MIC

What would you say are the strongest three factors associated with the salaries of major-league baseball players? According to a popular, well-established algorithm, the main influential factors are walks, intentional walks and runs batted in. How much does he earn? But a paper recently published in Science reports on a new data analysis tool, which is able to find interesting relationships and trends in complex data sets - relationships that are invisible to other types of statistical analyses. This could be a big deal: Large data sets with thousands of variables are increasingly common in…

by Elizabeth Grossman On August 28, 2008 at 10:53 p.m., a massive explosion and fire, caused by a runaway chemical reaction, ripped through the Bayer CropScience pesticide plant in Institute, West Virginia. It killed two workers and injured eight employees, two contractors, and six fire-fighters, all of whom were treated for possible toxic chemical exposure. On January 20, 2011, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) released its investigation report. Each of its key findings points to a disaster waiting to happen. The incident occurred at the facility's Methomyl-Larvin…

Liz and Celeste are on vacation, so we're re-posting some content from our old site. By Liz Borkowski, orginally posted 12/3/09 Twenty-five years ago, thousands of residents of Bhopal, India awoke in the middle of the night struggling to breathe. A Union Carbide pesticide plant had leaked 40 tons of methyl isocyanate, a highly toxic substance that had escaped in gas form and spread quickly through the densely populated city. The Indian Council on Medical Research estimates that between 8,000 and 10,000 people died in the first three days after the catastrophe; another 25,000 perished later…