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"Hey, Anyone Want to Run to Starbucks?"

In a small study of female college students, researchers found that a caffeine supplement seemed to lessen the muscle pain that crops up a day after a challenging workout. Just when we got our membership card into the haughty I-Eshew-Coffee club, they publish this little study. We confess we're having trouble trying to figure out this caffeine thing. Every month we hear of some new revelation as to its mythical powers over Homo sapiens. Is caffeine good for you or is it so dangerous to users that they might as well fry their arteries in coconut oil? We certainly know about the call-to-…

Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery, by Michael Bliss

When it comes to reading, I am new to the field of medical biography, having specifically avoided it for over 20 years just as the mailman of old eschewed taking long walks on his day off. Mercifully, enough time has passed that I no longer toss my popcorn into the inky depths if a patient of mine says hello to me at the movie theater. I am more comfortable integrating medicine into my personal life than I was during my residency, which we commonly referred to as the "Bataan Death March." I no longer leave the hospital ward via an obscure stairway at a speed that makes jackrabbits green…

mantle to microbe: a grad student's first conference

Hi ScienceBlogs... it is GREAT to be here! I just spent the weekend with many of the scientists whose research has comprised the bulk of my reading material (ie brain-biggering) over the last 1.5 years... yikes! I also got to meet many other young scientists hoping to make a career out of this crazy science game. It was totally awesome, and quite a whirlwind. I was at the 2010 Ridge2000 community meeting in Portland, OR. It was a meeting of about 140 people united by their shared interested in better understanding what goes on at mid-ocean ridges. We represented disciplines ranging from…

Geological Predictions for 2009

Geotripper always comes up with the best memes [Oh, wait, looks like Brian at Clastic Detritus might have priority on this one - sorry Brian!] He's made some psychic predictions for 2009. But I think his crystal ball must have some inclusions that are scattering away his mind-energy vibrational tones, because this is what I saw in the melted cheese on my pizza last night: Episodic tremor and slip on the Cascadia subduction zone occurring early this spring will trigger the long-dreaded subduction zone megathrust event. The magnitude ~9 earthquake, and ensuing tsunami, devastate the coastal…

It's the same old story

Denialists claiming to be pro-science. Politicians insisting on a balanced treatment. A population ignorant of the science indignantly rejecting a clear and well-established, evidence-based conclusion. I'm not talking about creationism, although it's exactly the same story. It's the anti-vax position now. That dishonest weasel, Chris Christie, is now talking about respecting the choice of anti-vax parents. Mary Pat and I have had our children vaccinated and we think that it’s an important part of being sure we protect their health and the public health, Christie told reporters here Monday.…

Frauds through and through

Perhaps you've heard of these absurd creationist challenges: Kent Hovind challenge of $250,000 for scientific evidence of evolution; Joseph Mastropaolo's challenge of $10,000 to "prove evolution"; Ray Comfort's challenge of $10,000 to show him a transitional fossil. They all sound like easy money, but don't try: they've loaded the dice in every case. Dana Hunter gives a 19th century example I did not know about before. Alfred Russel Wallace accepted a bet to show the curvature of the earth by a flat-earther, and he did it, too, with a simple and clever observation. You'd think he'd be…

McCain's Own Agents of Intolerance

As the media circus over Jeremiah Wright continues, it should give us pause that the media hasn't decided to focus on John McCain and his embrace of a wide range of religious bigots. Although McCain once called these men "agents of intolerance" in 2000, he has since done a total flip-flop and openly embraced them in the 2008 campaign. Compare this to Barack Obama, who has now fully renounced his former pastor--as he rightfully should have. Whether this slanted coverage is due to racial bias, or just to the fact that these outrageous conservative white religious figures are so ingrained in…

3D Live Peep Show: In the Brain

Imagine being able to observe the health status of your brain streaming real-time in 3D. Medical treatments for a range of neurovascular, neurological, cancerous and trauma-induced conditions would be far more effective, because snapshots over time would reveal the progression of a disease or damage. This is not science fiction. Scientists at Stanford University have reported a new brain imaging technique in the journal Nature Medicine that takes a major step towards this goal. Proof of concept was demonstrated using mice. Figure 3: a) Two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional…

