A 50-year-old Queensland woman has made history as the oldest Australian woman to fall pregnant naturally and give birth to a healthy first child.
The non-hibernating squirrels were tested three times during one year. They were tested during the summer when they were not hibernating, again early in their hibernation season and a third time mid-way through the hibernation season. If animals were hibernating before the test Jinka woke them up to see if the substance would cause them to go back into hibernation.The thing I'm most interested in is: how drowsy looking is a hibernating squirrel when you wake it up.
The bottom line is much stronger results ruling out supersymmetry, extra dimensions, black holes and other exotica, restriction of the possible mass range of the Higgs to about 114-150 GeV, and a tantalizingly small and not yet statistically significant excess of possible Higgs events in the mass range 120-145 GeV.Interesting.The big surprise here is that the experiments have done a fantastic job of getting these analyses of the data done at record speed. Before the LHC turn-on, estimates based on experience at the Tevatron tended to be that it would be 2012 before we saw completed analyses of a significant amount of the 2011 data. A lot of people have been working long hours and going without a summer vacation… The bottom line though is not a surprise, but rather pretty much what many people (including myself) expected. The unconvincing popular theoretical models of the last few decades have finally been confronted with experiment, which is falsifying them, to the extent that they can be falsified. It’s an inspiring example of the scientific method working as it should. The remaining mass range for the Higgs is the expected one, and, as expected, this is the hardest place to separate the Higgs from the background. If it’s really there, the data collected during the rest of this year should be enough to give a statistically significant signal. So, within a few months we should finally have an answer to the question that has been plaguing the subject for decades: “Higgs or something else?”. This is very exciting.
The universe was born spinning and continues to do so around a preferred axis – that is the bold conclusion of physicists in the US who have studied the rotation of more than 15,000 galaxies. While most cosmological theories have suggested that – on a large scale – the universe is the same in every direction, these recent findings suggest that the early universe was born spinning about a specific axis. If correct, this also means that the universe does not possess mirror symmetry, but rather has a preferred right or left "handedness". ...I don't quite get the next bit, though, in that I didn't think it made sense to talk of subatomic spin as if it were, well, actual spin:
Longo and a team of five undergraduate students catalogued the rotation direction of 15,158 spiral galaxies with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They found that galaxies have a preferred direction of rotation – there was an excess of left-handed, or counter-clockwise, rotating spiral galaxies in the part of the sky toward the north pole of the Milky Way. The effect extended beyond 600 million light-years away.
The excess is small, about 7%, and Longo says that the chance that it could be a cosmic accident is something like one in a million.
What impact would this have on the Big Bang and how the universe was born? Observers in our universe could never see outside of it, so we cannot directly tell if the universe is spinning, in principle, explains Longo. "But if we could show that our universe still retains the initial angular momentum within its galaxies, it would be evidence that our universe exists within some larger space and it was born spinning relative to other universes," he told physicsworld.com. "I picture the Big Bang as being born with spin, just like a proton or electron has spin. As the universe expanded, the initial angular momentum would be spread the bits of matter that we call galaxies, so that the galaxies now tend to spin in a preferred direction," he explained.Others are not convinced he's got a valid conclusion on his hands. Still...interesting.
Substantial gaps persist in basic oceanographic knowledge. One such gap was closed in January, 2005, when an American nuclear submarine making 33 knots 500 feet beneath the surface crashed headlong into an uncharted seamount 360 miles southeast of Guam.Here's Andy's link to the New York Times 2005 story of the accident, and it makes for fascinating reading. It opens with this:
Blood was everywhere. Sailors lay sprawled across the deck, several of them unconscious, others simply dazed.Did I read something about it before, and have forgotten? I don't think so.Even the captain was asking, "What just happened?" All anyone knew for sure was that the nuclear-powered attack submarine had slammed into something solid and very large, and that it had to get to the surface, fast.
Two out of three people believe Rupert Murdoch's News Corp should have to dispose of its entire stake in BSkyB. According to a new survey for The Independent by ComRes, 65 per cent agree that the phone-hacking scandal shows News Corp is not a "fit and proper" organisation to own any part of BSkyB, while 26 per cent disagree.For those who think Murdoch is a victim of left wing hysteria led by the likes of The Guardian, I'll use his "Daily Telegraph" defence, which comes in handy when running front page campaigns against incumbent governments: The Guardian is not running a campaign, it is merely reflecting public opinion.
Domestic demand for Australian beef may increase after radiation was found in meat here and amid concern that cesium leaks from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant may spread farther, according to Australian Agricultural Co. Ltd.
"We're expecting to see better demand out of Japan as they move away from their own herds," Chief Executive Officer David Farley said on a conference call Monday. That follows a boost in demand for beef after radiation was detected in domestic seafood in March, he said.
A lot of it has to do with a weak economy that has left plenty of backup power available. The rapid growth of energy-efficiency measures is also responsible, as well as something called demand response – when commercial and industrial electricity users are throttled back by the use of computer-controlled switches and the Internet.
And then, Andrew does a triple down on a kinda offensive attempts at point scoring by noting with apparent approval John Hinderaker's very American argument that drives me crazy: to paraphrase, "well, that just goes to show what happens when you don't have enough normal people carrying guns". (Particularly when they are in swimmers on an island enjoying the sunshine, or at an Australian historical site, I suppose.) Hinderaker writes:UPDATE
In fact:
“Explosives were found on the island,” deputy Oslo police chief Sveining Sponheim told reporters. He said a man detained by police was aged 32 and ”ethnic Norwegian.”
