One of our popular topics last year was earthquakes.  That makes sense, with the earthquake in Japan.  It's not like there was some greater instance of earthquakes but if you are a Doomsday fearmonger, any event is a good event; that means anti-science activists determined to send us back to the 13th century looked for ways to make earthquakes result from fracking.

If you dispute that, you get meaningless gibberish responses like 'you can't prove the earthquakes did not come from fracking', which is true, in the same way you can't prove I am not the disembodied brain of Adolf Hitler writing this piece from my Antarctic Fortress where I am plotting the Fourth Reich - but it's sort of silly to live your life believing it.

The Moriond EWK conference is in full swing and results are being shown of the recent new searches for rare decays of the Bs meson. The Bs is a hadron made up by a bottom quark and a (anti)strange one. The peculiar composition of this particle and its zero electric charge make it a very interesting probe of new physics in its decays: new physics processes might give a sizable contribution to the rate of decays yielding pairs of muons, which are both very rare in the standard model, and very easy to identify in the detector.

In 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik, it began a new era in the Cold War.  The Race to Space. Senator Lyndon Johnson worried the commies could rain nuclear bombs down on us from the high ground, making him the perfect guy to run NASA and because it was a military concern it got funded.  Only later it became a human exploration issue and much later became a science one.

If you want to know basic things about animals, like who eats whom, you might guess that your days would consist of watching real-life nature documentaries. You might expect to go out into the savannah or into the depths of the sea to observe predators hunting and devouring their prey.

Actually, it takes a lot of sitting still and watching to see even a single predation event. It turns out you can get a lot more data a lot more quickly by looking at predator vomit and feces. Oh, the glamour of science!

When it comes to squid, the remmants they leave in their predators' guts or scat are usually beaks. These hard, chitinous structures last a lot longer than the muscle that makes up the rest of the squid.

“Exaggerated celebrations after making a goal, such as sliding, piling up, and tackling a team-mate when racing away, can result in serious injury.”

Bülent Zeren, MD from the Center for Orthopaedics and Sports Traumatology, Karsiyaka, Izmir, Turkey, and Haluk H. Öztekin, MD at the Clinic of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, Atatürk Research and Training Hospital, Izmir, Turkey, have undertaken one of the very few formal scientific studies into ‘Score-Celebration Injuries’ (SCIs)

A mini-medical machine could mean a new power scheme for cardiac pacemakers. Rather than use batteries, engineering researchers at the University of Michigan say they can use vibrations from heartbeats themselves. 

Their new device is designed to harvest energy from the reverberation of heartbeats through the chest and convert those to electricity to run a pacemaker or an implanted defibrillator. By taking the place of the batteries that power them today, the new energy harvester could save patients from repeated surgeries - the only way today to replace the batteries, which last five to 10 years.

A research team has announced discovery of molecular oxygen ions (O2+) in the upper  atmosphere of Dione, one of the 62 known moons orbiting Saturn. 

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” studies have become a field provided with copious Templeton funding. Yale recently had the 2011 WITA (Why is there Anything?) conference (see their blog), which was funded by the Templeton and Yale Divinity School. Rutgers sports the Rutgers Templeton Project in Philosophy of Cosmology, and they now have a blog where they ask a list of questions ending in a grand finale with lucky number 13 being the ‘WITA question ’ in its better known version:

 

I would like you to consider carefully the following comments made by Gerhard Adam in the discussion that followed a recent article on artificial intelligence.

Gerhard’s contribution is a lesson in the benefits of disciplined logical thought. Please read on:

“Intelligence" didn't just "wake up" one day. Its presence is visible from microbes up to the highest organisms. The notion that if you just cobble together enough pieces and intelligence will emerge is simply magical thinking.”

And in response to another comment; “It just seems that intelligence is being viewed as some arbitrary "add-on" to biology. Like it's some feature that is "out there" and has nothing to do with the organism in question.”

Part guidebook, part workbook, Ariel's book for neurotypical partners is sure to be considered a boon for spouses who know almost nothing about Asperger's Syndrome. Written by  Cindy Ariel, a licensed psychologist who provides therapy for a variety of issues, including relationships, it is an easy-to-read guide to understanding Asperger's Syndrome and why partners on the spectrum behave in ways that may be hard for those unfamiliar with the syndrome to understand.