A Fake Smithsonian Exhibit

The integrity of the Smithsonian Institution hinges on disseminating knowledge in an objective, thorough and fair manner. Like the freedoms that our forefathers included in the First Amendment, the freedom to present information must be a top priority of the Smithsonian. The intrusion of bias or censorship would compromise the ability of the Institution to fulfill its Congressional mandate, and would jeopardize the outstanding reputation the Institution has developed in its 157-year history.

Senator Joe Lieberman, May 20 2003

Today (and the next time in this series on duality), I explain the most interesting insight that I have gotten from string theory about black holes.

Have you heard about HOTorNOT.com? It's perhaps the most superficial of all superficial dating site, allowing members to vote on other members' attractiveness and promoting dating decisions based almost solely on attractiveness scores. (You carry your own attractiveness score with you and how hot you are becomes part of your profile.)

Researchers in the science of beauty and human attraction call this a data paradise. Here are some of the things researchers have been able to discover using HOTorNOT.com's magical numbers:

• Men are 240% more likely to accept a date offer than women.

"TAU researcher confirms oily "water" on a Saturn moon", so reads the email that crossed my desk.  Then I learned why no mountain or landform on Titan can ever be taller than 6,200 feet.  The reason surprised me, but first, the backstory about the paper.

The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn has generated many exciting discoveries about the planet and its moons - and now a Tel Aviv University (TAU) researcher associated with the project has determined that Saturn's moon Titan includes a unique population of lakes.

"Anti-science" or "cautious" ... how you regard skeptics of positions that are ethically or scientifically subjective is often a matter of how you already believe.   If you are a Republican concerned about the ethical implications of human embryonic stem cell research, whole books can be written on how Republicans hate science.   But if you are in astronomy and have watched every program started during the Bush years get gutted since Democrats took control of Congress, you might think Democrats hate Congress(1) more.  In reality there are legitimate issues involved and it is up to policy makers to navigate them.

Two days ago I wrote here about the projected reach of Higgs boson searches of the Tevatron experiments, discussing what can be seen by CDF and D0 if they combine their analyses results, after improving them as is today thought possible to do. The reach was shown as a function of the integrated luminosity, which allows one to infer what can be done if the Tevatron stops running in 2011 or, as is being proposed, it continues for a few more years.

Oil fields are highly specific ecosystems - they contain no oxygen and the temperature, pressure and salinity are often high, which makes them home to a very particular community of bacteria.

Geert van der Kraan, a doctoral student who received his Ph.D. from TU Delft on the subject, says using bacterial changes as a biomonitoring tool in oil fields can be a way of keeping tabs on the state of the oil field itself - and increase its yield.

Ultrasound can speed the healing of fractures, according to results of a randomized, controlled trial published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders.

The researchers found that the use of low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) in patients with tibial fractures which showed inadequate progress toward healing resulted in 34% greater bone mineral density (BMD) in the fracture area after 16 weeks than use of a sham device.

Jon E. Block, Ph.D. worked with a team of researchers from University Hospital Marburg and the University of Ulm, Germany, to test LIPUS in 51 patients and 50 controls.

Some females will do anything to land a mate.   

Biologists have described the evolution of the size of a female trait which males prefer when choosing a partner. The study in Evolutionary Biology shows that male cichlid fish prefer females with a larger pelvic fin and that this drives females to grow fins out of proportion with their body size.

Sebastian Baldauf from the University of Bonn, Germany, worked with a team of researchers to study the effects of female ornamentation in the African cichlid fish Pelvicachromis taeniatus. He said, “In contrast to the well-known phenomenon of sexual selection influencing male traits, the expression of female ornaments in relation to body size is almost completely unexplored.”

The discovery of Gliese 581g was cause for rampant hype almost everywhere but here, along with some rather ridiculous claims that there was a 100% chance of life there.

The actual paper authors were more reserved, though astronomy is far bolder than biology in terms of its participants hyping findings and generally physics is pretty reserved (exception: LHC claims when it was being funded and built - now that the marketing is over, the call for perspective has set in) outside dark matter and dark energy, where anything goes.