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Hints of physics behind standard model?
The LHCb collaboration is studying the decay of mesons $B$ in order to find some violations in standard model rules. In particular LHCb has measured a particular ratio, named $R (D^*)$, between two...
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Ducking out the back way
Our visit to Whistler ended today, and it was a bit complicated because no one told us about the Vancouver to Whistler bike race today, or what that might mean for people who wanted to got the other...
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Book report on apples
Frazz is one of TPP's favorite comic strips, and today's strip (Sept. 13, 2015) was a classic because it hit TPP right in the wheel house. Caulfield presents a report on apples, and nails it,...
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Alexander Gerst's timelapse
Watch Earth roll by through the perspective of ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst in this six-minute timelapse video from space. Combining 12 500 images taken by Alexander during his six-month Blue Dot...
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Peter Thiel on biotechnology again: "Get rid of the randomness"
Peter Thiel has some provocative thoughts on biotechnology again, this time in an interview for Technology Review. I had a post earlier about Thiel's view of biotechnology which included some...
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From the portals of hell to built-in fire protection: intumescents
A friend posted the link to this demonstration, wondering if it was safe. (Do listen to the children in the background - their cries of "kraken" at 1:02 are worth it. Science is great fun!)The caption...
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Jellyfish proteins: modern snake oil for brain health
Watching ABC's World News Tonight this week, I saw an impressive-looking ad for a pill that claimed to improve memory and cognition. The ad showed several adults, all looking very happy, presumably...
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Amphiascus: Can a Copepod be a Friend of Mine?
Amphiascus sp., copyright Alexandra.The animal shown in the image above is a member of Amphiascus, a cosmopolitan genus of about thirty known species of benthic harpacticoid copepods. Amphiascus is a...
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The 92 Nobel Prize nominations of Robert Burns Woodward
As Nobel season dawns upon us, Stu Cantrill points me to an endlessly interesting link on the Nobel website which lists nominating information for various scientists up to 1964 (names of nominees and...
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Cox's Orange Pippin
Perhaps you have never heard of or seen this apple: Cox's Orange Pippin. TPP just finished eating one, the first in a great many years and it did not disappoint. The orange pippin is simply one great...
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Pretty, but toxic, mushroom
This is an easy mushroom to identify, Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric. They are big (the cap can easily be 15 cm in diam when spread) and very handsome, and a large number of them were arising in a...
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Fear of cloning: time to stop stalling and just do it!
For several months I've been stalling on a relatively simple project whose completion would let us submit a nice paper. This is the missing step in an undergraduate Honours student's project; I wrote...
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Building scientists #istandwithahmed #kierawilmot
So what's this kid doing in the high school auditorium after school? He's drilled holes and put pipes into a cooler, there's some kind of heating device or trigger. Wires. And it looks like a boat...
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FieldNotes: Homo naledi, #IStandWithAhmed and NatGeo Fox
There Is No Theory of Everything by Simon Critchley at Opinionator: Over the years, I have had the good fortune to teach a lot of graduate students, mostly in philosophy, and have noticed a recurring...
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Prof. Erland Stevens's edX med chem class
Just as he did previously, Prof. Erland Stevens of Davidson College is teaching a comprehensive med chem edX class that would be useful for anyone wanting to dive into the field. The course attracted...
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Hyperbolic Pascal triangles and other stories
A new set of mathematical abstracs. We start with the hyperbolic Pascal trianlges: Fibonacci and Pell sequences in the hyperbolic Pascal triangleIn this paper, we introduce a new generalization of...
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Donald Trump shows his anti-vaccine craziness, and Ben Carson's response is...
Donald Trump used the latest Republican debate as an opportunity to express wildly inaccurate anti-vaccine claims, embracing the thoroughly discredited position that vaccines cause autism. This claim...
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Brand spanking new botanical research articles
TPP is catching up, or trying to, on lots of things. Here's a link to some research summaries for the latest issue of the American Journal of Botany. The very first article is pretty interesting...
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Innovative bicycle wheel with built in springs
Oh, this is just too cool! Loop wheels with built in springs would look just great on TPP's bicycle and at my age, and another year was just chalked up, anything that makes the ride smoother is looked...
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Happy posts!
September is a nice time of year when you are not a student or faculty member for whom the month is quite hectic. Enjoying September is a great side benefit of retirement. And it includes TPP's...
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