It happens in the best families, so they say. Two experiments work 24/7 to produce an improved result on the Higgs search, and the result is disappointing, to say the least.

I am talking about the Tevatron, of course. For a little while longer, CDF and D0 will have the exclusive on Higgs boson searches. Last March, we all rejoyced when we saw that the Tevatron was starting to become sensitive to a high-mass Higgs, and indeed it excluded its existence in a range of masses between 160 and 170 GeV. We were waiting for more exclusions for the winter conferences of 2010, when more data would be used to produce improved results. Instead, no improvement, but actually, a retractatio. How is that possible ??

Call it contrarian stubborness, but I believe there remains that print journalism a critical aspect of American society.

That said, what's journalism?

Matt Bowden, in the October issue of The Atlantic, proposes that we are in a "post-journalistic age," created by the broadcast drive for ratings and the corporate drive for a bat bottom line, both of which are, of course, money.

"In this post-journalistic world, the model for all national debate becomes the trial, where adversaries face off, representing opposing points of view," Bowden said.

One of the basic lessons rookie reporters are taught is to follow the money. Who benefits, who pays, who receives. In Bowden's PJ world, journalists are lawyers, not recorders of facts.

Attentive readers of this blog may have noticed that those who post comments to my entries often show two interesting and complementary attitudes: a fundamental distrust of (if not downright contempt for) philosophy, coupled with an overly enthusiastic endorsement of science. Take, for instance, my recurring argument that some (but not all!) of the “new atheists” engage in scientistic attitudes by overplaying the epistemological power of science while downplaying (or even simply negating) the notion that science fundamentally depends on non-empirical (i.e., philosophical) assumptions to even get started.

According to new research conducted by scientists from the University of Maryland and the Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France, smokers may face another serious health risk from the habit and the tobacco industry may have another serious PR problem on their hands as a result.

A study appearing in the upcoming issue of Environmental Health Perspectives suggests that Cigarettes are "widely contaminated" with bacteria, including some known to cause disease in people. The research team describes the study as the first to show that "cigarettes themselves could be the direct source of exposure to a wide array of potentially pathogenic microbes among smokers and other people exposed to secondhand smoke."

Many politicians see government welfare as the best way to address the problem of poverty in society. President Barack Obama, for example, recently promised to halve poverty within ten years, and his Republican opponent, John McCain, similarly vowed to make poverty eradication a top priority of his Administration.

Others, however, say that even in the current economic situation, in developed countries, this kind of rhetoric about cutting "poverty" is misleadingly outmoded—because it implicitly suggests that government income transfers are the best vehicle for achieving substantial reductions in poverty.

Virtually limitless sources of energy are everywhere. One such potential source is energy from ocean waves that could be used to generate electric power.  Yet as engineers test new technologies for capturing it, the devices are plagued by battering storms, limited efficiency, and the need to be tethered to the seafloor.

Currently, a team of aerospace engineers is attempting to address these setbacks by applying the principles that keep airplanes aloft to create a new wave-energy system that is durable, extremely efficient, and can be placed anywhere in the ocean, regardless of depth.

 Following up their 2000 discovery of an ancient reptile commonly referred to as SuperCroc,  paleontologists from the University of Chicago and McGill University today unveiled key fossils of five previously unknown or poorly understood crocodile species. Most of them walked "upright" with their arms and legs under the body like land mammals, with their bellies touching the ground. The discoveries are reported in the latest issue of ZooKeys.

The five new species, dubbed BoarCroc, RatCroc, DuckCroc, DogCroc and PancakeCroc by University of Chicago Paleontologist Paul Sereno, lived roughly 100 million years ago and ultimately survived the dinosaurs.

Considering the people and things most often googled these days, it maybe surprising to learn that search engines play a much bigger role in our lives than just helping us find pictures of Megan Fox and mildly entertaining videos of would-be wrestlers in their backyards. Specifically, search engines are becoming a major part of how we learn, according to research published in the November issue of Information Processing and Management.

A new study of Antarctica's past climate reveals that temperatures during the warm periods between ice ages (interglacials) may have been higher than previously thought. The latest analysis of ice core records suggests that Antarctic temperatures may have been up to 6°C warmer than the present day. The study also found that during the last warm period, about 125,000 years ago, the sea level was around 5 metres higher than today.

The findings, reported this week by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Open University and University of Bristol in the journal Nature could help us understand more about rapid Antarctic climate changes.

I recently discussed here the Tevatron results of searches for new Z bosons in electron-positron or dimuon samples collected by CDF and DZERO, pointing out that there seem to be a couple of intriguing upward fluctuations in the data. One of the dielectron fluctuations sits at a mass of 240 GeV, the other, also in the dielectron spectrum, is at about 720 GeV. Neither is compelling.