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August 24, 2011

3:01 AM | A Higgs Setback: Did Stephen Hawking Just Win the Most Outrageous Bet in Physics History?

A few years ago, celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking was widely reported in the press to have placed a provocative public bet that the LHC (along with all particle accelerators that preceded it) would never find the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” believed responsible for having imbued massive particles with their mass when the [...]

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A Little News, Two Approximations, And A Few Graphical Derivatives To Go With Your Coffee

Good Morning! While drinking my coffee after getting a full night's sleep, (hooray for happily sleeping seven month olds!!!), I came across a cute little satellite and some useful approximations.ESTCUBE 1The Estonian University of Tartu has successfully placed a student built and student operated cubesat into orbit. The satellite will deploy an electrodynamic tether and test the ability of the device to propel the space craft by exploiting the force between the electric charge […]

Jones P., Muñoz G., Ragsdale M. & Singleton D. (2008). The general relativistic infinite plane, American Journal of Physics, 76 (1) 73. DOI: 10.1119/1.2800354

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Algae Can Cover One-Twelfth of U.S. Annual Fuel Consumption

A new study shows that the U.S. land and water resources could likely support the growth of enough algae to produce up to 25 billion gallons (94.6 million m3) of algae-based renewable biodiesel a year, one-twelfth of the country’s yearly needs. Read more »

Venteris, E., Skaggs, R., Coleman, A. & Wigmosta, M. (2013). A GIS Cost Model to Assess the Availability of Freshwater, Seawater, and Saline Groundwater for Algal Biofuel Production in the United States, Environmental Science & Technology, 47 (9) 4840-4849. DOI: 10.1021/es304135b

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TMI Friday: Batteries should NOT be included

There are some days when you have to ask yourself, just what is the deal with men. I don't mean our general demeanour, or the pretensions of superiority over other genders. No, I'm talking about the strange things that men decide to do when left alone for too long.The men who happily dangle their members inside bottles, or in reach of the spinning blades of a vacuum cleaner not thinking of the consequences. With this in mind, we arrive at a case study by Bedi et al, where they […]

Bedi N., El-Husseiny T., Buchholz N. & Masood J. (2010). 'Putting lead in your pencil': self-insertion of an unusual urethral foreign body for sexual gratification, JRSM Short Reports, 1 (2) 18-18. DOI: 10.1258/shorts.2010.010014

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Glucose Leaves A Bitter Taste As Cockroaches Learn to Avoid Insecticide Baits

Populations of the German cockroach (Blattella germanica) have rapidly evolved to be repelled by the glucose in insecticide baits that are used to kill them. Scientists found that the cockroaches had a ‘re-organised’ sense of taste which makes them perceive the glucose in the insecticide bait as bitter and repellent rather than sweet. Researchers first […]

Wada-Katsumata, A., Silverman, J. & Schal, C. (2013). Changes in Taste Neurons Support the Emergence of an Adaptive Behavior in Cockroaches, Science, 340 (6135) 972-975. DOI: 10.1126/science.1234854

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“Race, Intelligence, and Genetics For Curious Dummies”

Last week, a cicada-like re-emergence of “Bell Curve” claims of a genetic determinacy between intelligence and race surfaced in a Heritage Foundation special report on immigration. The report drew on Jason Richwine’s Harvard dissertation, “IQ and Immigration Policy.” Amid the furor, the Atlantic’s Ta Nehisi Coates was ready with the history. He wrote in [...]

Zakharia, F., Basu, A., Absher, D., Assimes, T., Go, A., Hlatky, M., Iribarren, C., Knowles, J., Li, J., Narasimhan, B. & Sidney, S. (2009). Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans, Genome Biology, 10 (12) DOI: 10.1186/gb-2009-10-12-r141

Mountain, J. & Risch, N. (2004). Assessing genetic contributions to phenotypic differences among 'racial' and 'ethnic' groups, Nature Genetics, 36 (11s) DOI: 10.1038/ng1456

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August 24, 2011

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