Featured Articles

Helicobacter Pylori

Helicobacter Pylori

Oct 19 2012 | comment(s)

Helicobacter is a good example in our changing understanding of the role of microbes and the human body environment.  Some may recall that this particular bacteria was introduced to the public in a rather striking experiment where it was suspected of causing stomach ulcers and gastritis.  Dr. Barry Marshall drank a petri dish containing cultured Helicobacter Pylori and within days developed gastritis.  This demonstrated a firm connection between bacteria and gastritis/stomach ulcers as well as the role of using antibiotics to treat this condition.

Helicobacter is presumed to be present in about 50% of the world's population upper gastrointestinal tract, while fully 80% of individuals harboring this organism are asymptomatic.
Atom Interferometry - Detecting The Undetectable

Atom Interferometry - Detecting The Undetectable

Oct 19 2012 | comment(s)

If one beam travels a fixed length and another travels an extra distance or in some other slightly different way, the two light beams overlap and interfere when they meet up, creating an interference pattern that scientists inspect to obtain highly precise measurements.
Helmets: How Vibrations From Football Hits Wobble The Brain

Helmets: How Vibrations From Football Hits Wobble The Brain

Oct 19 2012 | comment(s)

It's football season so along with cheers and yelling you will hear a more dangerous sound; the sharp crack of helmet-to-helmet collisions. Hard collisions can lead to player concussions but the physics of how the impact of a helmet hit transfers to the brain is not yet well understood. 

A research team has created a simplified experimental model of the brain and skull inside a helmet during a helmet-to-helmet collision. The model illustrates how the fast vibrational motion of the hit translates into a sloshing motion of the brain inside the skull. 
Essays On Emergence Part I

Essays On Emergence Part I

Oct 19 2012 | comment(s)

I am about to go to an informal workshop on naturalism and its implications, organized by cosmologist Sean Carroll. The list of participants is impressive, including Pat Churchland, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Rebecca Goldstein, Alex Rosenberg, Don Ross and Steven Weinberg.
Why Government Appears Inefficient

Why Government Appears Inefficient

Oct 19 2012 | comment(s)


Three reasons why government can look less efficient than it really is:

1. Cherry-picking in privatization. Let’s suppose we could rank government agencies or services in descending order of productivity: 1, 2, 3, and so on, with agency 1 being the most efficient and productive. As a reality check, let’s note that such a ranking is indeed possible, in a rough way.

NGC 660 And A Rare Polar-Ring Galaxy

NGC 660 And A Rare Polar-Ring Galaxy

Oct 19 2012 | comment(s)

A Gemini Legacy image has captured the colorful and dramatic tale of a life-and-death struggle between two galaxies interacting. All the action appears in a single frame, with the stunning polar-ring galaxy NGC 660 as the focus of attention. 
Wind Shear Fights Tropical Storm Maria

Wind Shear Fights Tropical Storm Maria

Oct 19 2012 | comment(s)

Tropical Storm Maria is moving away from Japan and strong wind shear is pushing its rainfall east of the storm's center, with no areas of heavy rain remaining in the tropical cyclone. The low-level center of the storm is now exposed and a wind shear greater than 30 knots (34.5 mph) continues to further weaken the storm.
Election Physics: Are Voters As Predictable As Atoms?

Election Physics: Are Voters As Predictable As Atoms?

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

Some physicists are looking to do for elections what they have done for economics - try and prove that people can behave rationally.  Here is hoping it goes better this time.

Unfortunately, the biggest believers in the idea that humans might, on occasion, obey rules that yield predictable collective patterns, have been non-scientists, like political philosopher John Stuart Mill and social scientists Auguste Comte and Adolphe Quetelet.
The Weird Grey Area Between Primordial Plasma And Ordinary Matter

The Weird Grey Area Between Primordial Plasma And Ordinary Matter

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

Physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) recently observed first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, composed of protons and neutrons we know today, from the odd, seething soup of their constituent quarks and gluons that permeated the early universe some 14 billion years ago.

The RHIC physicists have been creating and studying this primordial quark-gluon plasma (QGP) for a while but the data they presented at the Quark Matter 2012 international conference from systematic studies varied the energy and types of colliding ions to create this new form of matter under a broad range of initial conditions, allowing the experimenters to unravel its properties.
Barley Genome Deciphered

Barley Genome Deciphered

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

An international research effort has resulted in an integrated physical, genetic and functional sequence assembly of the barley genome, which could lead to higher yields, improved pest- and disease-resistance and enhanced nutritional value of crops.
Can Twitter Detect Bias Among Sports Journalists?

Can Twitter Detect Bias Among Sports Journalists?

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

Most people regard journalists as biased, though it is most evident in the bias of journalists at places politically different from the consumer - in the US, MSNBC viewers regard Fox News consumers as biased while Fox News consumers regard everyone else as biased.

