Humor

Ron Breslow of Columbia University in New York has denied charges he plagiarized...himself. Hey, science is tough.  You have to cite pretty thoroughly. There are lots of instances where entire papers have been sent back from peer review because authors did not cite the reviewers or their friends enough times. It's pretty competitive out there.   Plus, like I discussed in Free Radicals - In Science, Anything Goes, scientists hate each other...when outsiders are not looking.  So it is other chemists calling for a retraction of Breslow's paper in Journal of the American Chemical…

Should robots behave politely? Because, to some, it’s a given that in the not-too-distant future large numbers of people will be interacting with robots (domestic, public, corporate and perhaps even law-enforcement/military) on a frequent basis.Professor Tatsuya Nomura at the Department of Media Informatics of Ryukoku University, along with colleagues at the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories Kyoto, have been tackling the question and its implications, and have recently published their results in a paper entitled ‘Effects of Polite Behaviors Expressed by Robots: A Case…

Can software automatically recognise celebrities? Hewlett-Packard (motto: Let’s do Amazing) believes so, and has recently published a paper on the feasibility of ‘Wikipedia-based Online Celebrity Recognition’.Researchers Demiao Lin, Jianming Jin, and Yuhong Xiong, from HP Labs China have been investigating so-called Smart-Browsing on the www, and point out that : “Obviously, recognizing celebrity names is important for smart browsing.”Clearly though, in order to implement Smart Browsing for Celebrities, a celebrity database is required. Fortunately, Wikipedia hosts many thousands of articles…

It was back in 2005 that inventor  Boris Volfson was granted a US patent for a device which has been erroneously summarised by some as a 'Flying Saucer'. But which is more accurately described as a Space Vehicle Propelled by the Pressure of Inflationary Vacuum State. Although the patent explained at length how  “A levitating, rotating, superconducting disk“ might be able to develop a temporary egg-shaped space-time anomaly sufficient to allow a passenger vehicle to travel faster than light, the exact physics behind the crucial component known as the ‘Phonon Maser’ may have remained…

What's the world coming to?  With all of the PhDs America produces, pretty soon law enforcement will be limited to officers with graduate degrees in quantum physics - but for now, Newton is still all it takes. Well, usually. Sometimes even the laws of physics are not what they look like. And special laws of physics apply on April 1st so use the contents of this paper on the differences between angular and linear motion carefully.  Not every judge is going to be impressed but this was in California, so he was probably happy to have someone besides an environmental activist in court.…

The number of scholarly authors who have formally studied the significance of verbal (and physical) interactions at Fawlty Towers is very limited. Nonetheless, professor Annjo Klungervik Greenall, of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, has recently done so – examining in detail the many (often heated) exchanges between Manuel and Basil Fawlty, and asking how they might contribute to the idea of Linguicism. As the professor puts it : “The present paper aims to demonstrate how a refined version of the Gricean theory of…

“Viewing a stressful soccer match more than doubles the risk of an acute cardiovascular event.” This disturbing conclusion was published in a 2008 study based on data regarding 4,279 Bavarian medical emergency cases. The number, and character, of adverse cardiovascular events which occurred during the FIFA World Cup (held in Germany from June 9 to July 9, 2006) were compared with those in a control period. Not only was there double the incidence of cardiac problems, but their time of onset starkly correlated with the beginning of the matches. [see graph at right] “Our results show a strong…

A recent discovery regarding injuries to baseball pitchers’ elbows can be described, in round terms, thus : the faster the pitch, the more likely the injury. Brandon (Brad) Bushnell M.D. (pictured) and colleagues at the Harbin Clinic Orthop(a)edics and Sports Medicine, Rome, GA. explain the background: “To our knowledge, no study has directly evaluated the connection between maximum pitch velocity and elbow injury in professional baseball pitchers.” Previous studies have examined baseball pitching styles and their relationship to elbow injuries – but this is the first to explore whether…

Ridicule might delay truth but it can't replace it. In recent weeks astonishing rumors have been spreading fast in science circles, and soon the wider public will be in the know. According to these rumors, despite all the denial and ridicule, planet Nibiru is real. Yes, you read that correctly. Nibiru is a fact. Science leaders are ready to admit the observation of Nibiru. This rogue object was there all the time. Right under our eyes. Since the days of Galileo we are aware of its existence. Initially it was mistaken for a star, and later for a solar system planet. It's neither.  We…

This article discusses a new method of mathematical physics, self-field theory (SFT), used to analyze the atom including its nucleus. Like quantum theory, SFT can be used in many other applications across physics. Our aim in this article is to outline the basic mathematical foundations of SFT and to demonstrate its intimate relationships to the history of physics during the early 20th century.  In summary we find the mathematics is a 'completion' of Bohr's theory of the electron that was discovered in 1913.  The centre of the formulation is the Maxwell-Lorentz…