Want to avoid a baby mama without getting surgery or enduring condoms that are too small?  Men may soon have the same choice as women when it comes to birth control.

A male contraceptive pill has been talked about for decades, but so far none has been successfully created despite strong demand. Recent surveys found that about 70 percent of men would be willing to take a birth control pill if it were available.

A new study says such a birth control pill for men, without side effects, may soon be ready.  Working on mice, the team found that a compound called JQ1 acts as an inhibitor to sperm production and also sperm mobility. 

Since the early 1970s, all aspects of academia have skewed left.  With that political shift, the confidence that scientists are neutral arbiters for the public good has also declined on both sides.

More Republicans than Democrats think the fix is in regarding a green 'agenda' and global warming whereas more Democrats than Republicans think scientists are shills for Big Ag, Big Pharm, etc. regarding food and vaccines.  Basically, science can't win but there was a time when being an academic, and certainly a scientist, was impressive and not a presumption about a political world view. Getting into the political muck - and plenty of advocates for science recommend doing more of it, not less - has been a bad thing for credibility.

On Friday evening I will be talking in the wonderful Piazza Mantegna, in downtown Mantova (see picture below). It is an event organized by Festivaletteratura (literature festival), where I will be armed with blackboard and chalks, plus a mike, and where I will explain the way a discovery of a new particle comes about.

On Saturday instead I will be at the aula magna of the Mantova University, where in company with Gian Francesco Giudice (a CERN theorist) I will discuss the Higgs boson discovery and the aftermath. That is a more "serious" event and we will be discussing in front of a paying audience. I hear that the event is already sold out, so it will (should) be interesting!

Soil bacteria and bacteria that cause human diseases have recently swapped at least seven antibiotic-resistance genes, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Most of the antibiotics used to fight illness today originated from the soil. Bacteria use the antibiotics, in part, as weapons to compete with each other for resources and survival. Scientists have long acknowledged that gives environmental bacteria an evolutionary incentive to find ways to beat antibiotics.

I've been feeling a bit inspired about our prospects in space, lately.  Foremost (of course) by the incredible competence displayed by the makers of the Curiosity probe that landed on Mars, last week, and the JPL controllers and the citizenry that backed such a wonderful venture.  

The physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote in 1984:

“...the most revolutionary discovery in science is yet to come! And come, not by questioning the quantum, but by uncovering that utterly simple idea that demands the quantum.” Wheeler, 1984 [1]

Here is where a “modal realist version of Einstein”, while contemplating the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox involving the infamous Alice and Bob characters, could have stumbled onto Wheeler’s “utterly simple idea that demands the quantum”:

There was an interesting study published recently that addresses the changes that occur to gut bacteria in pregnant women and the role this fulfills in maintaining a healthy pregnancy.

There are two primary points that need to be addressed in order to appreciate these findings.

During a recent American political convention, two networks carried real-time Twitter 'data', what they called a meter, based on the commentary on the social media service.  While election polls have not been accurate for the last few decades, some technologists believe Twitter can be.

As evidence, they say the have devised a means to predict the outcome of other election-based processes - TV talent shows - through their big data analysis of tweets. Analysis of Twitter is not new, it is built into their API, but Fabio Ciulla from Northeastern University in Boston, USA and colleagues say their method shows that the elimination of contestants in TV talent shows based on public voting, such as "American Idol", can be anticipated.