Cool Links

Yes, the humanities get a free pass today because California State University, Northridge math professor Tihomir Petrov was arrested for peeing on another professor's door.   So math professors are not above being ridiculous either.    

43-year-old Petrov apparently had a squabble with a colleague, whose named has been withheld to protect the ridiculous.   
Linhenykus monodactylus has been identified as the first dinosaur with just one finger

The new dinosaur belongs to the Alvarezsauroidea, a branch of the carnivorous dinosaur group Theropoda. Theropods gave rise to modern birds and include such famous dinosaurs as Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptor.


This specimen is the only known dinosaur with one finger, and highlights the wide variety of evolutionary modifications of the hand that existed in different theropods.  

Homeopathy is under fire because, in a modern world where evidence is easy to find, people can easily learn that duck liver diluted in trillions and trillions of gallons of water will not actually cure the flu.
Talk about a quandary; science writers across the board have been critical of Andrew Wakefield and his linking of vaccines and autism, which set off a decade of concern before being laid to rest.  But in a world where every person who feels oppressed by Big Science claims they are just like Galileo, prosecuting a researcher for bad data needs to be done with caution.

Yes, though prosecuting someone who falsifies patient histories is another matter entirely.
In the Valley of the Moon, high in the Andes, a team of paleontologists and geologists have announced the discovery of a dinosaur ' at the root of the dinosaur family tree'  which roamed South America as the age of dinosaurs began approximately 230 million years ago.

It had a long neck and tail and weighed only 10 to 15 pounds.  They have aptly named the new dinosaur Eodromaeus - the "dawn runner."
Neuroscientists at MIT say they have uncovered why relatively minor details of an episode are sometimes inexplicably linked to long-term memories.     Even irrelevant information that follows the relevant event (rather than precedes it) is more likely to be integrated into long-term memory.

Here's an interesting one, short and sweet - apparently Russians are able to perceive between slightly-different hues of the colour blue because their language contains more words for it.

Researchers are still trying to figure out how it works - is it that language influences perception, or does physiology influence language? No definitive proof either way as far as I can tell, but it's an interesting effect nonetheless.

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/news070430-2.html

Science programs get regular criticism here for being overhyped and then delayed with budget overruns as a sweetener.

But the James Webb Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider are not only.   The U.S. military's F-35 is getting renewed dirty looks as the recession continues.   
When I was a lad, the science fair was a dozen schools.   The Google Science Fair has students from around the world, which means I would be unlikely to spend 3 minutes looking at the problem, guess because I had to get to another event, and still place second in the physics competition.

The good old days.

But the prizes are better than the textbooks I got also.   So if you're ages 13 to 18, check it out.   You may a $50,000 scholarship, a 10-day trip to the Galápagos Islands or a three-day site visit to CERN.
In The Economist:
Once seen as the last resort for a bunch of lonely geeks, online-dating services have gradually shed much of the stigma formerly associated with them. 
Sounds great, but when there is money ($3-4 billion per year!) to be made, you take the chance unscrupulous people will exploit the lonely.
Last year Jetplace, an Australian company, admitted that it had been running more than 1,300 false profiles on a matchmaking service that it owned. Dating-site bosses maintain that such instances are rare, but detecting them can be tricky.
"Many unknown dinosaurs await discovery in rock formations all over the world, but some new species are hiding in plain sight. One such animal, described in an in-press Cretaceous Research paper, had one of the largest heads of any dinosaur."

Check it out at Smithsonian online:

Titanoceratops
Sam Noble museum specimen, just re-named Titanoceratops. Image from Flickr user cosmicautumn.
Brian Switek at Wired writes:
Fossil birds don’t often receive good press. Numerous papers pass through the academic literature each year without even a nod from journalists, but the description of a prehistoric stork on the island of Flores proffered such delicious headline bait that reporters could not resist. Although no bigger than its modern-day relatives, this 6-foot stork would have towered over the tiny Flores “hobbits”
Kathryn Gray, a 10-year-old girl in Canada, has become the youngest person ever to discover a supernova.  With a middle name like Aurora, perhaps that isn't a surprise.

The supernova occurred in the galaxy UGC 3378 and is part of the constellation Camelopardalis.   It is about 240 million light-years away.  She discovered it with the help of two other amateur astronomers.

CBC News has the story

Supernova in UGC 3378
cave in the Annamite Mountains of Viet Nam contains a river and jungle and is large enough, in spots, to hold a skyscraper.

Hang Son Doong Cave is part of a network of about 150 caves in central Vietnam near the Laotian border.  The husband and wife team of Howard and Deb Limbert first discovered it in 2009 but only recently returned to scale a huge calcite wall and try to find the cavern's end.
If you're a conspiracy theorist, these are good times.   Leading up to the end of 2012, when the mother of all world endings is scheduled (until the next one), plenty of things would be expected to happen that sets it all in motion and counts as ominous portends, in that 'no-snowflake-in-an-avalanche-takes-the-blame' sort of way.

And one just did.   In Arkansas, thousands of blackbirds fell dead from the sky over the town of Beebe.

California, the U.S. state in the midst of a budget deficit that would make third world nations cringe, didn't stop finding ways to tinker with an already perilous economy.   100 watt incandescent bulbs will no longer be allowed to be sold along with over 720 other laws the legislature found time to pass while being unable to approve a budget.
Like the right, the left has its anti-science contingent and agriculture is ground zero for the zealots in the environmental movement.   To be sure, any science that is misused can have devastating consequences but genetically modified foods - those that can resist blight or grow in poor climates - have done a lot of good for feeding poor people and had no ill effects whereas so-called 'organic' food can only be purchased for reasonable cost by those fortunate enough to live near it.    
Ancient rock art in Western Australia has maintained its colors because it is alive, researchers have determined.   Obviously most art fades in a few hundred years but the "Bradshaw art" has looked good for 40,000.

Bacteria and fungi have made homes in there, preserving the color, though making it difficult to accurately date.   A black fungus like Chaetothyriales cannibalizes its ancestors, making a 'biofilm' that can muddy the waters for research.

Broken glass isn't some hysterical metaphor by zealots who hate business, a PNAS study found that microscopic particles of dust emitted into the atmosphere when dirt breaks apart follow similar fragment patterns as broken glass and other brittle objects.

Dust is important in the study of atmospheric cause and effect because it is not just a big issue, like climate change and the resulting global warming/cooling/variation (your choice, depending on whether or not you are buried in snow at the moment) but also in weather forecasting (so you would have known you were going to be buried in snow during the third warmest year recently).
It's not going to be a surprise to anyone that Julian Assange has become a classic paranoid, especially given the business he has chosen for himself.    You don't publish stolen secret documents without worrying a little - or a lot.

Now he is worried that if the UK extradites him to the US for espionage he will be 
killed "Jack Ruby-style" - a reference to the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald before he could stand trial for the murder of President John F Kennedy.
The Kennedy assassination and then-murder of his shooter has been fodder for conspiracy theorists since it happened in 1963.