Fabrizio Tamburini (left) is an old friend - I have known him since 1976, when we both used to attend the gatherings of the newborn Associazione Astrofili Veneziani, at the Lido of Venice. The love for astronomy had brought us together, but we took different paths in our scientific activities. Fabrizio remained maybe more faithful to his old love for the universe, and is now a well-known and respected astrophysicist, who studies original ideas in the physics of photon propagation and more. I repeatedly invited him to write about his research here, but so far he has not accepted, mainly for lack of time... But I am sure he will soon.

Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 9th is Nautilus Night.

500 million years ago, at the time of the Cambrian Explosion, there was no life on land. The ocean held plenty of trilobites and other animals, but  they all lived on the seafloor--almost nobody swam freely in the water. Plectronocerus, the first fossil cephalopod, evolved and crawled on the floor just like everyone else.

I'm back, after an extended hiatus due to my big move to Chicago to begin grad school.  I’ve been pummeled by work for the past month, so I’ll keep this one short and sweet.

In academia, the many, many advancements of women are not enough and so they are increasingly forced to massage statistics to make it look like they are oppressed, underpaid, blocked out of the hard sciences, etc.

In reality, women have it pretty good. Maybe even great. Men, as a special interest group, basically stink at being a special interest group because they were historically always the interest group, no 'special' needed.

The observations of faster than light neutrinos have stirred up much debate, but the most important is not pointed out. Seen in a wider context, the affair sheds yet again light on the rapid decay of the academic science machinery, a social construct where the quest for truth has given way to career gaming as well as plain political and monetary interests.

 

A meta-analysis has provided support to the previously suggested idea that a certain gene's variation is linked to suicidal behavior. The gene in question is the one that codes for BDNF (or brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a protein that performs the role of growth factor in nervous system development. After comparing 11 studies and adding data they had gathered themselves (resulting in a total of 3352 people, of whom 1202 had a history of suicidal behavior), the authors were able to confirm that people with the methionine (see figure 1) variation of the gene ran a higher risk of exhibiting suicidal behavior than those with the valine (see figure 1) variation.

   

8,000 years ago, which is basically yesterday in geological time, a now-vanished glacial lake covered a huge expanse of today's Canadian prairie and the rich farmland in the Red River Valley. As big as Hudson Bay, the lake was fed by melting glaciers as they receded at the end of the last ice age. At its largest, Glacial Lake Agassiz, as it is known, covered most of the Canadian province of Manitoba, plus a good part of western Ontario and the Minnesota-North Dakota border.

You can thank the stretching of continents and the oceans that filled those newly created basins for the Earth we know today.  Rifting is one of the fundamental geological forces that have shaped our planet. But rifting involves areas deep below the Earth's surface so scientists have been unable to understand fully how it occurs.

Using one of the most sensitive neutrino detectors on the planet, the Borexino instrument, an international team are measuring the flow of solar neutrinos reaching Earth more precisely than ever before. 

Canola, a specific edible type of rapeseed developed in the 1970s, contains about 40 percent oil and became popular as a substitute for traditional cooking oils. The name is derived as “Can” (for Canada) and “ola” (for oil low acid) and Canola oil is the lowest in saturated fats of all commonly used oils.  While much is imported, North Dakota leads the U.S. in canola, approximately 92 percent of domestic production.