A research team has announced discovery of molecular oxygen ions (O2+) in the upper  atmosphere of Dione, one of the 62 known moons orbiting Saturn. 

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” studies have become a field provided with copious Templeton funding. Yale recently had the 2011 WITA (Why is there Anything?) conference (see their blog), which was funded by the Templeton and Yale Divinity School. Rutgers sports the Rutgers Templeton Project in Philosophy of Cosmology, and they now have a blog where they ask a list of questions ending in a grand finale with lucky number 13 being the ‘WITA question ’ in its better known version:

 

I would like you to consider carefully the following comments made by Gerhard Adam in the discussion that followed a recent article on artificial intelligence.

Gerhard’s contribution is a lesson in the benefits of disciplined logical thought. Please read on:

“Intelligence" didn't just "wake up" one day. Its presence is visible from microbes up to the highest organisms. The notion that if you just cobble together enough pieces and intelligence will emerge is simply magical thinking.”

And in response to another comment; “It just seems that intelligence is being viewed as some arbitrary "add-on" to biology. Like it's some feature that is "out there" and has nothing to do with the organism in question.”

Part guidebook, part workbook, Ariel's book for neurotypical partners is sure to be considered a boon for spouses who know almost nothing about Asperger's Syndrome. Written by  Cindy Ariel, a licensed psychologist who provides therapy for a variety of issues, including relationships, it is an easy-to-read guide to understanding Asperger's Syndrome and why partners on the spectrum behave in ways that may be hard for those unfamiliar with the syndrome to understand.

Introduction

It is a mathematical fact that both the real numbers and the rational numbers contain an infinite amount of elements. It is possible to devise a procedure that assigns a label containing a different natural number to every rational number. This is not possible for the real numbers. Technically this means that the set of real numbers has a higher cardinality than the set of rational numbers. In simple words it means that there are far more real numbers than there are rational numbers. Still both sets can densely cover a selected continuum, such as a line. However, the rational numbers leave open places,because infinite many real numbers fit between each pair of rational numbers.

Quantum physics is close to the ultimate foundation of everything, but not because it is about little things. Quantum physics is not about little things; a radio-wave photon can be hundreds of meters long (in terms of wave length as well as coherence length). Physics is fundamentally the question of what is possible at all. With quantum mechanics, physics arrived at a point where we either face up to uncomfortable facts or refuse to follow science any further. Quantum physics is not important to consciousness because of some quantum magic in the brain that switches the light on, but because physics is fundamentally about all that is possibly possible for consciousness to be conscious about – a consistent description of all phenomena, telling us what is possible.

If you want to irritate a lot of people at once, write an article about evolutionary psychology. Publishing such an article will invariably provoke a firestorm of denunciations and criticisms. Given the vehemence of these attacks, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that the scientific basis for evolutionary psychology (or “evpsy” as it is sometimes abbreviated) was akin to tarot cards or bloodletting. Yet the basic premise of evpsy—that some aspects of the human brain and behavior were subject to evolutionary pressures—seems to be scientifically sound.

“Sound generated during eating of apples plays important role in its texture evaluation by consumers.”

Just a few days ago the CDF collaboration announced their new measurement of the W boson mass, with a considerable improvement over the precision of the current world average for that quantity. Now DZERO, the competitor experiment, has also published their own new measurement, which is based on a statistics of 4.3 inverse femtobarns - twice as many data as the ones used by CDF.

Forget mitigation and rationing, it is not the way cultures and progress work.  The long-term solution is obviously to engage in basic research and come up with effective clean energy but also to create fewer emissions while development is in progress.

America never migrated to nuclear energy the way the French did so today up to 75 percent of electricity used in the United States is instead produced by coal-burning power plants and that means carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and increased risk of global warming. To reduce the impact of current power generation, researchers are searching for porous materials to filter out the CO2 generated by those plants before it reaches the atmosphere, a process commonly known as carbon capture.