Watson's Genome

Last year, Craig Venter became the first single person to have his genome sequence published (doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050254). That genome was sequenced using the old-school Sanger technique. It marked the second time the complete human genome had been published (which led to some discussion as to whether the publication deserved to be published in a high profile journal like PLoS Biology), and the first time all of the sequence came from a single individual. This past week, Nature published the second complete genome sequence of a single individual (doi:10.1038/nature06884). Like Venter,…

Always Choose "Same"

The beginning of many Ultimate (nee, Frisbee) games is marked by flipping discs to decide which team must pull (kick off) and which goal each team will defend at the start of the game. This is sort of like the coin flip before an American Football game. Two players -- one from each team -- flip a disc in the air. A third player -- a representative from one of the teams -- calls "same" or "different", referring to whether both discs land with the same side (top/bottom or heads/tails) facing up or different sides facing up. If he guesses right, his team gets to choose whether they want to pull…

Chopra, again

Chopra's latest attempt to critique Dawkins is as lame as his first. I summarized that first one as "Well, you can't see love in your fancy microscope, now can you, Dr Smarty Pants?"; this one is the Incredibly Agile Evasive God trick. He's going to play a game and try to define his god and religion into a kind of vague god he's going to conveniently pull of out his pocket, one fuzzy enough that no one can criticize it, and he's also going to engage in some blatant projection: But Dawkins has pulled the same trick that he resorts to over and over. This is the us-versus-them trick. Either you…

They Found the Ultimate Switch

Cells do things (or stop doing things) because of internal homeostatic (or other) regulatory mechanisms, or because of communication with the "outside" via receptor sites located on the cell membrane. To get cells to do what we want (produce more or less of a hormone, for instance, or simply to die as in the case of cancer cells) it would be nice to have a machine that you point at a patient, program a few dials and buttons, and then affect the receptor sites in that person's cells. Well, the production model isn't quite ready yet, but such a device now exists on both the drawing board and…

Ohio School District: WTF????

This is an amazing story, and unfortunately, it is probably being repeated again and again across the country. It begins with a parent who does not want his daugther exposed to science, which is pretty common, but leads to a startling revelation about the local school board. Startling, but I'm afraid, probably not at all uncommon either. In Pymatuning Valley Local School District, in Andover, Ohio, a "concerned" parent, Frank Piper, questioned the school board about the teaching of science in the middle school, where his daughter is enrolled. Specifically, he is concerned because the…

The Art of Not Looking Like a Fool (A fish story)

When I am in the mood to fish, and I'm at the lake, I pay special attention to the water. I notice things moving or splashing. I notice the behavior of the terns, the herons, the bald eagles, the loons, and the mergansers. Those fish eating birds are watching the fish and have a better view than I do, and more incentive as well. But mostly I watch the surface of the water. And here is what I've learned: Most of the time you can't see below the surface, out any distance from the shore. You can't tell what is going on at the surface because waves, or ripples caused by a light breeze,…

Is there springtime for the Abyss?

Think of the changing seasons around you, and the way plants and animals respond to these changes. Trees change color in response to decreasing light levels. Birds migrate, and bears go into hibernation as winter approaches. So, we wonder, what are the seasonal cues in the abyss? Are summer days longer than winter days in the deep-sea? What's the ocean equivalent of rainfall, anyhow? If you've read Craig McClain's "25 Things You Should Know About the Deep-Sea" you know that a) the deep sea-floor is not a stable environment and b) processes and patterns are linked to surface production.…

How Do You Review Avatar?

Maybe you tell us why they're blue. First the name. Avatar--if you play computer games, you may know this very well--is a character you use inside an unreal world. The word Avatar has its origins in Indian mythology. An Avatar (ava-tara in Sanskrit) is god's visit to earth to fix something that is broken. Vishnu, one of the three gods who protects creation, by necessity visits earth often. Vishnu, the puranas declare, is dark-blue in color (the original story teller was inspired by blue oceans, blue sky?). Thank you, Scientific Indian. Maybe you go pretentious. The point, though, is that…

What is a grade?

