Crossposted from LiveJournal

in chemistry news, An isomer of href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/327/5965/564">hexasilabenze was created, Si6R6, which turned out to be tricyclic (and bright green). It apparently is aromatic in some loose sense, and the authors want to call this ‘dismutational aromaticity’. Before this, only hexasilaprismane has been made, of all the Si6R6 isomers, and it was definitely not aromatic. Also, a quantum computing team calculated energy levels of hydrogen molecule to 20 bit precision using photonic quantum computer. Would be nice to be able to do quantum chemisty calculations on large molecules one day.

in physics, the 80-year old bizarre prediction of Dirac’s relativistic QM theory called “Zitterbewegung” was tentatively confirmed by a no less bizarre technique called ‘quantum simulation’, where hitting trapped ions with fine-tuned lasers makes them behave as free particles moving at fast speeds or as other types of quantum systems that are being simulated.

Speaking of the bizarre, biology was rich in that last month (when isn’t it?). Researchers attempted to tag some tree frogs with radio transmitters and learned something really weird: Tree frogs are apparently able to move into the bladder and urinate anything that was lodged in their body cavities: thorns, insects, radio transmitters. Also, a parasite was found, appropriately named Endaphis fugitiva, which jumps out of the banana aphid in which it lives when it realizes the aphid is in the jaws of a predator.

In promiscuous (but not in monogamous) mouse species, sperm cells can recognize and team up with sperm cells of the same male or, in a lesser extent, sperm of a brother. They form packs that swim faster than a single sperm cell. Also a couple researchers from Cincinnati decided to circumsize fruit fly males with lasers to see if their penis ornaments help them in mating.. Obviously, they do.

Speaking of sex, early last month a group from London made CNN news when they claimed that there is no G-spot in human females, simply by asking a whole lot of twins if they think they have any, arguing against an earlier italian study where G-spot was actually located with ultrasound.

And of course as everyone knows, paleontology had two major discoveries to hit the news: A polish group found well tetrapod tracks in Middle Devonian, showing that tetrapods coexisted with elpistostegids (such as Tiktaalik) for over 10 million years in different niches. Some chinese paleontologists found melanosomes in fossil dinosaur feathers, suggesting that dino’s plumage was striped russet-orange and white, overturning the idea that the color of prehistoric animals would never be known. How if they could find fossilized voice…

Something cool about humans: Ever seen movies where cowboys duel, the bad guy draws and the good guy reacts and draws faster? There’s truth to that: human brain reacts faster than acts (by a small margin, and with more mistakes, but faster). Another curous find about us: barefoot running subjects humans to four times less stress than shod running. Shoes make it easy to pick up the bad habit of landing on the heel.

And finally the poor little Mars explorer Spirit, stuck in a sand pit with two broken wheels since November, was finally declared a “stationary research station” (also covered by xkcd).

Crossposted from Livejournal

Of course, quite a few politically-motivated environmentalists made stuff up where science was too boring, but even Al Gore’s infamous “Inconvenient Truth” has ten times less factual errors than one global warming chapter of Lomborg’s “Skeptical Environmentalist”. Personally, I think pressuring people into feeling environmental anxiety and guilt is just as amoral as slandering climatologists (actually, I think a rational person should never experience guilt at all), but whether people deny or stretch the observed facts doesn’t change the facts in the least.

And since I’ve been running into internet discussions about this issue here and there, here are a collection of rebuttals by topic, partly for my own reference.
Responses to common contrarian arguments at RealClimate, the most in-depth blog on this topic, since it is ran by actual climatologists: Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and others.
How to talk to a GW skeptic at IllConsidered, blog by Coby Beck, an AI software engineer.
Skeptic Arguments by taxonomy at SkepticalScience, blog by John Cook, a solar physicist.
Climate Chainge: A guide for the perplexed by New Scientist magazine, bad as it became.

Crossposted from LiveJournal

In chemistry, everyone who was crazy about fullerenes and nanotubes is now crazy about graphene (monolayer of graphite, first literally peeled off a chunk of graphite with Scotch tape by some russians in 2004). In just last month people kept coming up with new ways to create it, new ways to modify it (and some more), new ways to calculate it, and new physical properties to measure. That whole nanoscience thing is a good source of funding!

Adult neurogenesis (did you even know new brain cells are constantly born in adult brains?) is still a hot topic in neuroscience: these japanese guys say the new brain cells not only form new memories (as a bunch of 2008 works has shown) but also clear out memories from hippocampus after they’ve been permanently stored in neocortex. Speaking of memory, this girl just showed that motor skills are stored by permanent rewiring of neurons, which is a neat explanation for why once you know how to ride a bicycle, you’ll never forget. Also, speaking of brains, there was this cool review by the leading bee brain specialist (who once was a postdoc in Stony Brook, like me) saying that brain size does not change cognitive capacity.

Continuing the search of minimal set of molecules required for life, a crowd of biochemists from all over europe finally published their detailed analysis of one of the smallest bacteria, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, in three articles in Science: 1, 2, 3. They found it “more subtle and intricate than was previously considered possible”. Well duh, it’s a pathogen, it has to be able to change quickly, and under evolutionary pressure to be small it just had to reuse the same molecules in multiple ways. One thing evolution is good at is reuse. It’s a good reminder of how dismally far is biochemistry from understanding the function of nearly all proteins. Decent advance, nevertheless.

What else.. Astronomers, besides everybody’s favorite slightly damp Moon bombing, found out that heliosphere is not smooth but has a weird ribbon going around it: Science 326:959 and four more papers in the same issue (how do they get so much space there with nothing but guesses??).

Anthropologists, who had a bit of a debate about the 3′6″ tall hobbit named Flo (Homo floresiensis, fossil human-like specimen found in 2003) have a new article, from Stony Brook of all places, again saying it’s a real specimen and not a sick H.erectus.

Botanists discovered some altriustic plants (they change their morphology to cooperate with relatives and to compete with strangers growing nearby), and some plants that use camouflage to hide from herbivore animals. Who knew botany can be interesting?

In kick-ass geological news, African continent is being torn asunder, with the gigantic Ethiopian Rift which suddenly appeared in 2005 in the middle of a desert, becoming 35 miles long and 20 feet wide in just a few days. It is now believed that it is no joke, this crack will one day become the middle of a new ocean.

And just for fun, someone bothered to find out why a dash of flour tossed on the surface of water scatters out so very fast (hey, it’s nanoscience!), and these girls say they got a good idea how to make the infertility pill for men.

Crossposted from Livejournal