Higgs rumours fly as meeting approaches
The latest rumour is that both ATLAS and CMS have evidence that the Higgs mass is about 125 GeV/C2 at confidence levels of 3.5σ and 2.5σ respectively. At 3.5σ, the measurement could be the result of a random fluke just 0.1% of the time whereas at 2.5σ the fluke factor is about 1%. [full article]

Fundamental constants are not constant—or maybe they are, we don’t really know
Now, there is a precedent here. The cosmic microwave background was initially thought to be isotropic—it’s the same where ever you look. However, accurate measurements show that there is a slight difference and the Universe seems to have some sort of global orientation. This might also imply that the fundamental constants could be different depending on which direction we look. [full article]

Smallest habitable world around sun-like star found
The planet, named Kepler-22b, lies 600 light years away around a star of the same type (called G) as the sun. It is about 2.4 times as wide as Earth and orbits its star every 290 days, right in the middle of its star’s habitable zone, where liquid water can exist on an object’s surface. [full article]

The insanely weird quantum wave function might be “real” after all
Until now, we have taken comfort from the idea that, real or not, the results from the wave function would be the same. So no worries, right? Quite possibly wrong. In a paper posted on the arXiv, a trio of researchers has shown that you can’t have it both ways; a purely statistical wave function will not always give the same results as a wave function with real physical significance. [full article]

Should We Clone Neanderthals?
As the Neanderthal genome is painstakingly sequenced, the archaeologists and biologists who study it will be faced with an opportunity that seemed like science fiction just 10 years ago. They will be able to look at the genetic blueprint of humankind’s nearest relative and understand its biology as intimately as our own. [full article]

Will We Find Oceans On Pluto?
…After the impact, Pluto and Charon would have been extremely close together, and spinning rapidly. The strong gravitational tidal pull between the two should have produced enough heat to melt the interior turning Pluto into a giant Slush Puppie. Pluto could have been like Europa for hundreds of millions of years before completely re-freezing over. [full article]

As a typical late night of internet reading goes, have so many tabs open and thus, another over the place, article compilation post is born.

Ageing stem cells from centenarian rejuvenated
PARIS: Age-degraded cells from elderly patients upwards of 100 years old have been successfully transformed into rejuvenated stem cells “indistinguishable” from those found in their embryonic state. [full article]

Kids are watching too much TV; if they’re under two, any TV is too much
That message isn’t reaching parents, however; 66 percent of children under two have watched TV, even though their brains can’t actually process the information meaningfully. [full article]

How Celebrities Took Over Cartoon Voice Acting
… when it comes to movies, recent years have seen big-screen Hollywood voice acting dominated by A-List actors like Bruce Willis, Angelina Jolie, and Robert DeNiro. The latest celebrity-dominated animated film comes now in the Shrek-inspired Puss in Boots, which represents the unholy trinity of Hollywood’s recent favorite trends: 3D, prequels, and spinoffs. [full article]

Lung regeneration closer to reality with new discovery
the research team reports that they have uncovered the biochemical signals in mice that trigger generation of new lung alveoli, the numerous, tiny, grape-like sacs within the lung where oxygen exchange takes place. Specifically, the regenerative signals originate from the specialized endothelial cells that line the interior of blood vessels in the lung. [full article]

She’s Her Own Twin
Lydia Fairchild was a proud mother who faced the most unusual of challenges. She had to fight in court to prove the children born from her body were her own.
The Department of Social Services called Fairchild and told her to come in immediately. What Fairchild thought was a routine meeting with a social worker turned into an interrogation. The proud mother was suddenly a criminal suspect. [full article]

Finally, after the internet got so saturated with ‘platitudes’ from every tom, dick and dickhead to the point it was impossible to distinguish the genuine ones from the fakes… a properly heartfelt tribute to Steve Jobs from his once long lost sister… https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Scientists discover tsunami on the Sun
In what is a surprising discovery, scientists have found tsunami-style towering waves that race across the face of the Sun. [full article]

Rumours that first dark matter particle found
The physics blogs are abuzz with rumours that a particle of dark matter has finally been found. If it is true, it is huge news. Dark matter is thought to make up 90 per cent of the universe’s mass and what evidence there is for it remains highly controversial. That’s why any news of a sighting is seized upon. [full article]

Innovation: Making a map for everyone, by everyone
Crowdsourcing a map of the world is a supremely democratic project – now new smartphone and online apps will let anyone join in… [full article]

The Original Coming Anarchy: Violence in West Africa
“…(Guinea’s military ruler) Camara was shot in the head, either during the coup, or in the violence that followed, or just days ago (reports vary wildly). Whether or not this is affecting his mental condition is unknown, but the stories we read coming from Guinea suggest a James Bond-esque mad villain ? he sleeps all day and emerges only after dark, broadcasts rambling tirades on the radio that last for hours, and has his official guests wait to meet him in a gallery adorned with life-size portraits of himself…” [full article]

Am also approaching that ‘need to get a haircut’ point. Telling factor is after a shower my hair becomes this almost Beatles like bob cut. But anyways…

A pretty good list of what one man considers The 10 best long tracking shots ever filmed which I can wholeheartedly agree with.

An article and sample of Philip Glass’s new opera can be found here.

A rather bizarre article on a Vietnamese man dug up wife’s corpse ‘so he could hug her’.

For Empire’s 20th anniversary, they’ve gotten a whole slew of actors to recreate some of their more famous roles. It’s pretty neat-o and can be found here.

And then lastly some science articles…

Why we shouldn’t release all we know about the cosmos
A trio of astronomers have warned that, unless we use the information sparingly, we risk squandering a once-in-eternity opportunity. If the whole data set is released at once, as is planned, any new ideas that cosmologists come up with may have to remain untested because they will have no further data to test them with. [full article]

Death of rare giant star sheds light on cosmic past
An enormous explosion observed in 2007 was the death of one of the most massive stars known in the universe, new calculations suggest. Similar blasts may have polluted the early universe with heavy elements, altering its evolution. [full article]

…I can now close some tabs.