Grades are all over the place, but what are they? Well, I guess there are a few questions. What is a grade? What is the grade supposed to be? Why do we give grades? I think the grade is supposed to be a measure of a students' understanding of the material. Probably everyone would agree with that description. But, it is still a bit tricky. Who (or what) determines what a student should understand? Who determines what an "A" means? Fortunately, there is not a governing body (yet at least in physics) that says what an "A" grade means. It is left up to the expert evaluations of faculty…

Spindle Cells and Humor

Since the science of humor is in the news today, I thought I'd point out an interesting tidbit from a recent Cerebral Cortex paper: The speculation that humor may be a uniquely human cognitive trait (Bergson 1924; Caron 2002) prompted our third hypothesis: humor will activate both anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and frontoinsula cortex (FI), the 2 regions in which an evolutionarily recent neuron type, the Von Economo cells (previously termed ''spindle neurons''), are present. A review of the functional imaging literature reveals that the Von Economo cell regions, particularly FI, are active…

A brief note on the importance of science journalists

Carl Zimmer Live Blogging The Mars Methane Mystery: Aliens At Last?, reports that: 2:14 Lisa Pratt of Indiana University is talking biology. She is stoked. 2:15 Okay, I mean as stoked as scientists get at press conferences where they talk about photic zones. You can see it in the rise of her eyebrows. Now, a reporter used to covering press conferences on the steps of a courthouse or a state or federal capitol would not catch that as "stoked." But Carl Zimmer covers scientists, and he knows what we look like when we're excited. That means his article about this will convey her excitement, and…

Genome-Wide Associations in Asians

Genome-Wide Association Study in Asian Populations Identifies Variants in ETS1 and WDFY4 Associated with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus: In this study, we first conducted a genome-wide association study in a Hong Kong Chinese population, followed by replication in three other cohorts from Mainland China and a cohort from Thailand, which totaled 3,300 Asian patients and 4,200 ethnically and geographically matched controls. We identified novel variants in ETS1 and WDFY4 associated with SLE with genome-wide significance and confirmed the association of HLA locus, STAT4, BLK, IRF5, BANK1, TNFSF,…

Who believes in the evil eye?

A friend pointed me to a new Pew survey, Many Americans Not Dogmatic About Religion. It shows the general finding that though Americans are a religious people, they're moderately ecumenical in their practices and beliefs. I was concerned in particular though with the resurgence of supernatural beliefs with the decline of institutional religious orthodoxy. The back story to this is that many psychologists posit that humans have an innate predisposition toward supernatural beliefs because of the cognitive biases we're hardwired with. For example, it isn't a coincidence that almost all human…

Irking accomplished. Continue.

Draw Mohammed Day is over now, and we're getting the reactions now. Some people didn't get it, including Greg Epstein. There is a difference between making fun of religious or other ideas on a TV show that you can turn off, and doing it out in a public square where those likely to take offense simply can't avoid it. These chalk drawings are not a seminar on free speech; they are the atheist equivalent of the campus sidewalk preachers who used to irk me back in college. This is not even "Piss Christ," Andres Serrano's controversial 1987 photograph of a crucifix in urine. It is more like…

Marshall Ganz on how the President lost his way

Marshall Ganz is a legendary organizer, and one of the architects of President Obama's remarkable grassroots campaign of 2008. When I was doing Camp Obama, the trainers were rightly in awe of him. Which makes his diagnosis of where the President has gone astray especially important: This dramatic reversal is not the result of bad policy as such; the president made some real policy gains. It is not a consequence of a president who is too liberal, too conservative or too centrist. And it is not the doing of an administration ignorant of Washington's ways. Nor can we honestly blame the system…

Creationists don't understand fossils

This headline is hardly news, but still noteworthy. A few days ago, Todd Wood (a young earth creationist from Bryan College, in Dayton, TN) noted an article in ICR's Acts & Facts on trilobite tracks by his predecessor at Bryan, creationist Kurt Wise: "Why would dozens of feet of rock have tracks but not the animals that made them?" asks Wise. He proposes that the Flood uniquely solves this dilemma. He quotes Wise: What if, when the "fountains of the great deep were broken up" (Genesis 7:11), the spreading waters surprised the trilobites living on the ocean bottom? As the water became…

Vietnamese are enriched by ethnic diversity!

There is a question on the World Values Survey which allows people to give a number corresponding to their position on a spectrum where 0 = "Ethnic diversity erodes a country´s unity" and 10 = "Ethnic diversity enriches my life." Below the fold I've placed the countries where this was asked as well as the mean values. In other words, the proportions in each class were used as weights. The results frankly surprised me. Below is an ordered list: Ethnic Diversity Enriches Jordan 2.9 Ghana 4.8 Egypt 5 Thailand 5.3 Georgia 5.4 Bulgaria 5.5 Moldova 5.7 Cyprus 5.7…

The race-mixing Vice President

Over the past few months I've been reading books on American history seeing that I am American and I should know a bit about the country which I call home. For example, right now I'm reading Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877. I was surprised when I stumbled upon Richard Mentor Johnson, the 9th Vice President of the United States, between 1836 and 1840: Following the war, Johnson returned to the House of Representatives, and was elevated to the Senate in 1819 to fill the seat vacated by John J. Crittenden, who resigned to become Attorney General. As his constituency…

Out of Africa: by the skulls?

