That's a little harsh. Yes, it's been known for quite some time that average atomic weights vary from sample to sample, and the information content of the paper may not seem fundamentally novel. However, this is a paper where scientists are recommending a change in IUPAC's policy. For these standards boards, this is a fundamental issue. Think of it as similar to the "Pluto is/isn't a planet" debate. It seems like it's just semantics they're arguing (and I'm inclined to think that, in either case, it is. Funny story: I had to correct some kid in a museum recently because he was telling his little brother that Pluto no longer existed.), but passions can still become pretty inflamed.

Anyway, just thought I'd try to put the whole thing in perspective.

FTFA:

So this doesn't really decrease the amount of dark matter in the universe. It simply shores up the anomalous hypothesized excess of dark matter observed for elliptical galaxies in comparison with spirals.

OpenOffice.org Impress. It works fine for me (scientific presentations). I've had no problems with OOo Calc (Excel equivalent) or the word processor either. To me there's really no difference as far as ease of use or features between any of the OO programs and their MS equivalents.

*Cough, Xbox, cough* But I dunno, I've seen Ivy-League-educated, advanced-degree-bearing, Mac-using scientists get pretty worked up if they don't have access to the Office suite. I think Microsoft products (especially Office) are probably looked upon by the general public in the same way as a dishwasher. They're convenient, ubiquitous, people use them all the time, and the only time anyone really notices them is when they're not present.

And we all know how Linux has cornered the PC market. But it's not even a fair comparison. The problem with being a competitor to Facebook is that Facebook already has something that puts them miles ahead of Diaspora in terms of viability: your friends are already on it. The real issue in getting a social networking site off the ground is that in order to convince one person to join, you're going to have to convince at least a few of their friends. Otherwise it's just a niche message board for people interested in FOSS (pot, meet kettle).

I dunno, I think the best way to try to compete with Facebook would be to adopt the Facebook approach (only release the product to select groups of people at first, possibly college students). But that of course goes against the entire point of the Diaspora project.

I hope it works out for them, I really do. And I know I'll probably have an account. But I definitely won't have high expectations. It's up to the guys at Diaspora to prove me wrong.

If you watch the two videos, the good dancer is moving his arms and legs much more than the bad dancer is. He even starts with the running man! I'm not exactly sure what the quantitative definition of "flailing" is, but the bad dancer definitely isn't flailing if the good dancer isn't.

It'd really be nice to see the rest of the videos. While I think it's a really big leap to go from good dancer to attractive mate, it could be something as simple as the fact that the bad dancer keeps his head down and looks much more defensive and withdrawn than the good dancer. My suspicion is that judging someone to be a good dancer or not has much more to do with the standard body language we already intuitively understand than with any sort of display of strength or fitness. Think about it: you could be the best dancer on earth, but if you're dancing around with your arms crossed in a defensive position, people probably aren't going to be too impressed. On the other hand, if you're dancing with your arms not obstructing your body and you keep your head level but don't really do much else, maybe no one will say you're a great dancer, but I doubt anyone will say you're a bad dancer. I dunno; I just think this study is another case of psychologists trying to prove too much with a limited amount of evidence.

Ahem...

Turns out getting the government to approve drugs takes time.

There are literally thousands of different species produced when even the simplest organic compound is burned incompletely (i.e., to form soot). C60 is a tiny fraction of what's produced in most soot from ordinary flames. This is why C60 is still $50 a gram. It actually took the researchers who found C60 in candle soot a pretty heroic effort, and even then, they already knew what they were looking for. The manufacture of C60 on an industrial scale occurs by maintaining an electrical arc across two graphite rods in a rarefied atmosphere. The temperature of the carbon plasma created is around 10000-15000 K, as opposed to a candle flame, which usually isn't more than a few thousand Kelvin. The exciting thing about this study is that there have been several groups that have proposed areas in space where these kinds of high temperature, low pressure conditions exist (namely in the atmospheres of aging red giants) which should, with the carbon rich atmospheres of these stars, form detectable amounts of fullerenes. Until now, this was just a theory. Obviously, it's still just a theory, but at least now it has some evidence to back it up.