How our brains learned to read
Today we are readers. Evidence suggests that reading – which depends on an alphabet, writing materials, papyrus and such – is only about 5000 years old. The brain in its modern form is about 200,000 years old, yet brain imaging shows reading taking place in the same way and in the same place in all brains. To within a few millimetres, human brains share a reading hotspot – what Stanislas Dehaene calls the “letterbox” – on the bottom of the left hemisphere. [full article]

New global map of Mars suggests Red Planet once had ocean
Further, regions that are most densely dissected by the valley networks roughly form a belt around the planet between the equator and mid-southern latitudes, consistent with a past climate scenario that included precipitation and the presence of an ocean covering a large portion of Mars’ northern hemisphere. [full article]

Dark galaxy crashing into the Milky Way
Called Smith’s cloud, it has managed to avoid disintegrating during its smash-up with our own, much bigger galaxy. What’s more, its trajectory suggests it punched through the disc of our galaxy once before, about 70 million years ago. [full article]

Ripples in space divide classical and quantum worlds
The location of the boundary between the classical and quantum worlds is a long-standing mystery. One idea is that everything starts off as a quantum system, existing in a superposition of states. This would make an object capable of being, for example, in many places at once. But when this system interacts with its environment, it collapses into a single classical state – a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. [full article]

…I need to get a more interesting life so I can blog more often. Here’s some other stuff in the meantime…

Vanished Persian army said found in desert
The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C. [full article]

Mystery ‘dark flow’ extends towards edge of universe
SOMETHING big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe. That’s the conclusion of the largest analysis to date of over 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction at blistering speeds. Some researchers say this so-called “dark flow” is a sign that other universes nestle next door. [full article]

Time-travelling browsers navigate the web’s past
Finding old versions of web pages could become far simpler thanks to a “time-travelling” web browsing technology being pioneered at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. [full article]

Flasher leads to Hamilton bus crash
Police say the strange incident happened shortly before 9am when a teenager on the Orbiter bus allegedly exposed himself to a woman passenger. She screamed, prompting the driver to phone a bus company representative, who in turn told him to drive to the nearby police station at the Flagstaff shops, River Rd.

With the female passenger still screaming, the bus driver stopped in the station carpark and – believing the bus was in neutral – activated the emergency door lock.

“Unfortunately for the driver, the bus was still in gear and it rolled into the entranceway of the station, cracking its windscreen and causing minimal damage to the building,” a police statement said. [full article]

An no, that wasn’t me.

Seven questions that keep physicists up at night
It’s not your average confession show: a panel of leading physicists spilling the beans about what keeps them tossing and turning in the wee hours.

That was the scene a few days ago in front of a packed auditorium at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, when a panel of physicists was asked to respond to a single question: “What keeps you awake at night?” [full article]

Innovation: You Facebook, you tweet – now lifelog
It has been said before that an era of lifelogging, in which people will record and broadcast their daily lives, is on the way. But this time it might happen – people are already capturing many things about their lives and sharing them via social networking sites. The launch of the new camera and new research from Microsoft suggest people are ready to take the final steps. [full article]

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint?
EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation? [full article]

Will California become America’s first failed state?
Los Angeles, 2009: California may be the eighth largest economy in the world, but its state government is issuing IOUs, unemployment is at its highest in 70 years, and teachers are on hunger strike. So what has gone so catastrophically wrong? [full article]

World’s largest dino footprints found
Found in the Jura plateau near the south-eastern city of Lyon, the prints are thought to belong to a giant vegetarian sauropod. The round prints are about one and a half metres wide, which palaeontologists at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) reckon were made by animals around 7.5 metres tall, weighing around 40 tonnes. [full article]

Cheap naked chips snap a perfect picture
HOW can image sensors – the most complicated and expensive part of a digital camera – be made cheaper and less complex? Easy: take the lid off a memory chip and use that instead. [full article]

Pirates hit navy ship ‘in error’
A group of Somali pirates has been captured after attacking a French navy ship by mistake, apparently thinking it was a harmless cargo vessel. [full article]

Nothing worth blogging about, but have been keeping busy the last couple of weeks and now with some free time, have found a few blog worthy net things around. One site in particular worth checking out is futilitycloset.com. My new go to site to stave off boredom and kill time at work. Anyway, onto some other things…

The Rupublic of Molossia

The Republic of Molossia (moe-LAAHSS-eeyah) is a sovereign, independent nation, located in and completely surrounded by territory of the United States. With a total area of 9956 sRN (2.5 ha / 6.3 ac), Molossia is one of the smallest nations on earth, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in spirit. A sense of humor characterizes most Molossian people, which, coupled with the casual and comfortable western lifestyle, makes Molossia an enjoyable place to visit. [website] [wikipedia]

Republic of Whangamomona

In 1989 regional council boundaries were redrawn, with an emphasis on connected catchments. These revised maps made Whangamomona part of the Manawatu-Wanganui Region. Residents objected, as they wanted to continue being part of the Taranaki Region, and on 1 November 1989, they responded by declaring themselves the “Republic of Whangamomona” at the first Republic Day. Though the move began as a pointed protest, the town continued to hold a celebratory Republic Day once a year, during which a vote for President was held. [wikipedia]

Enviromental Space articles from New Scientist…

Phantom storms: How our weather leaks into space
Space radiation hits record high
Illegal toxic waste spotted from space

And another behind the scenes video for The Fantastic Mr Fox on how Wes Anderson videoed himself in every part and edited the performances together for his new film I still can’t wait for…