CMS

With the future of the Affordable Care Act still up in the air, most of the news coverage has gone to insurance coverage, premiums and Medicaid. And rightly so. But also included in the massive health reform law were a number of innovative measures to improve the quality and value of the medical care we actually get in the doctor’s office. With repeal still on the table, those measures are at risk too. One of those ACA efforts is the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, which reduces Medicare payments to hospitals with relatively high rates of often-preventable hospital readmissions. The…
"We knew that we had indeed done something that was very different and very exciting, but we still didn't expect it to have something to do with physical reality." -Gerald Guralnik, co-developer of the Higgs mechanism Might as well make this entire week "Higgs week" here on Starts With A Bang, given how important yesterday's discovery/announcement was! It isn't every day, after all, that you see a theoretical physicist on the 7PM news. (Video here.) Image credit: KGW.com. (So proud of Portland, OR's local TV station, KGW NewsChannel 8, for being willing to promote science to the whole city…
"Give me a coin. <Takes Coin.> All right. Uh... heads, I win, tails, you lose. Right? <Flips coin.> Tails, you lose." -Ralph Kramden All things being equal, you're well aware that if you flipped a completely fair coin, you'd have a 50% chance of it landing on heads, and a 50% chance of landing on tails (ignoring the side, of course). Image credit: C. Nolan, A. Eckhart and Warner Bros. Pictures, retrieved from http://explow.com/Two-Face. So let's imagine that you flip the coin ten times, and you get seven heads and three tails. Are you worried? You shouldn't be; in order to tell…
I'm at wee bit behind on this here blogging thingie, but there has been a flurry of physics results which are worth a quick peek: CoGENT claims CDM result - claim marginal detection of annual modulation, consistent with light CDM particle. See resonaances for detail Fermi confirms Pamela - say no more, nudge nudge wink wink Talking of blind bats: AMS is on Now for something completely different: Cliff Will explains Gravity Probe B CMS experiment at the LHC hints unsubtly that they might be seeing stringy quantum black holes - I'll believe it when I see the Earth implode... Theorists get…
The day has finally come. In our very first post, back in June, we wrote that the launch of the new website was slated for later in the summer. In fact, by then we had already been at it for months, and if we had known how much longer it was going to take, we might have thrown up our collective hands on the spot. So we are quite pleased to say that our new website is now on line, and it even seems to work most of the time. There are, of course, some new articles to read - a new wrinkle in insulin production, why fish scales shine, molecular Frisbee, and more - as well as press releases and…
This guest post is written by BNL theoretical physicist Raju Venugopalan. After earning his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University in 1992, Venugopalan worked at several universities in the United States and at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, before joining Brookhaven in 1998. He is the leader of the nuclear theory group in Brookhaven's physics department. Raju Venogopalan Last week, members of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced that they've found a phenomenon that's similar to one observed by physicists at Brookhaven…