Assorted news

I was just pondering the appalling lack of interesting science news the other day, and then I got back home and found these: CSI Ambleside...

The DAMA collaboration is claiming strong evidence for WIMPy Cold Dark Matter, based on an annual modulation in their scintillator experiment.

Ah, I was wondering why Stanford had a non-detection by their CDM detector group as a lead news item last week.

Sean has rounded up a guest blogger to explain this result, or lack thereof.

There is a new class of high critical temperature superconductors.
Non-cuprates, based on FeAs - that is iron/arsenic for those with a limited perspective on the periodic table (man, those physicists do some complicated chemistry - why so many metals?).
h/t Incoherent Ponderer, but the real info is over at nanoscale views with updates here and here.
And the discovery paper

I am also bemused by the linear optical absorbitvity of graphene sheets - 0.023 opacity doesn't sound like much, but that is per sheet.
Atom thick sheet.

Now contemplate 0.977ⁿ in the limit of moderately large n.
Consider, for example a sheet of graphene only 1000 atoms thick.
If this holds, that is absorptivity of 0.99999999992 or so, across the relevant band.
That could be useful.

But, the real news is: CSI: Ambleside by Half Man, Half Biscuit is coming out next week.

The third song, "Bad Losers on Yahoo Chess"argh "Blue Badge Abuser"... is from the new album.