Everyone issues forth platitudes about how science should be more 'open' and, in a world of social media, it will certainly stay harder to remain closed.

A few weeks ago, a leak about a possible new discovery (for the comprehensive explanation from a member of the collaboration, see Tommaso Dorigo) set the media aflame.    A preliminary document seemed to show γ-rays from a decaying Higgs particle with a mass of 115 gigaelectronvolts and the details about what it really or really was are best left to experts like Tommaso but the issue here is, will open science, part of the Science 2.0 vision, make any headway or not?  

Ethan Siegel is not the most popular writer on Scienceblogs.com but he may consistently be the most enlightening.    

He writers that the future of particle physics is commonly believed to be either going from the Large Hadron Collider to a Very Large Hadron Collider for protons, or going back to electrons and building a huge Linear Collider. 

There is another option, he says. What if we could find a particle that had the best of both worlds? 

About women and lesbian sex, 'an experimental phase in college' is a litany in humor circles.  When it comes to casual sex among women, everyone seems to have an opinion, a statistic, and evidence, be it anecdotal or scientific. And no one is sure how "lesbians" and "lesbian sex" are qualified and quantified in any of these research missions. 

Writing in The Edge, Stephanie Schroeder says that as lesbian sex and homosexuality become more accepted, the popular perception of young lesbians as experimental consumers of casual sex is going away.

Simon Baron-Cohen,  Cambridge University psychology and psychiatry professor labeled by fans as a world expert in autism and developmental psychopathology, says evil doesn't explain...evil.

He thinks the word is a leftover from an ancient time and the concept should be rebranded as something new, something you should, well, buy his book about.

Lou Gehrig, "The Iron Horse" first baseman for the New York Yankees, had played for 2,130 consecutive games and endured any number of sprains, bumps, bruises and illness.  It was a shock when it finally ended, with him telling his coach, in his understated way, he wasn't "feeling well."

Politicians want to control their image - and that means controlling the media when they can.   And when they can't, that means removing a highly respected journalist in one of the most liberal cities in the country, one that voted 80% for Barack Obama during the 2008 election - and even re-elected Nancy Peloso in 2010.

Part of the press' job is to strip away the cloaks and veneers politicians and their media flaks create.    But they have rules and one of them is that if you are a 'pen and pad' reporter, you shouldn't take video with your phone, it seems - especially if the video is a protester of Pres. Obama.

Apple now admits that iPhones store location information and plan a patch to scale back their data collection but also say it was no big deal.   Steve Jobs, however, reportedly claimed “We don’t track anyone. The info circulating around is false.”

Google traffic to Demand Media sites is down 40 percent and other content farms seem to be following, according to an analysis by Experian Hitwise.  They looked at downstream traffic from Google, what sites users visit after visiting Google.com and Demand dropped from 0.57 in January to 0.34 percent last week, a 40 percent decline from the start of 2011.

That means their Panda upgrade to penalize content farms and (hopefully) make way for quality sites like ours to show up in the best results, and not just the best-SEO results, is having some impact.

Apple is the kind of marketing machine that will be discussed in business classes for decades to come.  It is a mega-giant corporation that makes its young, progressive users feel individualistic and rebellious.   Its chairman, Steve Jobs, gives almost no money to charity, was caught illegally obtaining stock options (yet got no penalty) and controls what you can put on Apple tools but is fondly regarded as a man of the people while Microsoft chairman Bill Gates donates billions and is reviled as a monopolist even though people can install Flash or anything they want on their PCs.