A few months ago LHC took a special run of proton-proton collisions at  2.76 TeV. Why the lower energy, now that we are accustomed to searching for new phenomena at the highest available energy of 7 TeV ? Because of the wish to compare lead-lead collisions, taken last year at 2.76 TeV nucleon-nucleon energy, with proton-proton ones. The comparison allows to extract extremely interesting results.

The astrocyte, most common cell in the human nervous system, is finally getting some respect; researchers have used embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells to cultivate the star-shaped astrocyte.

Not just putty in the brain and spinal cord

The ability to make large, uniform batches of astrocytes, explains stem cell researcher Su-Chun Zhang, opens a new avenue to more fully understanding the functional roles of the brain's most commonplace cell, as well as its involvement in a host of central nervous system disorders ranging from headaches to dementia. What's more, the ability to culture the cells gives researchers a powerful tool to devise new therapies and drugs for neurological disorders.

The plot of the week is actually a table this week. A histogram with several background components can be extremely informative, but sometimes a table provides more detail and one can focus better on interesting features.

The table below has been produced in a CDF search for events containing same-sign lepton pairs: a striking signature of new physics, faked by very few processes. Because of the paucity of Standard Model sources, even relatively small new physics signals can emerge in such a sample. The CDF analysis is based on 6.1 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions collected at the Tevatron during Run II. Let us see what the table tells us.

The vaccine-injury crowd  is inoculated against reason, evidence, and appeals to civic duty and compassion for the suffering of millions. Those of us who've spent time in the trenches with them know it all too well. You can acknowledge that vaccine injuries do occur. You can commiserate on how tragic those are, how we need to always continue to do more, to make vaccines as safe as possible, but it falls on deaf ears. As long as you follow those acknowledgements with the statement that the accumulated body of replicated science shows no connection between vaccines and autism, vaccines and asthma, vaccines and MS, vaccines  and SIDS, you are the enemy. You are a pharma shill. Or a pharma whore. You're a sheople. Or you're blind to reality.

There are perennials in the plant kingdom, flowers that bloom each year, and in culture as well.  Each year, for example, there will be a new go-to cliché in football.    Many of us who have watched for a long time can even tell you what year a broadcast was made by which cliche was in use.

Quiz:  If I say they play "smash mouth football", what year was I thinking?

Grímsvötn Ash Plume

Grímsvötn, an ice-capped volcano in the south of Iceland is currently erupting.  The ice cap is quite extensive and thick, so unless there are unknown sub-surface fissures, extensive local flooding is unlikely to result from the eruption.

The volcano is likely to melt only the ice immediately over and adjacent to the caldera.  Melt water intrusion into magma can increase the production of tephra, as happened with last year's eruption of Eyjafjallajökull.  However, the ice cap of Grímsvötn is so thick that the erupting volcano will probably do no more than melt a hole through the icecap.

Quantum mechanics allows us to perform the following experiment (see the article by David Mermin in Physics Today Vol. 38 No. 4):

Folks went apeshit over Stephen Hawking speaking his belief that heaven is a fairy tale. Some crazy fool insisted the rapture was today. And the world turned on. And on it will turn.

Why did these two non-stories capture so much attention in a world where so many other things should have more weight? Why would anyone be surprised an atheist wouldn't believe in heaven and a true believer might go a bit overboard and think he could predict the second coming?

Modern physics has disproved direct realism: There is no locally realistic description of our world possible. Although I have already explained this differently at several places, for example by refusing 'real stuff' as being a good explanation for what is ‘at the bottom’, it is worth to prove it once rigorously. Let me present the simplest established proof in the simplest possible version that I can come up with. Everybody claiming interest in the interplay between science and philosophy should have gone through this proof at least once and I did my utmost to make it as easy as possible: Only three angles are considered and probabilities almost completely avoided by instead talking about natural numbers like 50.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists doesn't like births outside expensive hospitals and recently issued a statement disapproving of the practice.   Regardless,  mothers, Caucasian at least, are not listening and a new analysis shows that home births, common throughout history but declining since 1990, jumped up again after 2004.  An increase of 20 percent.

28,357 home births occurred in 2008 - 0.67 percent of the approximately 4.2 million births in the United States, which may sound negligible but it is the highest reported proportion since 1990. This change was largely driven by a 28 percent increase in home births for white women, for whom more than 1 percent of all births now occur at home.