A new five-ton instrument that goes by the name MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration) has been installed in the Keck I Telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. 

MOSFIRE gathers light in infrared wavelengths — invisible to the human eye — allowing it to penetrate cosmic dust and see distant objects whose light has been stretched or "redshifted" to the infrared by the expansion of the universe.  Basically, it will allow scientists to look 'back in time' and study the earliest galaxies in the universe

For once I allow myself some self-advertising... I just published on the Cornell arXiv the preprint of a proceedings paper I wrote for the Bormio 2012 conference on Nuclear Physics, where I presented the most recent results from the CMS experiment in a review talk. The paper is titled "Recent Results of the CMS Experiment".

The paper is 33-pages long, and thus configures as a general review of the results that CMS produced from the analysis of data collected during 2011, the 5 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collisions, which among other things granted a first feeble but trustworthy evidence of a Higgs boson when read together with similar ATLAS results.

Why take something for free and feel cheap if you can pay half a grand and support quackery? Precisely! Hangovers from alcohol are almost entirely due to dehydration, read: too little water in your body. Although you drank a lot of water along with the spirit, the alcohol made your body dehydrate; no matter you didn’t even dance enough to break a sweat. Our bodies also do not like the alcohol metabolites, the main problem being acetaldehyde from the action of the liver enzyme alcohol-dehydrogenase, and then acetic acid. I wrote about these and why Asians should be especially careful with booze in “Alcohol in China and Enzyme Evolution”.

Global spending on cleaner energy grew to a record $263 billion in 2011, a 6.5 percent increase over the previous year, according to new research by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The United States reclaimed the top spot among all G-20 nations, thanks to $48 billion primarily in government subsidies, but with $45.5 billion in private investments, China is the real hub of clean energy activity - leading the world in wind energy investment and deployment, as well as wind and solar manufacturing. 

Mitigation, rationing, taxes. Environmental policy claims have historically been driven by negative thinking - a demand-side mindset that seeks to limit consumption of fossil fuels through pollution permits, greater expenses for consumers and multi-national climate change treaties. 

New research from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University suggests that encouraging the purchase of coal, oil and other dirty fossil fuel deposits could be a much better way to fight climate change.

In Moby Dick, Melville scoffs that “fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale.” Following the example of the Ancient Egyptians and Chinese, the fragrance industry has employed this essence, called ambergris, in perfume making for years.

We know that voting changes your brain a little - just reading that sentence changed your brain a little, so actions and behaviors certainly change us.  But does voting change your descendants?

Epigenetics is really a nascent field and that means there is a lot of interpretation. That also means people can try to make the case that politics is genetic. Which means partisan spinmeisters, within science and outside it, will find new avenues for the confirmation bias of their faithful.

The number of scholarly authors who have formally studied the significance of verbal (and physical) interactions at Fawlty Towers is very limited. Nonetheless, professor Annjo Klungervik Greenall, of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, has recently done so – examining in detail the many (often heated) exchanges between Manuel and Basil Fawlty, and asking how they might contribute to the idea of Linguicism.

A powerful earthquake has struck an hour ago, at 8.30UT, very close to the place where a similar event occurred on December 26th 2004. The earthquake has an estimated magnitude of 8.7 and occurred at a depth of 33km, according to NOAA. The map below shows the location of the event and the potentially affected areas.

The key air pollutants that combine to cause smog have dropped due to emissions regulations but baseline levels of ozone are continuing to creep up in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia.

Scientists from the University of British Columbia, along with state and environmental groups, are trying to figure out why average levels of ground-level ozone haven't dropped with emissions over the last decade and have instead gone up. A new report from Metro Vancouver shows ambient levels of fine particulate matter, like sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, have declined by 20 to 60 percent since 2001, but ozone has continued to rise in that same period, up 20 percent.