no one else.

Pregnant women who were vaccinated against pandemic influenza in 2009 were not at increased risk of experiencing fetal death, though pregnant women who contracted influenza had an increased risk of fetal death. 

During the swine influenza pandemic of that year, there were anecdotal reports of miscarriages and stillbirths occurring shortly after vaccination, so the Norwegian Institute of Public Health initiated a study to investigate if there was an association between pandemic influenza vaccination and the fetal deaths. 

About 200 million people across 75 of the poorest countries in the world are now infected by the blood parasite Schistosoma haematobium (S. haematobium). The infection causes severe urogenital disease, but also causes bladder cancer in a number of patients and why this occurs is not clear.

While the developed world gets all of the attention for obesity, the developing world is only different in one sense; they retain more severely undernourished people even while obese and overweight people in those countries are gaining weight.

Unless people get obese equally, that growing divide may force governments in the developing world to simultaneously care for starving people while treating health problems associated with obesity, including diabetes and heart disease.

If you are going to use 'entanglement' to teleport quantum information on a practical scale, it needs to be worked out how entanglement could be 'recycled' to increase the efficiency of these connections.

Writing in 
Physical Review Letters , a group has done just that - mathematically. They have
also devised a generalized form of teleportation, which allows for a wide variety of potential applications in quantum physics.

There is currently a Twitter survey going on to establish a list of favorite philosophers of all time, organized by Oxford University Press.

I don’t know the results yet, but my entries would have to be David Hume (1st prize), Aristotle (2nd) and Bertrand Russell (3rd).

For two decades, carbon dioxide was touted as the silver bullet for halting climate change.  What about methane, what about NO2, and what about soot?

Soot, that black carbon that causes smoggy skies (and has sent Beijing's Pollution Index right off the charts) is the number two contributor to global warming, second to carbon dioxide, according to a four-year assessment by an international panel that is not the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

The new study concludes that black carbon, the soot particles in smoke and smog, contributes about twice as much to global warming as previously estimated by the 2007 IPCC report.

Want concerns about transmission of disease and antibiotic resistance to get attention?  Show that pretty tropical fish are at risk.

The $15 billion ornamental fish industry has sounded the alarm about antibiotic resistance because of concerns that treatments for fish diseases may not work when needed – and creating yet another mechanism for exposing humans to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The risk to humans is minor unless they frequently work with fish or have compromised immune systems, researchers said, but more serious is the risk to this industry, which has grown significantly in recent years, and is now a $900 million annual business just in the United States.