Does yoga help with chronic back pain?  Yes it does, but so does stretching.  Either is better than handing people a book, according to the largest U.S. randomized controlled trial of yoga to date. 

In the trial, 228 adults in six cities in western Washington state were randomly assigned to 12 weekly 75-minute classes of either yoga or stretching exercises or a comprehensive self-care book called "The Back Pain Helpbook". Nine in 10 of them were primary-care patients at Group Health Cooperative and participants in the trial typically had moderate, but not severe, back pain and relatively good mental health. Most had been at least somewhat active before the trial started. 

Teens who drink more than five cans fizzy soft drinks per week - less than one per day - are significantly more likely to commit violence or carry weapons, suggests research in Injury Prevention, part of the British Medical Journals.  

South Korea isn't the only place fishermen are worried about losing their squid. According to a recent article in Pakistan's The News, 

This article eliminates the need for the Higgs.

The quaternionic equation of motion of an elementary particle is in fact a continuity equation in which another quaternionic flavor ψʸ of the transporting field ψˣ is coupled with that transporting field via a source term. The coupling factor acts as the mass of the corresponding particle.

This fact comes into the foreground when the Dirac equation is converted from its spinor based form to the much cleaner quaternionic form. After stripping away the matrices and reducing the spinors to a single element, the quaternionic Dirac equation for a free particle runs:

  ∇ψ = m ψ*

or

  ∇*ψ* = m ψ

A derived equation is

  ∇(ψ ψ) = m (ψ ψ*) = 2 m|ψ|²

This morning I read with interest a paper on Physics Today, titled "Communicating the Science of Climate Change", by R. Somerville and S. Hassol. In it, there is a table worth pondering about. Here it is:

Donna Laframboise’s book “The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert: An Expose of the IPCC” is out. Negative reviews on amazon are very helpful. Forget the positive ones; they are seldom useful. Reviews that give the writer a low score are the most revealing. Often, they are witness of an informed person who has spend time on a charitable reading but who found the work nevertheless lacking for good reasons. In this case however, the negative reviews are lightning fast reactions of well known people (Scott A. Mandia, Peter Gleick) who have obviously not read the book before writing their “review”.

So what is the deal with this 'cosmic speed limit'? Is it really unthinkable that neutrinos move faster than light? 

October is passing and the neutrino saga continues to make headlines here and there, but I know that the excitement is bound to slowly dampen, as the preprint claiming superluminal speeds ages in the Arxiv without being sent to a scientific magazine.

The evolution of the human brain is the topic of a lot of research. This shouldn’t be surprising since it is so well-developed in human beings, and, as many believe, it is one of the main traits that sets us apart from our close evolutionary relatives. The seat of consciousness, culture, science, technology, and so on, exerts a great desire upon people to understand it, and to understand how it could have evolved. In order to study this question, a new study, published in PLoS Biology, investigated the occurrence and activity of evolutionary young genes in human brain development.

The researchers, from the University of Chicago, grouped their findings into four lines of evidence:

Social networks on the internet have grown greatly in the past few years. None more than the near ubiquitous Facebook, with over 800 million active users, half of which log in on any given day. Yet, there is great variability in the size of the online social networks of individual people. Is this correlated with the real-world networks of people? Does this have a neural basis? It are exactly these questions that were investigated in a new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

By collecting MRI scans of 125 healthy volunteers (independently replicating the experiments in a second dataset of 40 people) and having these people fill in a questionnaire, the researchers that authored the study had a look at both aforementioned questions.