Featured Articles

Be A Sexy Jerk: Nice Guys Finish Last In Reproduction Too

Be A Sexy Jerk: Nice Guys Finish Last In Reproduction Too

May 16 2012 | comment(s)

Females like the bad boys when they are young, we all know that colloquially - and even more so when they are ovulating, say a group of social and evolutionary psychologists.
Hatchery Salmon Versus Wild Salmon

Hatchery Salmon Versus Wild Salmon

May 16 2012 | comment(s)

A group of studies says that salmon raised in man-made hatcheries can harm wild salmon through competition for food and habitat. Salmon, which survived millions of years of evolution, are in danger from...salmon.

The studies provide new evidence that fast-growing hatchery fish compete with wild fish for food and habitat in the ocean as well as in the rivers where they return to spawn and even raises questions about whether the ocean can supply enough food to support future increases in hatchery fish while still sustaining wild salmon. 
Eminent Squid Scientist Retires

Eminent Squid Scientist Retires

May 16 2012 | comment(s)

My very first mentor in cephalopod research was Eric Hochberg at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. I think I was seventeen when he welcomed me into the museum's secret catacombs (at least, that's how I thought of them) of preserved specimens. Awe washed over me as I stared at shelves upon shelves of jarred octopuses.

Eric introduced me to the California pygmy octopus, Octopus micropyrsus, which would proceed to fascinate me for the rest of my undergraduate career. I saw more of them in jars than I ever did alive, though I kept doggedly digging through kelp holdfasts trying to find them. Reclusive little beasts.
North Dakota Passes Alaska To Become Second Largest US Oil Producer

North Dakota Passes Alaska To Become Second Largest US Oil Producer

May 15 2012 | comment(s)

North Dakota pumped 17.8 million barrels of oil in March, with a daily average of 575,490 barrels, and has passed Alaska to become the second-leading oil-producing state in the nation, trailing only Texas.

North Dakota owes its quick rise from the number nine spot just six years to improved horizontal drilling techniques in the rich Bakken shale and Three Forks formations in the western part of the state.

Texas is not worried just yet. It produced 1.1 million barrels daily in February and 32.9 million barrels for the whole month and oil production has increased more than 8.2 million barrels from February 2011 to February 2012, records show.
The New Phrenology

The New Phrenology

May 15 2012 | comment(s)

Jonah Goldberg, writing a guest piece in USA Today, tackles what he calls 'the new conservative phrenology' - basically, pseudosciencing up why Democrats are super-smart just for registering to be Democrats and Republicans are not part of the reality-based science community:

"They were born that way."
Is The Government Putting Medical Ethics At Risk?

Is The Government Putting Medical Ethics At Risk?

May 15 2012 | comment(s)

A short while ago we carried a strange claim from a group of ethicists at Oxford.  Not only should abortion be okay, actual children should be aborted even after they are born.

They're ethicists so they can be dismissed rather quickly. Tomorrow they are just as likely to be arguing there should be no abortion at all if you can't abort newborns.  Yet there is growing concern that the government doing more things for more people in the best interests of overall society is leading to a resurgence in the social authoritarian rationalizations that gripped the country (and really, the world) the last time progressives held any power. 
Easterlin Paradox: Chinese Discover Money Does Not Buy Happiness

Easterlin Paradox: Chinese Discover Money Does Not Buy Happiness

May 15 2012 | comment(s)

Things would seem to be good in China.  They are the only world economy not in a financial demilitarized zone, things are booming.  

Yet more money is not making people there happier. They're actually less happy today than shortly after the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing was crushed by the military, says economist Richard Easterlin, researcher in "happiness economics" and namesake of the Easterlin Paradox.
A New Way To Fire Up The Body's Immune Cells And Fight Tumors

A New Way To Fire Up The Body's Immune Cells And Fight Tumors

May 15 2012 | comment(s)

Researchers  have uncovered a new way to stimulate activity of immune cell opiate receptors, leading to efficient tumor cell clearance - their pharmacological approach can activate the immune cells to prevent cancer growth through stimulation of the opiate receptors found on immune cells.

California Is The Benchmark For Sustainable Fishing - And Activists Want To Ruin That

California Is The Benchmark For Sustainable Fishing - And Activists Want To Ruin That

May 15 2012 | comment(s)

More than 150 years ago, immigrant Chinese fishermen launched sampans into the chilly waters of Monterey Bay to capture squid. The Bay also lured fishermen from Sicily and other Mediterranean countries, who brought round-haul nets to fish for sardines.

This was the beginning of the largest fishery in the western hemisphere – California’s famed ‘wetfish’ industry, named for the fish that were canned wet from the sea, that has remained imprinted on our collective conscience by writers like John Steinbeck. 

Who doesn’t remember Cannery Row?

What Robots Can Tell Us About Brain Cells

What Robots Can Tell Us About Brain Cells

May 15 2012 | comment(s)

Understanding neurons - their shape, patterns of electrical activity even a profile of which genes are turned on at a given moment - remains as much art as science due to the complexity of research.

