National Institute of Standards and Technology theoretical physicist James Baker-Jarvis died in a Colorado hospital after a 3-foot tree branch came through his auto windshield and impaled him during a windstorm.

But even after the 3-inch diameter branch went through his chest, he still held on long enough to pull the Subaru Outback to the side of the road, saving his wife from injury.

If you have to go, saving the life of someone you love is the way to do it right.

R.I.P.

NIST scientist killed after winds send branch his windshield north of Boulder by Mitchell Byars, Daily Camera

Vincent Dammai, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston, S.C., has been arrested by the FBI for supplying stem cells for use in unapproved stem cell therapies in violation of federal US Food and Drug Administration laws.

The upside to being a communist dictatorship is you can just ban cars for the common folk to lessen pollution when important events are in town, like the Olympics, which makes progressive environmentalists coo with delight but isn't that great for people who have to get to work. The downside is no one really care what happens to people when government is the most important thing, and that means corruption - and therefore yet another food scandal due to indifferent oversight.

A cave in South Africa contains a bed made of bundles of sedge and wild quince leaves. It was found by archaeologist Lyn Wadley of Wits University while excavating a site at Sibudu in KwaZulu-Natal province. Wadley found the bed, about the size of a modern twin bed, buried over nine feet deep in sediments inside a rock shelter on a cliff face on the banks of the Thongathi river, 20 north of Durban. Wadley has been working there since 1998. The bed was covered with a layer of aromatic leaves from a plant called the river wild quince. No other tree leaves were found on the bedding, so the leaves were not there as a result of random leaf fall, the report said.

At various times in Earth history, single-celled organisms threw their lot in with each other to become larger and multicellular, resulting, for instance, in the riotous diversity of animals. However, fossil evidence of these major evolutionary transitions is extremely rare.

At Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP, Ken Regan tackles what the statistical nuance of 'evidence' means in the latest Higgs disclosure, delving into statistics and social convention in a hard science (actually, he puts "hard science" in quotes, though I am not sure why - perhaps he thinks 'hard' is the colloquial version, like 'difficult' so he doesn't want to annoy social fields) such as particle physics and whether the assumptions behind the confidence intervals can be violated on both sides: by humans owing to unexpected selection bias, and by Nature possibly acting like a cheating prover in an interactive protocol. 

America is the only civilized country that allows late-term abortion on demand yet America is regarded as more hung up on abortion than European countries.  What gives?  Outside the recurring re-election campaigns of people like Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, who insist if they do not get 80% of the votes in Democrat bastion San Francisco women will be 'having abortions in back alleys', abortion is not really an issue.

At some point we need to either ban cigarettes or call off the fundamentalist ranting about smokers.  Yes, smoking is bad for you, everyone knows that by now, but having the state of California increase taxes on cigarette smokers - making the state government even more reliant on them - while they use some of that money for anti-smoking campaigns, which means the government now wants to kill the revenue source it is making itself more reliant on, is the kind of thing only...well... progressive government would do.

Eye evolution is always interesting stuff, as I last discussed regarding Dr. Ivan Schwab's "Evolution's Witness".  

A new finding suggests that the compound eyes evolved right at the origin of this branch of the evolutionary tree, long before the sorts of hard exoskeletons we now consider typical of arthropods.