It is a well-known fact that it is much easier to measure a physical quantity than to correctly assess the magnitude of the uncertainty on the measurement: the uncertainty is everything!

A trivial demonstration of the above fact is the following. Consider you are measuring the mass of the top quark (why, I know you do it at least once a week, just to keep mentally fit). You could say you have no idea whatsoever of what the top mass is, but you are capable of guessing, and your best guess is that the top mass is  twice the mass of the W boson: after all, you have read somewhere that the top quark decays into a W boson plus other stuff, so a good first-order estimate is 2x80.4= 160.8 GeV.

According to research presented on Monday, June 8 at SLEEP 2009, in the presence of free access to food, sleep restricted subjects reported decrease in appetite, food cravings and food consumption; however, they gained weight over the course of the study. Thus, the finding suggests that energy intake exceeded energy expenditure during the sleep restriction

Results indicate that people whose sleep was restricted experienced an average weight gain of 1.31 kilograms over the 11 days of the study. Of the subjects with restricted sleep who reported a change in their appetite and food consumption, more than 70 percent said that it decreased by day 5 of the study. A group of well rested control subjects did not experience the weight gain.

Both boys and girls have issues but boys are  getting a raw deal, according to Judith Kleinfeld, professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the US.

It's commonplace to hear about gender-specific issues involving girls but when there are concerns about issues primarily affecting boys, responses tend to veer toward sexism.  Issues impacting boys have been neglected by policy makers, she says. Her review of issues characterizing American boyhood, how they compare to those affecting girls, and the lack of initiatives in place to address them was published in the June issue of Springer's journal Gender Issues.

If you live in California, Bakersfield is just a place where farming mega-corporations grow a lot of stuff.  If you're remotely literate, you remember it as the 'Promised Land' the "Okies" left home for in The Grapes of Wrath.  If you like pop culture, it is part of the Route 66 highway(1),  which became famous in a song first sung by Nat King Cole(2).

But Bakersfield's rich central farmland was once the Temblor Sea, thanks to global warming, and  the fossil  remains tell a science tale.

Who doesn't every elderly person have a cognitive function decline as they age?   Elderly people who exercise at least once a week, have at least a high school education and a ninth grade literacy level, are not smokers and are more socially active are correlated to maintained cognitive skills through their 70s and 80s, according to research published in the June 9, 2009, print issue of Neurology.

D'you dig the Geek Off? Did you email your answers to geekoff@gmail.com? If not, too late sucka! That is, too late until Monday morning, when we play another round of the feud. Yep, every week there's a Geek Off and every week you can win a free Geeks' Guide to World Domination: Be Afraid, Beautiful People. Check the quiz Monday, email your answers 'til Friday at midnight EST, then check the answers and fight about corrections starting Saturday
morning.

Core-collapse (or gravitational) supernovae are among the most energetic and violent events in the universe and  constitute the final tremendous explosions in the life cycles of stars 8 times more massive than our Sun.

After running out of fuel, the core of such a star collapses and forms a neutron star or a black hole. At the same time, the outer layers are ejected at high velocity (up to 10% of the speed of light) and shine as brightly as billions of stars together.

To provide some perspective, the total energy suddenly released by such a supernova exceeds the total energy release by our Sun to-date; and also in the next 10 billion years.