But that could soon change: Researchers at MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a way to automate the process of finding and recording information from neurons in the living brain. The researchers have shown that a robotic arm guided by a cell-detecting computer algorithm can identify and record from neurons in the living mouse brain with better accuracy and speed than a human experimenter.
Riding A Long Train Down A Black Hole

Riding A Long Train Down A Black Hole

May 15 2012 | comment(s)

Riding into a black hole is a fun mental exercise.  General relativity predicts* that an observer who falls freely into a large black hole will have no means with which she can establish whether she is at the event horizon, which is the radius below which there is no escape possible.  I explained this more detailed in Black Hole Duality: Not noticing crashing with light speed.  Nevertheless, many popular descriptions leave the feeling as if the event horizon is also locally, to the one who falls freely through it and his close surroundings that fall with her, a recognizable place.  This can be misleading in interesting ways and a

4-Parameter Analytic Animations, Solid Man

4-Parameter Analytic Animations, Solid Man

May 15 2012 | comment(s)

This blog required programming.  The basic idea is to have four degrees of freedom for the four parameters living inside a four dimensional quaternion.  Four for loops did the trick.
Diamond Sutra - Ancient Buddhist Sanskrit Is Oldest Printed Open Access Text

Diamond Sutra - Ancient Buddhist Sanskrit Is Oldest Printed Open Access Text

May 14 2012 | comment(s)

The Diamond Sutra is a 16-foot scroll of Buddhist texts dealing with the practice of non-abidance. A dated colophon is included, making it the first known block-printed text to carry an explicit date.

Translated, the date of printing was May 11, 868 but that isn't the most fascinating part of the colophon. It reads...
Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 15th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong.
Earliest - Aurignacian Wall Art Is 37,000 Years Old

Earliest - Aurignacian Wall Art Is 37,000 Years Old

May 14 2012 | comment(s)

A 1.5 metric ton block of engraved limestone at the Abri Castanet in southern France is the earliest evidence of wall art - approximately 37,000 years old and evidence of the role art played in the daily lives of Early Aurignacian humans. 

The research team has been excavating at Abri Castanet for the past 15 years. Abri Castanet and its sister site Abri Blanchard are among the oldest sites in Eurasia bearing artifacts of human symbolism. Hundreds of personal ornaments have been discovered, including pierced animal teeth, pierced shells, ivory and soapstone beads, engravings, and paintings on limestone slabs.
Organic LEDS And Transparent Electronics

Organic LEDS And Transparent Electronics

May 14 2012 | comment(s)

Your cay may soon have a new dashboard, one made of a flexible plastic and oxide layer that could be integrated into the car front window to give the driver direct information

The MULTIFLEXIOXIDES project is designed to develop new cost-efficient, long lasting, light, flexible and transparent devices (can anything be all of those?  Only in academia) which can display information directly on the windshield. This is possible using small glass pads with a transparent substrate of nano-sized flexible oxides, which act as a basis for organic LEDs (light-emitting diodes).
University Of Luxembourg Jumps Into Open Access

University Of Luxembourg Jumps Into Open Access

May 14 2012 | comment(s)

The University of Luxembourg has agreed to actively participate in the Open Access initiative.  Defined in the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) declarations on Open Access, it is an effort to make scholarly publications freely available to the public - because the content creator pays for publication, rather than a corporation underwriting the cost and retaining copyright while charging a subscription fee for access.

SUSY: A Matter Of Prior Beliefs

SUSY: A Matter Of Prior Beliefs

May 14 2012 | comment(s)

In this sorry age for Supersymmetry (SUSY) phenomenologists, it is quite easy to step on an aching toe while discussing the results of the Large Hadron Collider experiments, whose results have let these physicists down by excluding the presence of SUSY where most of them used to put their moneys until yesterday.
Science Fiction Symposium At UC Riverside May 17th, 2012

Science Fiction Symposium At UC Riverside May 17th, 2012

May 13 2012 | comment(s)

UC Riverside, one of few universities to have a major library archive of science fiction and  humanities people devoted to the topic, will convene a symposium on science fiction Thursday, May 17 at 10:30 a.m. in the Special Collections Reading Room on the fourth floor of the Rivera Library.

The symposium is free and open to the public. Parking costs $6. 

They hope to create a degree program in this field, say event organizers.   Don't scoff, if you have been to an ethnic or gender studies program, you know universities will find a way to create something unneeded if it can make money.


Classic!
Toying With Entropy: Dominos, Tetris, And Black Holes

Toying With Entropy: Dominos, Tetris, And Black Holes

May 13 2012 | comment(s)

In the previous blog post we discussed entropy. I provided you with a less well-known perspective on entropy and demonstrated that this generic perspective is fully compatible with the more traditional (and more narrow) thermodynamics view on entropy.

I promised you a toy model to elucidate the information-theoretical entropy that was introduced. You have been waiting patiently, and you get your new toy today. But before we start playing, let's test your patience for a few more minutes, and first expand upon the results obtained in the previous blog post.


Trivializing The Second law

New Atomic Structure Found In Metallic Glasses

New Atomic Structure Found In Metallic Glasses

May 13 2012 | comment(s)

Researchers have discovered a new nanometer-scale atomic structure in solid metallic materials known as metallic glasses, filling a gap in understanding of this atomic structure.

Glasses include all solid materials that have a non-crystalline atomic structure. They lack a regular geometric arrangement of atoms over long distances. "The fundamental nature of a glass structure is that the organization of the atoms is disordered—jumbled up like differently sized marbles in a jar, rather than eggs in an egg carton," says Paul Voyles, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of materials science and engineering and principal investigator on the research.