Space: rocks floating around in the dark. Who cares? Canadian blogger Five Feet of Fury offers her blunt opinion, which may be more widespread than many science nerds suppose: After the novelty wore off, NASA spent decades getting borderline bitchy about how nobody else cared about their launches and missions anymore. But they had turned into Marge Simpson in that one where she keeps wearing the Chanel suit to everything. When nobody else is looking, nobody over the age of 12 gives much of a crap about real life space travel. They care more about imaginary space travel; who gets asked for his autograph more often: the second man on the moon (whoever that was) or Leonard Nimoy? Proof that Read More ›

In “Faster-than-light neutrino claim bolstered” (New Scientist, September 23, 2011), Lisa Grossman notes, Representatives from the OPERA collaboration spoke in a seminar at CERN today, supporting their astonishing claim that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light. The result is conceptually simple: neutrinos travelling from a particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland arrived 60 nanoseconds too early at a detector in the Gran Sasso cavern in Italy. And it relies on three conceptually simple measurements, explained Dario Autiero of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Lyon: the distance between the labs, the time the neutrinos left Switzerland, and the time they arrived in Italy. Here comes the horseshoe: But only time will tell whether the result holds up Read More ›

Kelly Oakes here (September 23, 2011): While scepticism is necessary in situations like this — I’m sure we’re all aware of the famous Carl Sagan quote, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” — progress is not made by shouting down anything that does not fit within the current status quo. You never know, perhaps this result will be the one that topples relativity. (They probably didn’t, but there’s a chance, however slim, that those neutrinos did travel faster than light — and that’s a very interesting prospect indeed). Actually, in some areas of science today, it is not necessary to make either extraordinary claims or fail to provide massive evidence to get shouted down. For example, all the evidence for evolution Read More ›

… than what you might expect to find in nature. From “Aquarium Fishes Are More Aggressive in Reduced Environments, New Study Finds” ( ScienceDaily (Sep. 22, 2011)”, we learn something that won’t surprise many: Oldfield quantified aggressive behavior as a series of displays and attacks separated by at least a second. Displays are body signals such as flaring fins. An attack could be a nip, chase, or charge at another fish. In aquariums, these behaviors can lead to injury and in extreme cases to death. Aggressive behavior was not correlated with small-scale changes in either group size or habitat size alone. However, a significant difference was observed in environments sufficiently large and complex: fish spent less time exhibiting aggressive behavior. Read More ›