Some genes appear to have an effect on lifespan. This shouldn’t be too surprising news. But now, a research team from Stanford has shown that there are epigenetic effects on longevity as well. Using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a beloved model organism in aging research, they have shown that some changes in chromatin states in a parental generation can affect the lifespan of their descendants.

A new photo of a nearby star and its orbiting companion shows the planet has a temperature like a hot summer day in Arizona.

If you're a man, no matter how funny you are, your wife thinks you are not.  Well, men, science is giving you the last laugh.

Sort of. Men are funnier than women, though mostly to other men, according to a psychology study from the University of California San Diego.  Men edged out women by 0.11 points out of a theoretically possible perfect score of 5.0, while about 90 percent of both male and female study participants agreed with the stereotype that men are funnier.

Freedom To Cheat?

Do the laws and constitutional safeguards which guarantee freedom of speech grant a freedom to cheat?  According to a basic principle of common law, freedom of speech ends where cheating begins.

Xavier Alvarez of Pomona, California has falsely claimed amongst other things: “I’m a retired Marine of 25 years.  I retired in the year 2001.  Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor."  That last statement was in direct contravention of the Stolen Valor Act, 2005, a federal law.  Alvarez has challenged that Act as imposing an unconstitutional limit upon freedom of speech.  The matter is to be determined by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a few short hours, the World Series will begin between the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals.  In the midst of all the talk of how offense is winning games this year (team Earned Run Average by starters in the post-season is over 5) and the strategic match-ups, there will be little attention paid to the belief engines in the skulls of individual players; their brains.

Earlier this year, a DNA computer was reported that could calculate square roots. A little later, a neural network was constructed out of ‘the stuff of life’. These advances strongly hinted at the possibility of using biochemicals in order to do computational operations. Now, a new study, published in Nature Communications, presents another step towards this goal.

Quick, which British cell phone do you use?   No?  Okay, which French microprocessor is in your PC?  No again?

America leads the world in innovation, the legacy of historical laissez-faire approaches to fixing big problems using the private sector.  Obviously that is different now, even in science, where Pres. Obama made good on his promise to add more science to his cabinet but erroneously thought all of science was composed of progressive academics who think more taxpayer spending is the only way science gets done, leading to the Solyndra boondoggle and more to follow.

A study by ICARUS re-investigated their neutrino experiments based on the article by Cohen and Glashow, who showed that superluminal neutrinos in standard model physics lose energy through neutral-current weak-interactions, which is somewhat like Cherenkov radiation. Given a neutrino moving faster than light a given distance D through a standard background, one can compute the rate of usually expected energy lost through that radiation. The neutrinos are detected via so called ‘charged-current interactions’, which turn them into muons, 104 of which ICARUS detected.

The saga of the superluminal neutrinos took a dramatic turn today, with the publication of a very simple yet definitive study by ICARUS, another neutrino experiment at the Gran Sasso Laboratories, who has looked at the neutrinos shot from CERN since 2010.

The sixth Snarky Puzzle Answers leads off with the story of a minor controversy.

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Two related Snarky Puzzles
September 20, "Deriving the Maxwell Source Equations Using Quaternions (2/5)"