Even so, the history of Islamic violence in Scandinavia suggests Muslim immigration there has been a bad deal for the locals:
It was not immediately known who was behind the bombing, but Norway’s intelligence police agency (PST) said in February that Islamic extremism was a major threat to the country…
... police last year arrested three Muslim men based in Norway suspected of planning an attack using explosives in the Scandinavian country.
Many facts are still unknown, but at this point it appears that a key ingredient in the tragedy was the fact that the killer had the only gun on the island.I honestly think that this type of argument is anathema for about 95% of Australians, yet Andrew gives it a run.
But finally, for a bit of inspirational nostalgia, this video from Nature turned up at Boing Boing, and it is very good:NASA is keen to tell you there’s a still a future for sending Americans into space, but there’s a general cultural anomie that seems content to watch movies about people in space, but indifferent to any plans to put them there. This makes me grind my teeth down to the roots, but I suppose that’s a standard reaction when the rest of your fellow citizenry doesn’t share the precise and exact parameters of your interests and concerns. That’s the problem when you grow up with magazines telling you where we’re going after the moon, with grade-school notebooks that had pictures of the space stations to come, when the push to Mars was regarded as an inevitable next step.
Just got hung up on the “why?” part, it seems. Also the “how” and the “how much” and other details. I can see the reason for taking our time – develop new engines, perfect technology, gather the money and the will. It’s not like anything’s going anywhere. But it’s not like we’re going anywhere if we’re not going anywhere, either – when nations, cultures stop exploring, it’s a bad sign. You’re ceding the future.......
So what’s the attachment, really? Childhood attachment to Star Trek fantasies, geeky fascination with spaceships, adolescent marination in sci-fi visions of rockets and moon bases and PanAm shuttles engaged in a sun-bathed ballet with a space station revolving to the strains of Strauss, phasers and warp six and technobabble and the love of great serene machinery knifing through clouds of glowing dust? Probably. It’s not over, I know – but it’s like watching the last of Columbus’ ships return, and learning they’re cutting up the mast for firewood, and no one’s planning to go back any time soon.
Of course, climate change sceptics will be all over the article in The Australian today noting a recent study, based on just four tidal gauges, that argues that sea level increase has started to decelerate, at least around Australia/New Zealand. [Note: see the update below for the correction to this.]
The author of the paper, which I had actually heard about before, seems open minded as to the question of long term implications.
The report in The Australian, however, gives earlier prominence to some very climate change sceptic sounding comments by one Dr Howard Brady, of Macquarie University.
Googling Dr Brady reveal little about him, except for the following:
* he is aged 70
* he is a retired scientist who did a lot of work in Antarctica
* he is a former Catholic priest
* he used to be chief of Mosaic Oil
* he gave at least one talk to a Engineer’s Club to deliver a climate change update.
Now, not all of these things are necessarily indicative of climate change scepticism; but most of them are!
Yet one of the links says he is interested in the "non-linearity of climate change", which sounds more like a climate change believer interest.
So, it’s a bit of a mystery. Come out and reveal your position on everything to do with climate, Dr Brady, and tell us how you managed to get quoted in The Australian on this study.
UPDATE: I should have known. Deltoid looks at the actual science at issue here and shows how that article misrepresents it. He also notes that The Australia has not published a correcting letter from Watson's department, and also wonders why Dr Brady is quoted as some sort of authority on this.
In short: another case of pathetic journalism on climate change.
As usual with Jung, I find it both interesting yet somewhat unsatisfactory, and not entirely clear what it means. Vernon finishes on this note:It is perhaps this craving for immediate experience that drives the highly emotional forms of religion growing so fast in the contemporary world, though Jung would have discerned a sentimentality in them that again simplifies humankind's moral ambiguities and spiritual paradoxes. He did not believe that authentic religiosity was expressed in these peak experiences. Rather he advised people to turn towards their fears, much as the mystics welcomed the dark night of the soul. This shadow is experienced as a foe, but it is really a friend because it contains clues as to what the individual lacks, rejects and distrusts.
"What our age thinks of as the 'shadow' and inferior part of the psyche contains more than something merely negative," he writes in The Undiscovered Self, an essay published in 1957. "They are potentialities of the greatest dynamism." That dynamism works by way of compensation. It aims to rebalance what has become lopsided. Hence, if at a conscious level the scientific has eclipsed the theological, the material the valuable, the emotive the spiritual, then the forces that hide in the unconscious will ineluctably make themselves felt once more. It will seem chaotic and quite possibly be destructive. But the passion also contains a prophetic voice calling humanity back to life in all its fullness.
Symbols do die. "Why have the antique gods lost their prestige and their effect upon human souls? It was because the Olympic gods had served their time and a new mystery began: God became man." Which raises the question of whether the Christian dispensation has now served its time too and we await a new mystery. Perhaps we do live on the verge of a new age, of another transformation of humanity.All a bit "Age of Aquarius", I feel. As I think technological transhumanism is a long, long way off, I don't see that as holding out much hope for "transformation of humanity". In a world where people are living more and more in front of a screen (I'm as guilty as anyone,) it's hard to see anything other than life enhancing mystery being slowly bled away.
Japan has a relatively small share of renewables, which account for approximately 5% of its total primary energy supply. The current National Energy Plan has set a target of 10% by 2020. At the G8 summit in France this May, Mr Kan announced a plan to increase renewables to more than 20% of total electricity supply by the early 2020s. The government also plans to install 10 million rooftop photo-voltaic units (solar cells) by 2030.
