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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Animal behavior scientists are teaming up with engineers to devise new kinds of research tools: mechatronic animal models. Or you could just call them robots.

RobosquirrelRobosquirrel was made as part of a collaboration between UC Davis, West Chester University, and San Diego State University.

Is that a real squirrel?

Nope! Chuck Testa.

That was a joke...Chuck Testa was not involved with this study. But given his talents, maybe he should be involved with ethology research robots.

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Last week I was introduced to an intriguing little brain game that could very well prevent Alzheimer's disease, with the nice side effect of helping to save the world.  The game was demonstrated no less than three times by a commenter on a previous article reading between the lines of some recent science-related news.
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If you are reading this then the recent research by Brian Pasley and colleagues in which speech sounds are reconstructed from measured brain activity has probably already come onto your neuro-radar. It's certainly drawn a lot of media coverage, with some great commentaries including this from Mo Costandi in the Guardian.

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Hey, you got simulation in my roleplay! Hey, you got roleplay in my simulation! Wait, it's two great tastes that taste great together!

Thus my students surprised me when they tossed in a role-based stance into what I thought was a straightforward systems engineering analysis. Herein lies the tale.

Background: I'm teaching a course in space mission operations that focuses heavily on scenario analysis. I presented them with a case where they had to balance risk versus success for a space-borne telescope. In rocket science, risk is never something you can eliminate, no matter how much money or resources you toss at it. That's part of what makes it rocket science. Risk can be reduced, mitigated, or even accepted, but never eliminated.

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The problem, in a word, is language.
Carl Zimmer’s recent article Can Life Be Defined in Three Words raised just that issue.
He referred to the many attempts that have been made by scientists to define what life is, and in doing so, unwittingly exposed some of the main problems in reaching a definition of life.
He described Radu Popa’s study in which Popa went to the trouble of counting the definitions of life, and gave some of the definitions. For example, “Some scientists define life as something capable of metabolism.”
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In evolutionary biology, Cope’s rule refers to the trend towards increasing body size in a lineage over geological time periods. Put simply, the rule says that members of a lineage get bigger over time. The rule has received mixed support, applying to some lineages (such as fossil mammals), but suffering from inconclusive evidence in others (Mesozoic birds, living mammals).

To explain the occurrence of the trend in some lineages, two explanations can be put forward:

• A passive mechanism: body size evolution passively drifts away from a lower boundary, an idea favored by S.J. Gould, among others.

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Robopocalypse, see also here on Boing Boing, is a novel by roboticist Daniel Wilson, who foretells a global apocalypse brought on by artificial Intelligence (AI) that hijacks automation systems globally and uses them to wipe out humanity.

Computers and now also robots make amazing progress these years and out-compete humans in everything but snakes and ladders. Many fear that humans will soon be the robot overlords’ Neanderthals.

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Peru is at the cutting edge, the forefront--nay, Peru is a veritable trendsetter, trailblazer, and spearheader--because Peru, alone in the world, has decided to set a quota for Humboldt squid.

Before you go off in a huff about how ridiculous I'm being*, let me explain why this is kind of a big deal. First, the Humboldt squid fishery is the biggest squid--the biggest invertebrate--fishery in the world. Second, no single country (or group of countries, for that matter) has ever set a quota for Humboldt squid before. That means fishermen have, by and large, been free to catch as many as they can.
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The deadliest mass extinction that we know of, 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period,  took a long time to kill most of Earth's life, and it killed in stages. It wasn't superior to sudden extinctions just because it was gradual.

By the end of the Permian period, Earth was almost a lifeless planet. Around 90 percent of all living species disappeared then, in what scientists have called "The Great Dying." Chemical evidence buried in rocks formed during this major extinction can tell science part of what happened.
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Bacteria can multiply rapidly, potentially doubling every 20 minutes in ideal conditions but this exponential growth phase is preceded by a period known as lag phase, where no increase in cell number is seen. Lag phase was first described in the 19th Century, and was assumed to be needed by bacteria to prepare to exploit new environmental conditions - they are basically Zombies. Beyond this, surprisingly little is known about lag phase, other than bacteria are metabolically active in this period. But exactly what are bacteria doing physiologically during that time?
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As you know, 74 people were killed this Wednesday when Egyptian soccer fans stampeded into a bottleneck after a 3-1 hometown upset win. While certainly tragic, it’s far from irrational: it turns out the behavioral economics were stacked against them.

Take the link between football and domestic violence. In2011 economists Gordon Dahl and David Card showed that when a home team loses, domestic violence in the home city increases by 10- percent. On police reports, you can see reports start to rise in the final quarter as a loss looks likely. Then reports peak an hour after the game and return to normal a couple hours later.

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