Science media does not have this issue because everyone votes the same way politically and it makes no difference; except on political issues that attract political demographics, like GMOs or climate change, science media can stick to science. What about sports?  Can a sports journalist be biased?

They can. It just may not be evident when it comes to their sports coverage.
How To Eliminate Fear - Create New Competitive Memory Traces

How To Eliminate Fear - Create New Competitive Memory Traces

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

If suffer from arachnophobia, fear or spiders, you know that rationality does not enter into it. Imagining a huge and hairy tarantula crawling on your arm in a therapist’s office is not less scary than coming out of the shower and seeing a tiny spider.

Why are phobias so hard to shake? It's not as easy as extinguishing the fear response. Instead of trying to erase the memory of the fear provoking stimuli,  creating new, competitive memory traces may be the solution. 
Top 10 List Of Plant-Damaging Fungi

Top 10 List Of Plant-Damaging Fungi

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

People love Top 10 Lists.  So a ranking system of the ten most important phytopathogenic fungi on a scientific and economic level should be a big hit. If you don't want to spend five more minutes reading, the rice blast fungus (Magnaporthe oryzae) is at the top of the list.

The results were tabulated by a survey of 495 international researchers about the most important phytopathogenic fungi. Each researcher chose three that they thought to be most significant and the most voted then formed the list.
The Music Of The Primes - Literally

The Music Of The Primes - Literally

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

The link between mathematics and music has always been there - our ears hear in frequencies and even before those frequencies were known in physics terms, ancient philosopher-scientists had determined that the language of math linked areas as remote as planetary motion and harmony. "There is music in the spacing of the spheres," wrote Pythagoras. The Pythagoreans didn't have irrational numbers, negative numbers or even a zero but they didn't need those for their kind of symbolism.
Embrace The Promise of GMOs - And Stop Being Afraid Of Science

Embrace The Promise of GMOs - And Stop Being Afraid Of Science

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

Recently, scientists in New Zealand welcomed a terrific new genetically modified organism (GMO) into the world: A cute, tailless cow named "Daisy" that produces hypoallergenic milk. Scientists engineered the animal to address the problem of infant allergies to cow milk, which affects up to 3% of children in the developed world.
Disaster Trifecta 40,000 Years Ago: Climate Shifts, Geomagnetic Field Reversal And A Super Volcano

Disaster Trifecta 40,000 Years Ago: Climate Shifts, Geomagnetic Field Reversal And A Super Volcano

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

Researchers from Germany and Switzerland did an analysis on sediment cores from the Black Sea and concluded that, for a brief period during the last ice age, a compass at the Black Sea would have pointed south instead of north. And that wasn't the worst thing going on around the same time.

41,000 years ago, say the researchers, a complete and rapid reversal of the geomagnetic field occurred. Along with the Black Sea sediment cores, they look at other studies in the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and Hawaii, and say it proves that this polarity reversal was a global event. 
Dreaming Of Torsional Building Oscillations During An Earthquake

Dreaming Of Torsional Building Oscillations During An Earthquake

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

I had a dream. So what, we all do. Well, this was particular, because I remember all of it well, and because it involved a very interesting situation. I was at Fermilab, in an office on a top-level floor of a tall building, when a powerful earthquake hit.
Give an Internet Award to Reddit Troll Violentacrez Brutsch

Give an Internet Award to Reddit Troll Violentacrez Brutsch

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

And once again I am amazed at the shortsighted, self-righteous moralizing of those who pretend to be all progressive, hip cyber age people.

Radioactive Titanium In Supernova Remnant 1987A

Radioactive Titanium In Supernova Remnant 1987A

Oct 18 2012 | comment(s)

Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud was close enough to be seen by the naked eye when its light first reached Earth in February of 1987.  During the explosion's peak, fingerprints of elements from oxygen to calcium were detected, representing the outer layers of the ejecta and soon after, signatures of the material synthesized in the inner layers could be seen in the radioactive decay of nickel-56 to cobalt-56, and its subsequent decay to iron-56. 

After more than 1000 hours of observation by Integral, high-energy X-rays from radioactive titanium-44 in supernova remnant 1987A have been detected for the first time. The radioactive decay has likely been powering the glowing remnant around the exploded star for the last 20 years.
Recession Has Been Hardest On Men's Mental Health

Recession Has Been Hardest On Men's Mental Health

Oct 17 2012 | comment(s)

The economic downtown that began in 2008 has been hardest on the mental health of men in England - yet it isn't the actual unemployment and falling household income the authors blame. They blame the threat of losing their jobs in a society that places an unrealistic level of pressure on males to be the breadwinners.

They base their findings on data taken from the national representative annual Health Survey for England for adults aged 25 to 64, between 1991 and 2010.  Response rates during the period varied from 85 per cent in 1991 to 64 per cent in 2008, and included almost 107,000 people.