While I was busy reporting the talks at the "Neutrino Telescope"  conference in Venice, LHCb released a startling new result, which I have not much time to describe in much detail this evening (it's Friday evening here in Italy and I'm going to call the week off), and yet wish to share with you as soon as possible.
The spectroscopy of low- and intermediate-mass hadrons (whatever this means) is a complex topic which either enthuses particle physicists or bores them to death. There are two reasons for this dycothomic behaviour.

The time of year for standardized state testing has arrived and if you have school-age children, there’s no way to avoid this topic. Everyone has strong opinions when it comes to the issue of “opting out,” so how do you decide what’s best for your child?
 
To help you make the best decision for your child, let me debunk some common parental concerns when it comes to opting out:

Will opting out spoil my child or teach them to avoid responsibility?

The numerous nutrition guidelines promoted by the U.S. federal government are obeyed by just 2 percent of Americans. If only 2 percent of any population can obey your guidelines, they are a nutritional wishlist created by groups of experts promoting their diet fads, not evidence-based information.

However, one group is constantly criticized by everyone else - pregnant mothers - and a new study shows that no pregnant women in any demographic are able to achieve the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Which means those guidelines are irrelevant, not that expectant moms need even more criticism.

This is an update to my article: How A "Dwarf Planet" Gas Giant Could Challenge IAU Definition - Pluto, Ceres, Haumea Etc Can All Be Planets. That article pointed out that we could discover a gas giant in our own solar system that satisfies the IAU definition of a "dwarf planet" as it wouldn't clear its orbit if it was far enough away. First, I should have pointed out there that the WISE search has not ruled out gas giants in the remote parts of our solar system.

A new paper claims the size and shape of your nose evolved in response to local climate conditions. 

The nose is one of our distinctive facial features. It conditions the air we breathe so it is warm and moist when it reaches the lungs, which helps prevent infections. And that may be why people whose ancestors lived in hot, humid places tend to have wider nostrils than people whose ancestors came from cold and dry environments.

In case you haven’t been keeping up-to-date with the latest news in the biotechnology regulatory system (and how could you not?), the system is under revision. As part of the new Coordinated Framework the FDA stated it would clarify how it will deal with the hot-button topic of genome editing, and update its guidance documents accordingly. As part of this process the FDA opened a docket on regulations.gov to receive public comments about the issue. As you might expect, a large majority of the comments have been less than scientific.

They are asking for your evidence-based input.  Please give it to them!

ECHA, the European Chemicals Agency, has released findings from its Committee for Risk Assessment (RAC) which concluded that glyphosate (e.g. Roundup, by the agriculture company Monsanto, though it's been off-patent for 17 years) is not a carcinogen, nor is it a mutagen, nor is it toxic for reproduction.

I think the chances of the SpaceX mission around the Moon going ahead on schedule in 2018 is tiny. But on the remote chance it does, I would not fly on that mission, if you paid me a billion dollars. The problem is that they have to rely on many innovations working just right that are hardly tested. Their current Dragon spacecraft is only rated for re-entry from LEO (Low Earth Orbit) and not for the much faster re-entry from a trip around the Moon. That’s why they plan to use the larger Dragon 2 which has its first flight in 2018.

President Trump says he came to Washington to “drain the swamp,” and now his administration is looking for wasteful programs to cut. A great start would be pulling the plug on numerous federal “research” programs that, frankly, have been captured by Washington special interests.

In fact, much of taxpayer-funded research serves ideological agendas—especially environmental activism—at the expensive of legitimate scientific inquiry. Consider a few examples.

By using lasers to manipulate a superfluid gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the team was able to coax the condensate into a quantum phase of matter that has a rigid structure — like a solid, and can flow without viscosity, a key characteristic of a superfluid.  Basically, they have created a supersolid, a new form of matter which combines the properties of solids with those of superfluids. 

Isn't that a contradiction? 

“It is counterintuitive to have a material which combines superfluidity and solidity,” says team leader Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. “If your coffee was superfluid and you stirred it, it would continue to spin around forever.”