The title of this post is not of my making - it is something you may read in a list of recent ATLAS results, in one of the otherwise dry and business-like web pages of the experiment:



Don't get me wrong, I am all for a bit of personality in such web outlets, so the above rather than criticism should be seen as an exhortation to my CMS colleagues (as CMS the experiment I am a member of) to mimic its competitor. I look forward to a listing of "CMS wondrous new results on Higgs physics", e.g. ...

The most popular pets are cats and dogs but their origins as human companions are much different. Dogs became domesticated during the ice age 23,000 years ago as humans and wolves co-habitated in tolerable refuge areas. Scavenging and then feeding by humans led to companionship. 

Pet cats (Felis silvestris catus. Felis catus) are much more recent, and evidence shows they were allowed as pest control but gradually became companions as humans migrated and took cats with them. Like dogs, and unlike cattle and horses, there was a nexus for domestication; in the case of cats the Fertile Crescent, the areas of the Middle East surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Distributive justice is the subject of social, and therefore political, debate, but like 'sustainability' no one really knows what it means so it can mean anything to anyone. And therefore be used by everyone for their agendas. Socialists in New York City are against the mayor's plan to take people who are clearly mental ill in the homeless population and hospitalize them, for example, they say it is distributive injustice, while proponents say it is a way to decriminalize mental illness among the homeless and therefore compassionate and just for the most vulnerable.

Imagine that a soldier has a tiny computer device injected into their bloodstream that can be guided with a magnet to specific regions of their brain. With training, the soldier could then control weapon systems thousands of miles away using their thoughts alone. Embedding a similar type of computer in a soldier’s brain could suppress their fear and anxiety, allowing them to carry out combat missions more efficiently.

To help try and understand the evolution and origins of cell motility, researchers have created the smallest mobile lifeform ever. 

Scientists introduced seven proteins, believed to be directly involved in allowing Spiroplasma bacteria to swim into a synthetic bacterium named syn3—through genetic engineering. syn3 was designed and chemically synthesized to have the smallest genomic DNA possible including the minimum essential genetic information required for growth from the smallest genomes of naturally occurring Mycoplasma bacteria.

A new study shows that supply chain cost increases coupled with inflation due to leaders just creating more currency are not new; they have been happening since ways to trade began.

A recent study revealed how the SARS-CoV-2 Spike (S)-protein interacts with human Estrogen Receptor Alpha (ERα) in lung tissue, which may increase the pro-coagulation activity of endothelial cells, enhancing the risk of thrombosis and shedding new light on the pathogenic mechanisms underlying SARS-CoV-2 infection and on its sex-specific differences.

The authors say it may also lead to the severe coagulopathy observed in some people receiving the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. 

Calculating how many lives have been lost in the COVID-19 pandemic will be valuable for future epidemiological and policy decisions - in many cases telling the public what we should not do. A murder victim who had a positive test within 30 days of being shot was counted as a COVID-related death, and that didn't inspire confidence. 

But Americans only know about that because there some effort at transparency. Elsewhere, governments claimed whatever they wanted to claim. China, the home of SARS-CoV-2 and the pandemic that resulted, first claimed they had ended their pandemic at 4,000 deaths while citizens reported crematoriums running 24 hours per day across the country.

That's the title of a short article I just published (it is online here, but beware - for now you need to access from an institution that can access the journal contents), on Nuclear Instruments and Methods - a renowned journal for particle physics and nuclear physics instrumentation. The contents are nothing very new, in the sense that they are little more than a summary of things that the MODE collaboration published last March here. But for the distracted among you, I will summarize the summary below.

Very few people are average, that is the problem with using population level statistics in a clinical environment, and why few do it.

Yet a population can show what questions to ask, like if there are racial differences in outcomes and why. A recent analysis in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society included data on 2,918 patients aged 75 years or older who were hospitalized for heart attacks at 94 US hospitals from 2013–2016.