Musical cartoons can boost verbal intelligence?  We'll hiatus Science 2.0 and start watching "Phineas&Ferb" right now.

Researchers writing in Psychological Science say pre-schoolers improved their skill after only 20 days of classroom instruction using their interactive, music-based cognitive training cartoons.

Tomorrow I will fly to Frascati, where are the headquarters of INFN, the italian institute for nuclear physics. I will attend to an event there, called "Incontri di Fisica" (Physics meetings), where high-school teachers meet researchers and receive training, as well as discuss ways to improve science education and popularization in schools and outside.

I will be discussing the subject of "Science popularization with blogs" on Wednesday afternoon and then, two days later, I will be the last speaker with another short talk, where I will try to summarize some ideas on the matter. And you might help for this latter presentation.

A daily supplement to reduce diabetes?   Maybe.

Researchers writing in Cell Metabolism show they have have restored normal blood sugar metabolism in diabetic mice using, nicotinamide mononucleotide(NMN), a compound the body makes naturally and which plays a vital role in how cells use energy.

All cells in the body make NMN in a chain of reactions leading to production of NAD, a vital molecule that harvests energy from nutrients and puts it into a form cells can use. Among other things, NAD activates a protein called SIRT1 that has been shown to promote healthy metabolism throughout the body, from the pancreas to the liver to muscle and fat tissue.

This year’s Nobel Prize in physics goes to Saul Perlmutter, who shares it with Adam Riess and Brian P. Schmidt, all having been vital in the discovery of that the universe’s expansion is speeding up; research that was done during the 1990s.

Several science bloggers opined that maybe work on quantum entanglement was more deserving, and they have a point, but if the wider impact of scientific issues is at play in the considerations that lead to awarding the Nobel Prize, the decision today was a good one in that regard.

Koalas have a reputation of being lazy animals (see figure 1). Of course, sleeping about 19 hours a day, and spending 3 out of the 5 remaining hours eating, only adds to their ‘street rep’. But even these lazy marsupials have to mate. And that’s when it gets interesting (at least to some biologists).

   

Figure 1: Sleeping koala. Awww...

(Source: Wikimedia Commons, author: Dingy)

   

RETRACTION: I have decided to retract three blogs (Deriving … 4/5, 5/5, 6/5+1). I was unable to figure out a reasonable statement concerning gauge symmetry. When the blogs were initially written, I focused on the field equations, mainly the Gauss-like law, and ignored the force equations entirely. Finding a solution that works with the the field and force equations were not looked for. A consistent proposal should do all three things (fields, forces, and solutions) with grace. I have concluded it is not possible to achieve these goals with the Lagrangian as written, hence the retraction.

Hard Times For Unscientific Blogging

Pseudo-skeptic claims of Arctic ice recovery have been followed by further losses in the real world.  Evidence of global warming is accumulating to such an extent that the web's unscientific bloggers have to work really hard to find anything to write about.  Times are so hard that Anthony Watts was recently reduced to writing a very lengthy anacoluthon-style dust-speck-spotting article about how Al Gore didn't make a video in one take.  Horror of horrors!  And what are we to conclude from Watts' analysis?  The experiment portrayed is valid!

We've all read about efforts to provide amputees with robotic limbs and we know that  deep brain stimulation can relieve a range of Parkinson and OCD symptoms - a Tel Aviv University researcher has combined those ideas and gone a step farther and successfully implanted a robotic cerebellum into the skull of a rodent with brain damage, restoring its capacity for movement.

In the 1990s, under the guise of wage protectionism, the Clinton administration got legislation passed that made it far more difficult for immigrants to get a work visa.  The concern was that a foreign worker would work in the US for less.  Result overall: Jobs instead went overseas.

Impact in science; we now spend $5 billion a year on STEM programs, trying to convince American children who are inclined to be doctors that they should instead be scientists, while foreign science students educated in the US are forced to go back home where they become competitors to the US.

The reportedly faster than light neutrinos at OPERA may be a systematic error, but if these and those data of other neutrino experiments are correct, they hint at a phenomenon that propagates with very many times, perhaps millions of times the speed of light.