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"Scientific American staff editor George Musser joins podcast host Steve Mirsky to discuss his article in the September issue about the possibility of time itself coming to an end" - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

"After nearly 6 months of smashing particles, the Large Hadron Collider has seen signs of something entirely new. Pairs of charged particles produced when two beams of protons collide seem to be associated with each other even after they fly apart. “It is a small effect, but it is very interesting in itself,” said physicist Guido Tonelli, spokesperson for the LHC’s CMS experiment. Tonelli and colleagues announced the results in a seminar at CERN September 21 and in a paper submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics." - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

I've made my comments in red. Some are more about taste than accuracy though. Toward the end of the text you make statements that suggest (at least to me) that an animal's actions remain unpredictable even with COMPLETE knowledge its genes and environment. I have a slight problem with this, because we don’t yet know whether the nonlinear amplification process (and whatever seed it uses)... more... - Christopher Harris

@Chad: thanks for the tip! - Björn Brembs

C'mon Zynga, make it happen. - Stephen Mack

So when you play poker, every heart card looks like a butt to you? "Butt flush!" - Stephen Mack from iPhone

Who is this Hank guy? He trademarked the phrase "Science 2.0"? http://www.scientificblogging.com/profile... - Just Joe

I simply do not get the point of the blog article. Besides, I am not sure if Nature or Elsevier would agree with any of the statements without the 'bigger picture' and context they are after. I joined their session @ESOF http://picasaweb.google.com/joergku... (pretty proud of the photos and being their live) and if not done already,... more... - joergkurtwegner

"Man-made DNA has booted up a cell for the first time. In a feat that is the culmination of two and a half years of tests and adjustments, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute inserted artificial genetic material — chemically printed, synthesized and assembled — into cells that were then able to grow naturally. “We all had a very good feeling that it was going to work this time,” said Venter Institute synthetic biologist Daniel Gibson, co-author of the study published May 20 in Science. “But we were cautiously optimistic because we had so many letdowns following the previous experiments.” On a Friday in March, scientists inserted over 1 million base pairs of synthetic DNA into Mycoplasma capricolum cells before leaving for the weekend. When they returned on Monday, their cells had bloomed into colonies." - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

Another great steps towards engineering life from scratch. This will eventually have an impact a thousand fold greater than the industrial revolution. - Spaceweaver

this is important - Christopher Harris

I'm not so sure. as I understand it, the Chinese government simply wants to be able to shape public opinion to maintain one-party rule and promote growth. therefore I don't think their censorship will extend to things like science, making it hard to see what the real loss is. maybe if google said 'all or nothing' and disabled all their services in china you'd see a real loss on the... more... - Christopher Harris

it is actually useful. It is interesting how google is crawling the networks. For example Google found my citeulike content via Frindfeed. Google has never been good at building social networks or social applications but it this looks interesting. - Pedro Beltrao

@Steve... yeah, that's what I thought, and looked around at various settings places, but did not find any hint on where to push the right button to get it going :( - Egon Willighagen

Not read this yet, but sounds deeply cool. - Matthew Todd

protein sequence should probably be considered as meaningful as dna - Mike Chelen

Some nice theoretical exobiology :). Jokes aside, it's interesting to apply biological ideas from real systems to these models to see how they hold up. Iddo should write this post up as a letter to Nature. Half seriously. - Andrew Perry

@Andrew... your faith is touching but I doubt this holds any interest beyond low-orbital blogosphere... - Iddo Friedberg

Hey, I liked that post! Who you callin' low-orbital?! - Bill Hooker

"It’s known as the golden hour. After a bullet wound or other massive trauma, soldiers in the field have about one hour to get intense medical attention. After that time, the chances of survival drop drastically. The research arm of US armed forces, DARPA, has long been interested in extending that golden window of opportunity to five or six hours, enough time to medevac someone from a remote location to a hospital. Earlier in December, DARPA announced that the Texas A&M Institute for Preclinical Studies (TIPS) would be receiving $9.9 million in funding to determine if previously successful suspended animation programs for rodents could work with pigs. According to Wired, the 15 person team lead by Dr. Matthew Miller hopes to have positive results in just 18 months. That sort of quick paced research could soon pave the way to preserve trauma victims the world over as they make their way to help." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"A newly-discovered planet orbiting a small, nearby star appears to be a "water world," with a surface that might be covered with liquid water. "This is certainly the first planet around another star which we think is mostly made of water," says David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who led the research team that found the new planet, named GJ 1214b." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

"A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would require an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second. However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory. The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart. Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences. For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving. The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable... more... - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

daah???? Anybody has more information on that? - Spaceweaver

http://www.sciencedaily.com/release... - Alexander Kruel

"Or so says Australian psychologist, Joe Forgas, who seems to think a case of the “grumps” can, in fact, make us think more clearly. The University of New South Wales researcher says grumpy people, rather than happy types, are better at coping with demanding situations because of the way the brain “promotes information processing strategies.” ... Professor Forgas said: ‘Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world.’" - Jamreilly from Bookmarklet

"..Man was made for joy and woe; And when this we rightly know Through the world we safely go. Joy and woe are woven fine, A clothing for the soul divine. Under every grief and pine Runs a joy with silken twine..." Auguries of Innocence by William Blake - alapinto

"Routine commercial travel to outer space may be the norm as soon as 2012, as the next generation of spacecraft — designed by private sector firms like Virgin Galactic, Orbital Sciences Corp., Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and others — transport adventure-seeking civilians into low-Earth orbit." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

Awesome! - Rene, Pro Button Pusher

hee hee hee - scherbi: bottom dweller

I take it many people can relate to my experience! :-) - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

"This explains homeopathy beautifully..." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

It's water! - Eivind

"Coffee contains caffeine, and as everyone knows, caffeine is a stimulant. We all know how a good cup of coffee wakes you up, makes you more alert, and helps you concentrate - thanks to caffeine. Or does it? Are the benefits of coffee really due to the caffeine, or are there placebo effects at work? Numerous experiments have tried to answer this question, but a paper published today goes into more detail than most.." - Jamreilly