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Submission + - ATLAS Results: One Or Two Higgs ? (mozilla.org)

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: An LHC physicist writes:

ATLAS has a very nice signal of H-> in a total of 17.8/fb of collision data. You can make no mistake here: that is a new resonance for sure.Now let us instead turn to the H->ZZ->four lepton decay mode.Here the signal strength is more in agreement with the standard model prediction, but the best-fit mass (123.5 GeV) is significantly lower than the fit 126.5 GeV of the gamma-gamma mode!

What is going on ?
Science

Submission + - Does science have an integrity problem? (usatoday.com)

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: Retractions are way up in the last 10 years and the majority are due to misconduct and not just honest mistakes, statistics show. Are modern scientists less honest? No, but it may be framed that way.
Education

Submission + - America is underinvesting in science education - except it isn't (cnn.com)

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: Every few months a story comes out that American kids are falling behind and they reference an international standardized test score which shows the US in the middle. Then they say we need to invest more in education. With 5,000 PhDs working as janitors that does not seem to make sense. And America is already number two in the world in spending per child.
Science

Submission + - Misguided activism - Frankenbug hysteria gets debunked (latimes.com) 3

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: Detractors of genetics like to put the term "Franken" in front of science they seek to ridicule, and in a July 17th LA Times post, Karin Klein uses that metaphor as well. But it wasn't accurate. It wasn't even science. It was scare journalism and it's doing a lot of harm regarding frank discussions of science policy.

The LA Times prints a rebuttal that details the science behind a mosquito that could save up to 100 million people.
Science

Submission + - Just Supposing, How Exactly Could a Squid 'Inseminate' Your Mouth? (io9.com)

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: A quick recap: while eating a parboiled squid, a Korean woman felt pain in her mouth. She went to the hospital, where the doctors extracted twelve squid spermatophores-packages of sperm-from her tongue, cheek, and gums. Ew! Also, ouch!

Here's the biology scoop on how it happened.
Science

Submission + - The Secret History Of Pain Killers (science20.com)

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: Illegal drugs get all of the attention but legal ones are a bigger problem. A middle class drug addiction has slowly taken root and its foundation is the best possible one; patients were told to take a more proactive role in their care. Misapplied to pain, it has been a disaster but one a long time in coming.
Education

Submission + - American Kids & Science Education: The Exaggerated 'Dismal' Claims (usatoday.com) 2

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: We've all seen the stories about how 'dismal' science education in America is. It turns out that it's kind of a straw man. America has long led the world in science but the 'average' score for Americans on standardized tests has never been good. Instead, every 2 years American kids get better but we keep being told things are terrible. Here is why.
Power

Submission + - Solar Power Is Booming - Why Do We Want To Kill It? (forbes.com)

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: Solar power is booming. Imports from China were a tepid $21 million in 2005 but in 2011 installations totaled nearly $2.7 billion. That’s a huge win. And just as advocates for solar power had hoped, a larger market drove down prices. Solar energy cost has declined by two-thirds in the last four years, meaning it will soon start to close in on fossil fuels.

There's just one problem. Now the government wants to kill it.

Submission + - NYC bans mention of dinosaurs, dancing, birthdays on student tests. (nypost.com)

Submitted by SchroedingersCat
SchroedingersCat writes: New York educators banned references to "dinosaurs," "birthdays," "Halloween" and dozens of other topics on city-issued tests. That is because they fear such topics "could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students." Dinosaurs, for example, call to mind evolution, which might upset fundamentalists; birthdays are not celebrated by Jehovah's Witnesses; and Halloween suggests paganism. Homes with swimming pools and home computers are also unmentionables — because of economic sensitivities. The city asks test companies to exclude “creatures from outer space" as well — for unspecified reasons.
Science

Submission + - How To Simulate Your Own Baseball Game (science20.com)

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: If Strat-o-matic is too easy and you used to pants the kids who play baseball on a console or PC, here is a way to take baseball's 24 possible states and simulate an entire game using Schrödinger's wave equation.
Space

Submission + - Starships in a Century? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the New York Times, Kenneth Chang writes about the 100-year starship conference, where "an eclectic mix of engineers, scientists, science fiction fans, students and dreamers" discussed ideas for how to travel across interstellar space, including "how to organize and finance a century-long project; whether civilization would survive, because an engine to propel a starship could also be used for a weapon to obliterate the planet; and whether people need to go along for the trip."
Some of the proposals were pretty far out, such as Joseph Breeden's concept for an engine-less starship (propelled using a gravity slingshot on a near-sun trajectory). Others were a little less forward thinking, although still futuristic by current standards of space exploration: nuclear rockets, fusion, lightsails, and so forth.
So, can we go to the stars? Wait a hundred years, and we'll see!
Science

Submission + - Quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativit (sciencecodex.com)

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: The unification of quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity is one of the biggest open issues in modern physics. General relativity, the joint theory of gravity, space and time gives predictions on a cosmic scale while quantum effects are fragile and typically observed on small scales, e.g. when considering single particles and atoms. That is why it is hard to test the interplay between quantum mechanics and general relativity. But the race is on to measure the general relativistic notion of time on a quantum scale.
Science

Submission + - Superliminal neutrinos refuted by ICARUS (science20.com)

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: The superluminal neutrinos hysteria has been refuted — by people who know what they are talking about, not kooky theorists. ICARUS, another neutrino experiment at the Gran Sasso Laboratories, has looked at the neutrinos shot from CERN since 2010 to verify results in the article recently published by Cohen and Glashow a few weeks ago.

Also, apparently physicists eat a lot of donuts during meetings.

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