Update: John Hawks weighs in. Here is the abstract. Several people have asked about a new paper coming out that uses the diversity in skulls to "prove" the Out of Africa hypothesis. The paper is going to be out in Nature yesterday. Yes, you read that right, it was supposed to be on the site on the 19th, but it still seems embargoed. But here is the headline from ScienceDaily, New Research Proves Single Origin Of Humans In Africa. Press releases are generally a little inflated, so no worries. The basic gist is that the authors used the variation in skulls to trace population bottlenecks…

No Free Pass for Ideologies That Happen to Be Religious

While this letter I found at AmericaBlog.com deals with religiously-motivated intolerance towards gays and lesbians, I think it's going to be germane (at least tangentially so) to the current stem cell discussion over at What's New in Life Science: We as a group have become tolerant of intolerance. Whenever anyone justifies their bigotry with what I call DHRB (deeply held religious beliefs) we roll over as if that were the end of the discussion. We have confused respecting a persons right to hold whatever religious beliefs they chose with respecting those beliefs. The truth is there are…

$1,000 Genomes and Metadata

Matthew Herper rounds up some of the discussion about the decreasing cost of genomics. But one thing that hasn't been discussed much at all is the cost of all of the other things needed to make sense of genomes, like metadata. I briefly touched on this issue previously: A related issue is metadata--the clinical and other non-genomic data attached to a sequence. Just telling me that a genome came from a human isn't very useful: I want to know something about that human. Was she sick or healthy, and so on. These metadata too, will have to be standardized: I can't say one of genome came from…

Digby, Political Inertia Is Preferred...

...at least by the Blue Dog Democrats. Digby, in discussing the history of the demobilization of the Democratic rank-and-file, observes (boldface mine; italics original): Clinton was pretty good at speaking in several layers of code, but he had terrible problems in 1994, even though he delivered the economic plan he promised. And that's because that economic plan was based on the abstraction of reducing the deficit which is a conservative talking point --- even if not one Republican voted for it. He failed to get health care, of course, and passed NAFTA, another Republican initiative. (There…

If the Global Banking System Nearly Collapses and Nobody Reports It...

...does it make a sound? On Sept. 18, 2008, the banking system almost collapsed--no, really. A while back, I noted that there are at least two classes of media bias: one involves the interpretation of a set of agreed upon facts, while the other involves decisions as to what those facts are, or, even if something happened (an aside: while this was not controversial to the science-oriented commenters, this distinction is apparently beyond the ken of at least one journalism professor). Anyway, this story, unearthed by C-SPAN, falls into the latter category (in the video, go to the 2:05 mark…

A Benefit of the Human Microbiome Project: Putting the "99% of Bacteria Are Unculturable" Canard to Rest

One of the common sayings in microbiology that drives me up a wall is the notion that 99% of all bacteria can't be grown in the lab. This false statement stems from the observation that if you take any sample (soil, water, clinical samples) and look under a microscope we see many more bacterial cells that contain DNA than we can grow. The problem is that, if you look at the paper that claimed this, they attempted to grow bacteria on a single, rich medium. One weekend, when I was a post-doc, I did a very simple comparison. I took standard rich lab medium ('nutrient agar' which is basically…

Helsinki Finland Bird List

Talitiainen (Great Tit), Parus major. Photographed in Hietaniemen hautausmaa (Hietaniemi cemetery), Helsinki, Finland. Image: GrrlScientist, 24 November 2008 [larger view]. Here's my list of birds seen in the Helsinki area of Finland during my two visits. Even though I only visited for 8 days in November 2008, I actually went out on a birding trip with several grad students from the University of Helsinki, while I only once went birding during my much longer February/March 2009 visit -- to see the Eagle-owls that are nesting on the Lutheran Church (name?) in downtown Helsinki. Helsinki…

