Before you started reading this sentence, when was the last time you read about ecology in the news? Probably not too recently, according to results of a new study published in the latest issue of the ecological journal Ecosphere. The study's authors, collaborators from Northern Kentucky University and Brigham Young University, noted that while the bulk of scientific studies escape the notice of journalists, ecological research in particular appears to be under-covered by the media. They set out to study this trend in more detail in order to develop recommendations for improving relationships between journalists and ecologists--with the ultimate goal of increasing public awareness of ecological studies.

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A new result by the CMS collaboration has been produced today on top quark physics. For those of you who only get triggered by the search of new particles or new forces, the study of "yesterday's signals", such as top quarks, is boring and uninformative; but high-energy physics is a rich field of research, and we extend our understanding of subnuclear physics no less by getting to know how exactly top quarks get produced in proton-proton collisions, than we do by placing limits on ephemeral particles (SUSY ones, e.g.).

So I salute the new measurement as an important advance. Using over one inverse femtobarn of data collected in 2011 (about a hundred trillion proton-proton collisions), CMS was able to study top quark pairs in great detail.
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In time for Valentine's Day, researchers have determined which champagne glass size will give drinkers the optimal experience. 
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Lately, my wife and I have been staring slack-jawed at elementary school options, little ropes of drool hanging zombie-like from the corners of our mouths  – and so we’ve decided to cede our choice to the numbers.

But when you peel back the data, things like high test scores mean next to nothing about school quality – isn’t it likely that socioeconomics and not the school itself created these high test scores? My wife and I want education causation and not just correlation – a school that creates more education than should be predicted by our (reasonable) genetics and (low) income.

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While anti-science politicians in Washington, D.C. block science solutions to harvesting more fish, a crucial piece of information about salmon isn't being considered; the numbers without a science solution only look good because of the massive influx of hatchery-raised fish that return to spawn in the wild. Only about ten percent of the fall-run Chinook salmon spawning in California's Mokelumne River are naturally produced wild salmon.
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Recent research examined suicide rates north and south of the border between 1960 and 2008 and revealed the widening gap in suicide rates between Scotland and England and Wales is largely due to the number of young Scottish men taking their lives.

The suicide rate for both men and women was lower in Scotland than the rest of the United Kingdom until around 1968 when it overtook the other two but suicide rates among men continued to rise on both sides of the border until the early 1990s when rates in England and Wales began to fall. The gap between north and south widened markedly.
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Efforts at obfuscation and fomenting false concerns by kooky anti-science food activists aren't working.  They spent the better part of the last decade blocking science advancements in food security insisting 'the science isn't settled' and muttering Frankenfood denialist jingoisms, but it seems to be failing. Farmland devoted to improved crops went up over eight percent last year, to 395 million acres. Agriculture strongholds like Brazil, India and Canada join the U.S. in picking science over advocacy.
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The gap between atheists and the religious seems at times to be an impossible divide, almost as if believers and non-believers come from different species. What separates the secular from the sacred? An "Ask the Brains" question on the Scientific American site recently inquired as to any differences between the brain of an atheist and the brain of a religious person. Andrew Newberg, the director of research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in Philadelphia, responded that, yes, in fact, there are some small but perceptible differences between the brains of believers and non-believers. -->

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Every 6 months or so these days it feels like we find the earliest animal life. More often than not, said life is something ugly that turns up in a bucket after dissolving rocks in acid.

Well, it's been a while, but here is the latest candidate:



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Writing in the most recent issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, an international team of collaborators has described nitrogen (N) as "the largest pollution problem in coastal marine waters." Excessive amounts of N sometimes fuel blooms of algae that can outcompete or even poison other organisms, and evaporation of N into the atmosphere in the form of nitrous oxide can cause damage to our delicate ozone layer. Most of the nitrogen along our coasts is deposited there by rivers that pick up N-rich sewage, fertilizer runoff, and atmospheric deposits caused by the burning of fossil fuels; in other words, nitrogen is yet another form of anthropogenic pollution.

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Le Chatelier's Principle is a neat concept, but too often it's expressed in a not so wonderful way. Here is a  textbook definition from a popular college textbook, fifth edition:
A change in any of the factors that determine the equilibrium conditions of a system will cause the system in such a manner as to reduce or counteract the effect of the change.
With such a definition, students often imagine the system as almost having a consciousness or a purpose. Wikipedia's definition also leaves something to be desired: -->

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Accessing the absolute latest in scientific communications directly by the independent amateur or citizen scientist has been a financially daunting prospect for decades; practically impossible.

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"Sex education is failing to reduce adolescent birthrates in conservative states, according to a new study" begins a somber Livescience piece. Oooh, that's juicy.  We all want to talk about how dumb conservatives are. And if it's a study - and it is, the writer says it right there - they are not injecting any personal bias.
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Perfluorinated Polar Bears! 
No, this is not an exasperated exclamation by Captain Haddock, but might well be a shout of surprise at learning that Canadians have been searching for compounds of that nature in these snowy animals.  But why should Scott Mabury and his group at the University of Toronto be looking for them?
 
The simple answer is that they are terribly persistent in the environment.  Bit odd, one might link, considering that Fluorine is the most reactive of all the elements in the periodic table.  So reactive[1], in fact, that
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You have seen it already two months ago, but those were "preliminary" results. Now both CMS and ATLAS have produced full-fledged documents (CMS here, ATLAS here) describing their respective combinations of different Higgs boson searches, using data collected in 2011 by the two experimental apparata at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
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It seems counterintuitive to think that hunting a threatened species could actually help conserve it, since conservation efforts usually aim to increase and stabilize populations. However, hunting can be a lucrative business, generating funding that both fuels management efforts and keeps locals more inclined to tolerate the presence of animals that would be considered a nuisance if they weren't so economically useful. Perhaps even more important is the fact that land that is set aside as habitat for human prey remains undeveloped, providing a home to many other species of wildlife as well as to populations of the individuals being hunted.

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If you have ever noticed the vast differences between a chihuahua and a wolf, then you are well aware of the remarkable changes that can be introduced by the domestication process. Although many of the most famous traits of our domesticated animals are the result of selective breeding, others may arise--either intentionally or unintentionally--from particular husbandry practices. The importance of this latter influence was recently highlighted by European collaborators investigating the mitochondrial diversity of domestic goats (Capra hircus) on Corsica.

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The use of stem cells for cosmetics and cosmetic procedures is exploding even while many important questions remain.

How legitimate are these stem cell cosmetic products and procedures?

Are they safe and effective?

What kinds of medical conditions are they being used to treat?

I also recently did a post on another area of medicine that is growing involving stem cells: sports medicine. There too much of what is happening is not backed up by published science.

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Alzheimer’s disease is a terrible and devastating condition. Not just for the patients themselves, but also for their loved ones. Witnessing the fading of shared memories from the minds of the afflicted ones, until no glimpse of recognition remains in their eyes when they look at you is a highly unpleasant experience.

   

Difference between a normal, healthy brain (left) and a brain of a person with Alzheimer's disease (right).

(Source: Wikimedia Commons, user: Garrondo)

   

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After reading Sascha's excellent article [Robopocalypse Now] regarding the effect and direction of robotic/AI development and its coevolutionary influences, it occurred to me that perhaps a shift in how we view such developments could promote a more intuitive understanding of what is occurring.
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