| Diabetes now tops Vietnam vets' claims By MIKE BAKER 2010-08-30T21:14:51ZRALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- By his own reckoning, a Navy electrician spent just eight hours in Vietnam, during a layover on his flight back to the U.S. in 1966. He bought some cigarettes and snapped a few photos.... hosted.ap.org |
Agony aunt tears up the rules of the dating game Dr Petra Boynton claims science has exploded some of the myths about dating and relationshipsAt this week's British Science Festival in Birmingham, psychologist and self-proclaimed agony aunt, Dr Petra Boynton, exploded some of the myths that surround dating. She believes that science can go some way to helping us understand and even improve how we date.But how much can science really explain? And should we listen to it?"Let's take the idea that being single is abnormal. The evidence shows that you can expect to be single for at least a third of your life," says Boynton, citing research conducted by sociologist Dr Laumann at the University of Chicago.According to Boynton: "People are anxious that they're past it at 22. If you look at the UK General Household Survey, the average age for men to get married is 34 and for women is 29."How about not sleeping with someone on the first date? Sociologist Anthony Paik surveyed 642 adults and asked how they got together in the first place and how happy they were now. He found that although the relationship quality was higher for those who first had sex when they were in a serious relationship with their partner, this difference can be accounted for by the selection process we use when we're picking a serious partner.And internet dating? Boynton says "a lot of online dating sites pride themselves on the number of successful matches they make. If you look at the research coming out of dating websites themselves, there's only about a 1 in 10 chance of meeting someone and going on a date with them if you're internet dating."Match.com asked Ipsos Mori to interview 1,000 former members and found that of the 160 who had left their website, 17% stated that they left the website because they had found a partner. Match.com of course makes the assumption that this was a representative sample.The problem with believing these statistics is that they're not available to independent researchers to validate.Given the lack of good news for singletons so far, can science step in to teach us how to date? Unfortunately not. Researchers might be able to explode many of the myths of dating, but the methodology used is far from perfect.Most research relies on surveys, where the group responding may have a viewpoint that is not representative of the general population.They also might not remember facts correctly or might have been inappropriately chosen. Women are more likely to answer than men. When researchers ask people to recount stories of their lives, memories can be selective.There is also (understandably) little interest from funders of research to look into our dating habits. And those companies that do the surveys, such as internet dating websites, have an agenda. They just want you to sign up.There are many interesting questions that might provide us with a deeper scientific understanding of etiquette and success in our ever-changing dating world. We are told that body language is important in working out how people are thinking and knowing whether someone is attracted to us. How can we apply that knowledge to the things we type on our dating website profiles? More importantly, can research be used to help those who are less able to empathise, such as those with autism spectrum disorder?Alas, dating remains as clear as mud. The message for singletons? Just get out there and date – there are no rules.Monica Desai is a British Science Association media fellow British Science Festival 2010British Science FestivalReproductionBiologyRelationshipsMonica Desaiguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Quarks, gluons and jets | Jon Butterworth The LHC paper I've been working on for the past few months is finally out. It shows quarks and gluons doing what they should do, and I love itIn July we (ATLAS) released a preliminary version of our first jet cross section measurement, and showed it at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Paris. Today we submitted the final version of this measurement to the European Physical Journal and to the archive."Cross section" in this context is basically a probability. If you fire two footballs at each other, they have a bigger cross-sectional area than two snooker balls, so they are more likely to hit each other. A "jet cross section" is a measure of how likely we are to see jets when we fire two protons at each other.Jets are what quarks and gluons do when they try to escape. The proton is made up of quarks stuck together by gluons. Most of the fundamental forces get weaker with distance - the Earth's gravitational pull gets weaker the further out into space you go, for example. But the strong nuclear force is the other way round.The force between two quarks actually gets stronger as you pull them apart, more like an elastic band. When two quarks in LHC protons bounce off each other they head away really quickly, feeling almost no force at first (physics buzzwords: asymptotic freedom. See this Nobel Prize citation). But at some point that has to end, because as they get further and further from the protons they were knocked out of, the force pulling them back gets stronger and stronger.You can think of the quarks as being the ends of the elastic band. They fly away from each other until at some point the band snaps and two new ends (new quarks) are produced. Eventually, we see a spray of hadrons (particles, like the proton, which contain quarks and generate amusing typos). Because the initial quarks get kicked so hard, this spray is collimated into a jet, and despite all the splitting and production of new quarks, the direction of the jet reflects pretty well the initial direction of the quark.ResultSo, what you see in the plot below reflects the distribution of quarks and gluons scattered in collisions at the LHC.When we collide protons, we really care most about the collisions between the proton's constituents - quarks or gluons. Unfortunately the quarks and gluons only carry a fraction of the energy of the proton, and we have no way of choosing how much. If the fraction was a half, for example, then we would have jets with 1750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) of energy (half of 3.5 TeV). But most of the quarks and gluons carry much smaller fractions.To have a real measurement of this, and show that the theory prediction (quantum chromodynamics, labelled QCD on the plot) agrees with the data, is a real achievement. It directly involved dozens of people, and less directly hundreds. One key component is the energy calibration which I described here.This result, like the minimum bias results, is part of finding our feet in the new energy regime of the LHC - but these collisions are much closer to where we want to be. And we already have about 300 times more data to play with than is shown here, with more flooding in. We are already using these data to look for new forces and particles (see here and here).PSWhen we put the preliminary results out, I wrote an earlier version of this article. Unlike the data, it changed quite a bit in between! In a good way.Jon Butterworthguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
In a Takeout Container, a Trek to the Stratosphere A seven-minute edit of a handmade craft’s recorded trip 100,000 feet into the air, posted on a video-sharing site, becomes a viral success. feeds.nytimes.com |
Last year's moonshot splashed up lots of water By ALICIA CHANG 2010-10-22T01:22:14ZLOS ANGELES (AP) -- When NASA blasted a hole in the moon last year in search of water, scientists figured there would be a splash. They just didn't know how big. Now new results from the Hollywood-esque moonshot reveal lots of water in a crater where the sun never shines - 41 gallons of ice and vapor.... hosted.ap.org |