Bird flu optimists and pessimists

A dead swan in a Dresden, Germany zoo signals the return of bird flu to that country (AFP). It is not the only locale where the disease is reappearing after a lull. Laos and Thailand have cases in birds and Thailand has just registered its second death in a week, a nine year old girl. Several more cases are hospitalized and over a hundred are on a watch list because of symptoms that might indicate infection (Reuters). Vietnam is looking on with worry. Deputy Agriculture Minister Bui Ba Bong said bird flu, which erupted across much of Asia in late 2003, often hit Thailand first and broke out…

The "bridge" fuel that wasn't

Among those who spend their working lives and/or spare time worrying about climate change, there are many subjects that still provoke heated debates, so to speak. Chief among them is the wisdom or folly of turning to natural gas as a "bridge" between the carbon-intensive oil- and coal-dominated present and the clean renewable future that we all know is coming sooner or later. The opponents just found their case a little bit stronger thanks to another controversial issue: nuclear power. Natural gas is, as anyone with a basic grasp of the fundamentals of greenhouse gas forcings can tell you,…

Wreckers

Some guy named Quentin Letts made a list of the 50 people who wrecked Britain. I'm a bit handicapped in reading it, since I don't know who Quentin Letts is, and I have never heard of 9/10ths of the people being damned by him, but I did recognize a few, like Tony Blair and this guy: Anti-religionist Dawkins, the best-known English dissenter since Darwin, is the merciless demander of provable fact. He is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and tours the world lecturing the elites of the West that they are stupid to believe in any god. He proselytises…

Open science, peer review and the flu

We had a great discussion in the comments yesterday after I published my NJ trees from some of the flu sequences. If I list all the wonderful pieces of advice that readers shared, I wouldn't have any time to do the searches, but there are a few that I want to mention before getting down to work and posting my BLAST results. Here were some of the great suggestions and pieces of advice; 1. Do a BLAST search. Right! I can't believe I didn't do that first thing, I think the trees I got surprised me so much all sense flew out of my brain. 2. Show us the multiple alignments. Okay. I'll…

Cell phones and honeybees

There's a curious story in the UK newspaper, The Independent, on mobile phones and the collapse of bee colonies (hat tip Randy, aka MRK). I don't quite know what to make of it, although I am skeptical: [Some scientists] are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe -…

The Synapse, Vol.1, n.2

Welcome to the second edition of The Synapse, the new neuroscience carnival. This time, you have a puzzle to solve. Next to each entry, there is an image depicting the structural formula of a neurotransmitter, neurohormone or neuromodulator. Your job is to figure out what they are and leave the answers in the comments (or in your own posts that link to this edition). If I have managed to figure out MovableType by now, you should be able to click on images to enlarge. Watch out - not everything is mammalian, or even vertebrate neurochemistry! The winner - whoever is the first to…

Human Salmonella from pet food

So we have more Salmonella contamination out and about. This one is in dry pet food. But it wasn't the pets that were getting the Salmonella: Salmonella-contaminated dry pet food sickened at least 79 people, including many young children, and could still be dangerous, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday. Even though the affected brands have been recalled and the factory in Pennsylvania closed, pet owners could still have the cat and dog kibble in their homes, the CDC said. [snip] "Dry pet food has a 1-year shelf life. Contaminated products identified in…

The Iraq-Pakistan border is not a problem

This is the first, and I hope the last, time I come anywhere near defending Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, but I want to make a more general point so I'll swallow hard and do it. This is about his supposed gaffe wherein he seems to think Iraq and Pakistan share a border: D[iane] S[awyer]: Do you agree the situation in Afghanistan is precarious and urgent? J[ohn] M[cCain]: Well, I think it's very serious. I mean, it's a serious situation. DS: Not precarious and urgent? JM: Oh I- I don't- know wha- exactly whether- we can run through the vocabulary, but it's a very- it's a ((v…

Banning the Bag

In San Francisco, large grocery stores are no longer allowed to give out the disposable, non-biodegradable plastic bags that have formed a giant patch of plastic (twice the size of Texas) in the Pacific Ocean and caused a host of other problems. The Whole Foods supermarket chain will halt plastic-bag distribution on Earth Day this year, and China's ban on plastic bags will take effect on June 1. In light of China's actions, the Guardian looked at other countries that have taken steps to ban or limit the distribution of plastic bags: At least 40 countries, states and major cities have imposed…

