South African Oscar Pistorius has qualified to compete in the 4x400m relay at the London Olympics. Modern technology is amazing. There is no way in looking at him walking running that would tell you that he had prosthetics for both legs below the knee, unless you look closely. [Read more…]
A press release from CERN cautiously announces the discovery of what may be the long-sought Higgs boson, with a spokesperson being quoted as saying, “The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found.” [Read more…]
The artist Nagai Hideyuki plays with our sense of perception by drawing figures on two flat pieces of paper that, when they are held at right angles and viewed from a certain direction, give the illusion of being 3-D constructions. [Read more…]
A news report on a new study says that the same genetic mutation that gave modern supermarket tomatoes their luscious-looking uniform red color is also the one that reduced its sweetness. [Read more…]
My post on physics researchers searching for the Higgs particle needing to get the chance of statistical errors down to below the five-sigma level (or 0.000028%) generated some discussion on the problems that can arise (mainly the increased likelihood of false positive results) in other areas such as the social sciences where the threshold for acceptability is often as high as 5%. [Read more…]
I have a fondness for optical illusions and what they tell us about how our brain processes visual information. I have written before about the moon illusion and the rotating snakes. [Read more…]
Here is a video explaining clearly how and why cancer spreads, using prostate cancer as an example. In the process the video also explains why it is that cancer is more likely to strike the older we get, the basis of the comment that cancer is the reward we get for getting old.
(Via Gawker.)
Reports are emerging from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN that provide some evidence of the detection of the Higgs boson with a mass of 125 GeV, or about 133 times the mass of a proton. [Read more…]
Take a look at this photograph published in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. (You can see a larger photo by clicking on the link.) It show the asymmetric skin damage on the face of a 69-year old truck driver due to the many hours driving with just the left side of his face exposed to sunlight.
Those of us who grew up in the tropics avoided staying out in the sun if we possibly could. We sought the shade and I still find it strange when at the first sign of warm weather in the spring, people here in the US rush to lie out in the sun in skimpy clothing. [Read more…]