2007 OR10, nicknamed Snow White by the graduate student who discovered it because it would presumably be white due to breaking off from icy fellow dwarf planet Haumea, turned out to be red.
Well, it still turned out to be ice also but the surprise is it may have methane slowly dissipating into space, which means it may have once had an atmosphere.
A study on activity in a the parahippocampal cortex (PHC) found people will remember a visual scene when the brain is more active.
The PHC, which has previously been linked to recollection of visual scenes, wraps around the hippocampus, a part of the brain critical for memory formation. However, this NeuroImage study is the first to investigate how PHC activity before a scene was presented would affect how well the scene was remembered.
Former Ohio State head football coach Jim Tressel seemed to be a role model for achieving on-field success with a high level of character. Two-time National Coach of the Year, Larry Coker and former player Randy Shannon also were thought to provide moral leadership while winning national championships during their tenure as head coaches for the University of Miami.
Yet, both storied football programs now find themselves in the middle of NCAA investigations for major rule violations. Reports of players trading memorabilia for cash or discounts, receiving cash and “entertainment” from boosters, and at least one of these coaches admitting to lying about their knowledge of these events has triggered a frenzy of discussion on what’s wrong with college athletics.
Much awaited, the results of searches for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider
have been released by the ATLAS collaboration, and are being shown at the Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbay, India. I will provide here just the main results, with little commentary - I wish to let the cake cool down a bit before discussing the subject in detail, examining the various inputs.
'Forgiveness is not something you do for others, nor does forgiving mean the offending behaviour is acceptable. It is something you do for yourself! By forgiving, you choose not to carry the burden of hate'Paul Bretherton
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Other Suns, Other Colors
It seems to be a law of universal application that if a task is boring and low paid, it should be given to a woman. Many of the women given such tasks in the past performed them with such skill and dedication that their work has become part of the strong foundations of modern science. It seems to me to be a matter of great shame that many people today do not know the names of these women.
In my
latest instantiation of the "Guess the plot" series I offered a clipped part of a graph showing branching fractions of the Higgs boson. One of the readers made a comment which I was proud to read, since it showed that interested readers of this blog with no specialized education in particle physics can get to know quite a lot about the matter. I answered there more extensively than I do on average, and then I thought that the answer could be of some use to others to whom the thread had fallen out of the horizon. So I am recycling it here.
Warning: Snark Attack Ahead
So you've been in the skeptic movement for a bit, dipped your toes in the waters, so to speak, and gone looking for the woonuts so as to have a blast pointing out their every fallacy and poorly thought out idea. Now what? You wanna upgrade your game some, show off your intellectual superiority and really go to town. Why limit yourself to just garden variety woo like homeopathy? If you read Stephen Law's new book Believing Bullshit, you'll be armed with a ton of great information which you can use to alienate 70% of Americans: those who believe in God.
The fossils of 3.4-billion-year-old microbes that used sulfur compounds for energy have been found in rocks from Western Australia, reports a paper published in Nature Geoscience.
David Wacey, Martin Brasier and colleagues analyzed microstructures present in rocks from the Strelley Pool Formation in Western Australia, and determined that they were the fossils of ancient microbes. The fossils were associated with tiny crystals of pyrite, a mineral composed of iron and sulfur. The isotopic composition of the sulfur suggests that the pyrite was formed as a by-product of cellular metabolism based on sulphate and sulfur.
At Science 2.0 we are not big fans of being clever just for the sake of being clever - we were smart kids and there are smart kids today and the belief by government funding agencies that STEM outreach needs to be cartoons and video games and mascots is a little patronizing to intelligent young people.
So young people do not need to be talked down to but some things are just cool and everyone likes cool - magic goggles and interactive maps are just that.
Gaetano Ling, an Imperial College London postgraduate, has developed interactive tools to make museums and galleries a little less 'dry' for children, including magic goggles, a Harry Potter style map and brushes that make sounds.
