Super Volatile

Two gentlemen having a beautiful argument in an ivory tower.

While more than a million humans run marathons voluntarily each year, most animals we consider excellent runners — antelopes and cheetahs, for example — are built for speed, not endurance. Even nature’s best animal distance runners — such as horses and dogs — will run similar distances only if forced to do so, and the startling evidence is that humans are better at it, Lieberman said.

Modern humans and their immediate ancestors such as Homo erectus sport several adaptations that make humans, instead of some ferocious, furry, or fleet creature, the animal world’s best distance runners.

So maybe we're not the physically weakest species on the planet, after all.

If you could meet any scientist who ever lived, who would it be? Larry Bassett THORNWOOD, N.Y.

Isaac Newton. No question about it. The smartest person ever to walk the face of this earth. The man was connected to the universe in spooky ways. He discovered the laws of motion, the laws of gravity, the laws of optics. Then he turned 26.

Q&A with celebrity-scientists and one of the coolest people on the planet, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.

A discovery that can revolutionize medicine.

None of this makes the moon a wellspring, and it would have a long way to go before it became a remotely hospitable place. But a sine qua non for any lunar base would be a steady supply of water, and transporting even a little bit of it from earth would be very difficult and prohibitively expensive. Knowing that there would be a steady supply on hand for drinking, raising food in greenhouses and even manufacturing rocket fuel allows space planners to check at least one essential box long before we even consider a lunar journey. Now all we need is the will, the wallet and the technical know-how to check all the rest.

Permanently dark areas of the Moon host a soil consisting of up to 2% ice crystals. Not that we'll do it anything about it in our lifetime.

If a space traveling entity approached you with an opportunity to visit any celestial object from any distance and allow you bring one scientific instrument of your choosing, where would you go and what would you bring? The size of the instrument does not matter, but keep in mind the farther away your object of choice is, the more it may have changed (i.e. if you hoped to visit the recently discovered supernova SN 2011fe, you would arrive 21 million years after the event).

neiltyson: I'd bring my iPhone, as the most compact representation of modern culture there is. And I'd visit a civilization on a galaxy 65 million light years away. Assuming I can get there instantaneously, I would look back to Earth with their presumably super telescopes and witness the extinction of the dinosaurs - the light of which is just now reach them.

Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewed by the readers of Reddit. Buried in the answers is the link to this excellent video interview with out-of-character Stephen Colbert.

Steinberg's work stood out because it challenges the widely held notion that quantum mechanics forbids us any knowledge of the paths taken by individual photons as they travel through two closely spaced slits to create an interference pattern.

This interference is exactly what one would expect if we think of light as an electromagnetic wave. But quantum mechanics also allows us to think of the light as photons – although with the weird consequence that if we determine which slit individual photons travel through, then the interference pattern vanishes. By using weak measurements Steinberg and his team have been able to gain some information about the paths taken by the photons without destroying the pattern.

What happened in physics in 2011, beside almost-but-not-quite search for Higg's boson and possibly faster than light neutrinos.

You can say that there is a statistically significant effect for your chemical reducing the firing rate in the mutant cells. And you can say there is no such statistically significant effect in the normal cells. But you cannot say that mutant cells and mormal cells respond to the chemical differently. To say that, you would have to do a third statistical test, specifically comparing the “difference in differences”, the difference between the chemical-induced change in firing rate for the normal cells against the chemical-induced change in the mutant cells.

Analysis of a very common mistake in neuroscience research papers.

Researchers in Fouchier’s team used ferrets – test animals which closely mimic the human response to influenza – and transmitted H5N1 from one to another to make it more adaptable to new hosts. After 10 generations, the virus had mutated to become airborne, which means ferrets became ill from merely being near other diseased animals.

Imagine a virus with a death rate of 50% that spreads through air. That's exactly what has been recently manufactured in a lab, causing a discussion whether results of such research should be published. The author wants to get it out. A paper with the results, that is.

These are exciting times for clean, cheap energy as the first of many breakthrough products using radiation-free nuclear reactions is about to be demonstrated. On October 28th, Andrea Rossi plans to demonstrate his a one megawatt nuclear boiler in Bologna, Italy. It will be powered by tiny amounts of nickel and hydrogen. Fuel usage is so minuscule that it easily qualifies as renewable energy. The entire plant is built inside of a standard shipping container.

Rossi claimed the experiment to be a success, yet it's based on research that didn't go through peer review and contains a secret formula. Secrecy is understandable, because if it works, it can make Rossi the richest man on the planet. Whether it's the biggest breakthrough in the history of industrialization or just a scam, time will tell. If the former will be true, I will call Rossi John Galt.