I wrote recently about an article by Ed Yong about a new technique that could be of use in catching research papers where the authors have massaged their data to get positive results. Yong has now identified and interviewed the hitherto anonymous developer of this technique. He is social psychologist Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvania. [Read more…]

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…]