Links for 2010-06-01

"It is official: the OPERA experiment (above, in a sketch) has found its first tau lepton in one of its bricks (a picture of a brick is shown below). What gives, I am hearing some of you ask. It means that a muon neutrino launched from the CERN laboratories in a 730 km course underground has oscillated into its brother, a tau neutrino, and that the latter has materialized into the charged partner, the tau lepton, inside the OPERA detector.

In other words, the observation spells the direct detection of muon neutrino oscillations into tau neutrinos! This is great news for the whole community of high-energy physics (many dull writers would write "great nu's" I guess). "

"[A]las, interactions amongst scientists aren't always so collegial. In fact, one's peers can be downright petty, obstructive and sometimes even malign. In consigning only goodness to the Acknowledgements section, we're missing out on a brilliant opportunity to tell the story of our work in all of its entirely. In this spirit, I hereby propose introducing a new section to the standard scientific manuscript: the Disacknowledgements Section. This would honor all the people who obstructed the research; the cast of characters - shall we refer to them as anti-authors - without whom the work would have proceeded much more briskly and less painfully. "

"People who ate the most full-fat dairy had a 69% lower risk of cardiovascular death than those who ate the least. Otherwise stated, people who mostly avoided dairy or consumed low-fat dairy had more than three times the risk of dying of coronary heart disease or stroke than people who ate the most full-fat diary."