To see the future, you must know the past: these nine words nicely summarize a syllogism which knows few exceptions. Turning to known data to check the power of one's extrapolations is a quite well-founded scientific approach. So if we are to try and guesstimate how much will the CDF and DZERO experiments manage to deliver in the next few years, we must check how well they delivered this far, by comparing results with early expectations.

But why bother ? Well, of course because there is a real challenge on: bookmakers need to tune the odds they offer!

Fermilab versus CERN

How To Model A Smoking Gun


Conspiracy theorists just love to get hold of a piece of new information and claim that it is the 'smoking gun'  that 'conclusively proves' their pet theory.  The psychology behind this mode of argument is so subtle that a 'smoking gun' proponent may not just fool many ordinary members of the public.  They may fool themselves also.


The Importance Of Context.

According to a study of how people evaluate and act on online health advice, information written by a doctor is considered more credible when it appears on a Web site than on a blog or a homepage. The findings, published in the Journal Communication Research, highlight the relative importance of different online sources to people who seek health information on the Internet.

"Most people look for health information online by keying disease symptoms into various search engines," said S. Shyam Sundar, distinguished professor of communications, Penn State. "But the results of that search could range from experts at the Mayo Clinic to somebody's personal blog."

In an article published this week in Science, Monash University biochemists say they have discovered the process by which bacteria developed into more complex cells and that this crucial evolutionary step happened much earlier than previously thought.

The team found that the cellular machinery needed to create mitochondria was constructed from parts pre-existing in the bacterium. These parts did other jobs for the bacterium, and were cobbled together by evolution to do something new and more exciting.