There is no question that increased use of natural gas has been good for the atmosphere - energy CO2 emissions are down to early 1990s levels in America and coal is at early 1980s levels of emissions, just like we all said we wanted.

Enhanced extraction methods like hydraulic fracturing - fracking - have also been good for the local economies in places like Pennsylvania. But as with any industry, Not In My Backyard (NIMBYism) occurs in residents of Pennsylvania just like it does yacht owners in Massachusetts. 

Brown and white fat cells in a living organism can be converted from one cell type to the other, according to a study using mice as a model organism.

ATLAS has just produced a very nice new study of jet production in Z-boson events. I will describe a sample graph below, but before I do I find it useful to explain to the less knowledgeable among you what a hadronic jet is, just in case you've been away during the last forty years.

Hadronic Jets: what are they ?

A drug developed by Gilead Sciences and tested in an animal model at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio suppresses hepatitis B virus infection by stimulating the immune system and inducing loss of infected cells.  

Cancer cells that can break out of a tumor and invade other organs are more aggressive and nimble than nonmalignant cells. Such cells exert greater force on their environment and can more easily maneuver small spaces, researchers write, due to a systematic comparison of metastatic breast-cancer cells to healthy breast cells which revealed dramatic differences between the two cell lines in their mechanics, migration, oxygen response, protein production and ability to stick to surfaces.

Reuters gets dinged for being off-kilter journalistically when it comes to politics; to the current generation of independent voters they became famous for their Mid-East coverage last decade by retouching photos to make Israelis look bad and Arabs look persecuted, adding in smoke from explosions that didn't exist, etc. Editors and journalists at other corporate media companies never noticed, but bloggers tripped them up.

In watching a recent discussion about "free will", I was surprised as to how quickly the discussion got confused by conflating "free choice" with "free will".
[Day 2, Afternoon, First Session:  Free Will/Consciousness]

In this article, I will attempt to better define some of these concepts to illustrate why "free will" is an illusion.

To begin, let's define "choice" as an event that occurs in which a decision point is reached.  Regardless of how many apparent choices one has, they always reduce to one decision.  In addition, we may recognize that certain choices may eliminate other choices from further consideration or selection.

Would one normally expect a health-professional’s stethoscope to hang more predominantly to their left, or their right? And if there is a bias, what conclusions may be drawn? In 2007, professor Emmanuel Stylianos Antonarakis MBBCh performed a cross-sectional questionnaire survey with 186 medical doctors of all grades from the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff. The prevalent stethoscope-hang side (if there was one) was noted and correlated with handedness, footedness, eyedness, earedness, hand clasping, arm folding, and leg crossing of the subjects.

“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is the beginning to one of the world's most popular hymns, yet while millions of people can oddly identify Nicki Minaj, almost no one knows the name of Charles Wesley or his Hymns and Sacred Poems. “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” became regarded as one of the Great Four Anglican Hymns and was published as number 403 in "The Church Hymn Book". It has been recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra to the kids on "Charlie Brown"(1) and now the private letters of the composer have been edited by Dr. Gareth Lloyd of The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library and Professor Kenneth Newport of Liverpool Hope University and published by Oxford University Press. They provide a rare glimpse into both the man and the birth of Methodism.