A recent article suggests that our fear of snakes is largely genetic because of its apparently uniform nature across all strata of people and that it was likely caused due to predation of our ancestors.

As evidence of this, the author interviewed 120 of the Agta Negrito people, a hunter-gatherer group in the Phillipines, and noted that 16 of the individuals had been attacked by giant pythons, while two had been attacked twice.  In addition, individuals reported six cases of fatal snake attacks over a 39 year period (1934 - 1973).  While it's not clear from the article, the snakes may not necessarily have fared much better, since they were also predated upon by humans. 

Firm evidence for the discovery of a Higgs particle has now been officially announced. This means the "Higgs ether" exists. But did not Einstein tell us that there is no ether? Poor Albert is getting punched hard these days. We just survived the faster than light neutrino hysteria, and now this.

Updates:

- Philip Gibbs does a great job, as always, at combining -albeit approximately- the results of different experiments in the Higgs search. He now has even a full combination of LEP II + Tevatron + CMS + ATLAS, where the signal strength, in SM units, fits absolutely bang on for a Higgs mass of about 125 GeV. Please see his article at the link above; but I cannot resist from stealing his most intriguing picture (sorry Phil!):

Is there still a gender gap in math?  There is if you are selling cultural drama but in actuality, not so much.  Complaints aside, the No Child Left Behind program accomplished its mission; by focusing on the same sort of educational system other countries use that allowed them to beat American kids in standardized tests - namely, teaching to the test - American children performed better in each international test and for the first time in history boys and girls achieved math parity.  That's a win.

But perceptions die hard - some people still insist Republicans are more anti-science than Democrats, for example, and some (not surprisingly the same people) use words like 'dismal' and 'failure' about American girls and math.  

  After recent claims by Henry Stapp, I'd like to write about his violations of the Born Rule. For those who don't know quantum mechanics the laws come in two parts. First Unitary Evoluation. We start a set of amplitudes for a how likely each of a set possible occurances are, and write it as a column vector, describe a physical processes as unitary matrix that multiplies this vector, resulting in a output vector again describing how likely each set of outcome.

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The Born rule is that the probability of observing a particular outcome  happening is

Xmas time is here again. Unlike many people I have no particular aversion to the holiday season. I don’t have too many emotional scars from Christmases past. Getting presents was always fun, I liked the lights on our tree, even stringing popcorn, and these days I try to keep awkward gatherings to a minimum. For me it breaks up the endless round of quotidian drudgery in a relatively pleasant way. But this year I can’t help viewing the whole spectacle through the eyes of human evolution and psychology. No matter how you might feel about the holiday season personally, it’s interesting to think about what may be behind all the crazy traditions: a little bit of the science behind the season. 

BMC Neurology has published the results of the HYPNOS I clinical trial demonstrating the sedative action of the Cefaly medical device (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22035386).

The results show, in a statistically highly significant manner using four clinical measurement methods, a pronounced reduction in vigilance induced by the action of the Cefaly(R) Hypnos medical device, by comparison to a placebo.

This sedative action on the central nervous system is observed after application for 12 minutes in 83% of individuals whose mean increase in tiredness was of 73%.

I received the text  below from Jim Markovitch, and decided it was fun enough to make a guest post entry with it. Markovitch worked for the world's largest supplier of corporate credit information, where he designed and implemented algorithms to estimate the probability of the equivalence, for credit purposes, of two name/address records. More recently he has adapted these algorithms to help identify unusually efficient approximations of fundamental constants. Let us see what this is about - TD

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Well over a year ago, someone asked for a response to the following quote from Ayn Rand.  I suspect this was largely due to the idea that such a view of individualism would be difficult to refute and consequently establish its legitimacy.  So, here's the quote:

The most abundant and important molecules in all living organisms are proteins; after all they manage to participate in every single one of life’s essential reactions. So it is easy to see why scientists have been making such a fuss trying to learn how to synthesise them in laboratory as this would provide them with a tool of extraordinary potential. Unfortunately, this has not proved easy.