It's not a freaking spider bite

Over at White Coat Underground, Pal has the post that I've been meaning to write. Earlier this summer, a family member posted on Facebook that a friend of her daughter was nursing a "nasty spider bite" that she got while camping in Michigan. Her post claimed it was a Brown Recluse bite. Being my usually buttinski self, I posted and told her that it was really, really unlikely to be a brown recluse bite, and that the friend-of-the-daughter-of-the-relative should hie thee to her physician and get the "bite" checked out. I told her that rather than a spider bite, it could be a Staph infection…

Iowa professor again poised to defend "intelligent design"

Via From Right 2 Left, I see that U of Iowa physics professor. Fred Skiff, will be speaking on intelligent design next week: At the next "Finding God at Iowa" Lunch Forum, Fred Skiff, University of Iowa professor of physics and astronomy, will speak on the theory of intelligent design. The forum will be held from noon to 1 p.m. March 2, in the Ohio State Room (Room 343) on the third floor of the Iowa Memorial Union. Skiff will offer "A 'Fireside Chat' on Intelligent Design." He will discuss some of the questions underlying the debate over intelligent design in nature, such as: What are the…

I stroked a pipistrelle

So the other day I got to stroke a live pipistrelle. In the adjacent photo, Mike Pawling (chairman of the Hampshire Bats Group) is holding the bat; Vicki is touching the bat's back. Mike and his wife Chris hold permits and everything, and they take care of rescued bats that have been found injured, or have been dropped by their mothers. Pipistrelles are certainly Britain's - and probably Europe's - most abundant bat; they are highly adaptable little bats (part of the vesper bat group, or Vespertilionidae) that inhabit cities and suburbs as well as woodlands and other places. Here are just a…

The tiniest snakes

More snakes, because - thanks to Dave Hone - I have some more pictures to use (and, I'll be honest, at least some of my posts are 'picture-driven'). We've looked previously at the unusual, mostly small, worm-like, burrowing snakes grouped together as the scolecophidians here. In that article, however, I didn't really emphasise the small size of some scolecophidian species. This photo - taken by Dave in Mexico (is that Dino Frey holding the animal?) - makes the point well. The smallest scolecophidians are Caribbean leptotyphlopids (aka threadsnakes, wormsnakes or slender blindsnakes)…

NC Symphony on the Green

Last night, my daughter and I went to hear the NC Symphony at the Green here in Southern Village. The entire square was packed (a couple of thousand people?). It was very enjoyable and an interesting choice of pieces. What was more interesting, and I am not sure I liked it, is the chosen ORDER of the pieces. The first half was filled with classics, the second half with pop stuff, including some not-well-known pieces. I am not sure that worked very well.... The concert started with Johann Strauss Sr.'s Radetzky March - a very powerful piece of music. But there is a reason why that is…

Pale Blue Dot III.4 - Alien Farts Stinking Up Mars

A couple of years ago, some research groups reported preliminary indications of Methane of Mars. At very low concentration - about 10 parts per million - but in the highly oxidised Martian atmosphere, methane has a short lifetime, and any amount implies either an unusual recent event, or ongoing production. There aren't that many ways to make methane... Allen from JPL discussed this issue. I think the suggestion that it was suit ventilation from the secret alien base was meant jokingly; but methanogenic subsurface bacteria would do to produce the flow of methane necessary to sustain that…

Call that a meteorite?

As reported by Uncertain Principles and Bad Astronomy, there was a meteorite impact in Northern Norway - Tromsø area. Initial reports were "impact compared to atomic bomb"... here is the proper report, including seismic signal - really did impact. Current reports suggest it was a ~ 10kg rocky meteorite. Meteors hit at 10-40 km/sec, typically, or 108-9 J/kg of energy. Now there are 4.2 GigaJoules per ton of TNT. So the impact energy was actually about the same as a few hundred pounds of explosive, comparable, say, to a couple of 500pound USAF bombs. Consistent with the eyewitness accounts.…

top that: quark soup, time travel and the end of the internet

From Gordon via Chad Fermilab is claiming single top quark decay to b quark + W ie the accelerator produced a t-quark as part of some quark/anti-quark ensemble, without simultaneously producing an anti-t-quark. So what does this all mean... well, there are three generations of quarks - the up and down, from which all normal baryonic matter is made (ie protons and neutrons); strange and charming; and bottom and top (aka beauty and truth) - with top being the heaviest. The three generations, or "flavours", essentially duplicate each other in key properties, except the successive quark pairs…