Month: October 2009

“We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals.”
…
A team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimated that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone -dating back to the Stone Age – has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution.

The Past 5,000 Years Mark a New Epoch in Human Evolution | The Daily Galazy
Source: dailygalaxy.com

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Essay – The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate – NYTimes.com (via davemorin / mikehudack)

“…otherwise distinguished…”

(via katiebakes)

Unless the terrorists get to it first! However, the most likely explanation is that this is all just an elaborate promotional effort for the final season of Lost.

“…the ‘brilliant and solitary’ physician’s sinister plans…”(via fiatluxemburg) Make that, ‘the brilliant and solitary Higgs boson’s sinister plans’ …

Source: davemorin

“Mollusc-driven architecture”

fiatluxemburg:

Concerned with the environmental and revenue impacts of leaks during oil drilling, StatOil sought an innovative and automated way to detect leaks.  They wanted to replace a manual process that included deep sea drivers.  StatOil’s innovation, they attached RFID tags to the shells of blue mussels.  When the blue mussels sense an oil leak, they close which prompts the RFID tags to emit closure events.  In response to the events, the drilling line is automatically stopped. [elemental links]