Cultured men are happier and healthier

post from Top stories on 23 May 2011 10:24:50 PM. © Top stories

Men who visit art galleries, museums, and the theatre regularly tend to enjoy better health and are more satisfied with life, reveals a study published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

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http://machineslikeus.com/news/cultured-men-are-happier-and-healthier

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Eggs, butter, milk -- memory is not just a
shopping list

post from Top stories on 23 May 2011 10:19:04 PM. © Top stories

Often, the goal of science is to show that things are not what they seem to be.

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http://machineslikeus.com/news/eggs-butter-milk-memory-not-just-shopping-list

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Mushroom compound suppresses prostate tumours

post from Top stories on 23 May 2011 10:13:21 PM. © Top stories

A mushroom used in Asia for its medicinal benefits has been found to be 100 per cent effective in suppressing prostate tumour development in mice during early trials, new Queensland University of Technology (QUT) research shows.

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http://machineslikeus.com/news/mushroom-compound-suppresses-prostate-tumours

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Nice Program on Mexican Free-tailed Bats

post from Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog on 23 May 2011 07:15:21 PM. © Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog

Mexican free-tailed bats in the Central Valley, California: the voracious insect-eating species protects the local crops from pests. Bats really are wonderful animals and very beneficial to people. They eat many insects and some also help pollinate some plants. The Mexican free-tailed bats seem to even benefit from human activity (taking advantage of bridge underpasses as homes, for example), but many other bat species are in trouble.

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http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/2011/05/23/nice-program-on-mexican-free-tai
led-bats/

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NCBI ROFL: Penguins on treadmills. Need we say
more

post from Discoblog » NCBI ROFL on 23 May 2011 07:00:09 PM. © Discoblog » NCBI ROFL

Heart rate and rate of oxygen consumption of exercising macaroni penguins.

“Twenty-four macaroni penguins (Eudyptes chrysolophus) from three groups, breeding males (N=9), breeding females (N=9) and moulting females (N=6), were exercised on a variable-speed treadmill. Heart rate (fH) and mass-specific rate of oxygen consumption (sVO2) were recorded from the animals, and both fh and sVO2 were found to increase linearly with increasing treadmill speed. A linear regression equation described the relationship between fh and sVO2 for each individual. There were no significant differences in these regressions between breeding and moulting females. There were significant differences in these relationships between all females and breeding males. fH and s VO2 were recorded from five of these animals for a total of 24 h. When fh was used to predict sVO2 for the 24 h period using the derived regressions, the estimate was not significantly different from the measured values, with an average error of -2.1 %. When fh was used to predict sVO2 for the 5 min intervals used for the calibration in all 24 birds, the estimate was not significantly different from the observed values, and the average error was only ...

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NcbiRofl/~3/v8pY6405osE/

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The 3QD Science Blogging Contest is Back!

post from Observations of a Nerd on 23 May 2011 06:05:12 PM. © Observations of a Nerd

3 Quarks Daily has announced their third annual science blogging prize! This year, the final results will be judged by none other than Lisa Randall, theoretical physicist extraordinaire from Harvard University.

Nominations are open now, and are for any post published between May 22^nd, 2010 and today. Posts can be nominated by placing a comment with a link to the post in the comments section of this post. Nominations close May 31st, so you've got about a week to nominate your favorites!

...and yes, in a moment of shameless self promotion: if you want to nominate one of mine, here are some of my favorites (though feel free to choose another you're more fond of);

Reverse Bestiality: When Animals Commit Sexual Assault

Why do women cry? Obviously, it's so they don't get laid.

The Science of Makeup

Testosterone Levels In Carcharhinus leucas: Is It All Bull?

Reflections on the Gulf Oil Spill - Conversations With My Grandpa

Read the comments on this post...

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/observationsofanerd/~3/-SM0m2GbOlY/the_3qd_science
_blogging_conte.php

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Maurice Goldhaber: A lifetime of physics

post from Physics Buzz on 23 May 2011 05:15:52 PM. © Physics Buzz

Maurice Goldhaber, an Austrian-born American physicist who helped establish the standard model of particle physics and a former American Physical Society president, died at his Long Island, N.Y., home on May 11. Goldhaber was 100.

[Maurice Goldhaber in 1937.]

Goldhaber's studies of subatomic physics helped to establish the standard model of particle physics. In 1934, he and his colleague James Chadwick made the first accurate measurement of the mass of a neutron. Chadwick had first discovered the neutron in 1932. Back then, scientists thought the neutron was a combination of a proton and an electron. The measurements helped show that it is a distinct particle.

Goldhaber also contributed to the understanding of particle spin. Scientists once believed that the spin of a particle would go clockwise as often as it would go counterclockwise. Goldhaber and his colleagues showed in 1957 that neutrinos spin only in one direction. Neutrinos are those elusive particles that zip through matter without being altered or very easily detected. Their discovery changed the way scientists thought about elementary particles.

Goldhaber was the director of Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1961 to 1973. During that time, three major discoveries made at the lab resulted in Nobel Prizes. Though Goldhaber officially retired in 1985, he continued to do research at the lab well after his 90th birthday.

Goldhaber was born in Lemberg, Austria, on April 18, 1911. He was studying at the graduate level at the University of Berlin in the early 1930s. As the Nazi regime took over central Europe, Goldhaber fled to the United Kingdom. There, he worked with Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the atomic nucleus, at Cambridge University. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge in 1936. Goldhaber then went to the United States in 1938 where he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois. He became a senior scientist at Brookhaven in 1950. He served as the president of the American Physical Society (APS) in 1982.

[Brookhaven National Laboratory]

Physics was an integral part of Goldhaber's life and a common thread through generations of family. Goldhaber was married to a nuclear physicist named Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber. She also fled Europe in the 1930s and worked with him at Brookhaven. Goldhaber's son Alfred Scharff Goldhaber is a physics professor at SUNY Stony Brook. Alfred's son David Goldhaber-Gordon (Goldhaber's grandson) is an assistant professor of physics at Stanford.

Martin Blume, a former editor and chief of the APS journals who used to carpool with Goldhaber, said to The New York Times that the physicist had "an idea a minute."

"I had a hard time keeping Maurice quiet," Blume said to the Times. "He did not have very much sympathy for someone just trying to focus on getting there alive. Sometimes I had to put my hand across his face to stop him from talking."

Peter Bond, the senior adviser to the director of Brookhaven lab, said in a Brookhaven statement that one of his favorite things Goldhaber once quipped is that "Physics teaches old things to new people."

Read The Full Article:
http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2011/05/maurice-goldhaber-lifetime-of-physi
cs.html

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Volcano followup: pix, video

Within hours of posting about the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Grimsvötn, I found out that helicopter footage of the plume (with tons of lightning) has been posted on Vimeo by Jon Gustafsson:Lightning is common in volcanic plumes, but this one[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/qidXZ_St998/

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Gulf Currents Primed Bacteria to Degrade Oil
Spill

From Science News: A new computer model of the Gulf of Mexico in the period after the 2010 oil spill provides insights into how underwater currents may have primed marine microorganisms to degrade the oil. Read the whole article

Read The Full Article:
http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/17002/Gulf-Currents-Primed-Bacteria-to-Degrad
e-Oil-Spill?from_rss=1

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