If you ask Europeans about the metric system, they declare America should get with the program because it is more popular. When it comes to speaking English, however, barely a third of the EU's 500 million citizens speak English yet that is how the business of the EU's 27 member countries is conducted.  No one is expected to speak 23 different languages.

A study of 64,659 women, recently published in the journal Academic Radiology, found that while 1,246 of these women were at high enough breast cancer risk to recommend additional screening with MRI, only 173 of these women returned to the clinic within a year for the additional screening.

“It’s hard to tell where, exactly, is the disconnect,” says Deborah Glueck, PhD, investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and associate professor of biostatistics and informatics at the Colorado School of Public Health, the paper’s senior author.

The Wall Street Journal published an excellent case study in denialism on Friday, in the form of a letter from sixteen scientists seeking to perpetuate gridlock in climate policy.  While nothing they have to say raises any scientific issues about climate change, the letter is interesting to peruse simply to see what arguments they use, and what that says about their motivations.

The letter uses several denialist tactics, including,
1) Cherry-picked examples placed out of context,
2) Unsupported claims
3) Irrelevant distractions
4) Implications of conspiracy, and
5) Self-portrayal as stubborn heroes fighting against the odds.

Over 30 percent of all terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2008 occurred in just five metropolitan U.S. counties, according to a report published today by researchers in the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland and the University of Massachusetts-Boston.  So what areas should you avoid, if you play the odds?

Last week I spent a few interesting days in the pleasant winter setting of Engelberg, a mountain location in the Swiss alps. There I attended the CHIPP 2012 winter school, an event organized by Vincenzo Chiochia  from University of Zurich and Gabriella Pazstor from University of Geneva. They invited me to give a three-hour mini-course in Statistics for data analysis in High-Energy Physics, something which was a new experience for me. It took me the best part of the last couple of months to get prepared, but I was glad I did. In the end, the material I put together could have been used profitfully for five or six hours of lecture, but by skipping some of the topics I could get to the end without using a silly speed.

Conventional wisdom holds you're born with perfect pitch or you're not. The conventional wisdom is wrong. Here's how to train perfect pitch.

For my book Brain Trust, I interviewed Diana Deutsch, University of California San Diego professor and president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and she said the trick is pairing pitch with meaning -- early!

Most of the time, fishermen fish for one particular creature--be it tuna, sardines, or shrimp. Unfortunately, species tend to exist in a commingled muddle called ecology, and it's often difficult to separate them with fishing gear.

On the east coast of the US, longfin squid are caught with trawl nets. When dragged through the water, trawl nets also collects things which are not squid, called bycatch. And although the population of longfin squid seems to be reasonably healthy, some of these bycatch species are not doing so well.

The news of the world are filled again with anti-Chinese propaganda. I am appalled at how simplistic anti-Chinese bickering is allowed to be, because it hides the real problems and dangers of China, and there are also positive aspects, like that China has done much for secularism and science.

Franz Hörmann, professor at the Vienna University for Economics (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien), distinguishes between Expert-Knowledge (Fachwissen) and Experience-Knowledge (Erlebniswissen). The latter rests on memories formed by personal involvement. He has not personally experienced the Nazi-Jew holocaust; he has no Experience-Knowledge of it. He is not an expert on history, so he claims no Expert-Knowledge on the holocaust either. Nice – somebody who is humble. Hörmann states that: