Some Higgs boson excitement pending …

Has a Higgs boson been found, in fact will it ever be found? … No, we don’t know yet, but we soon might. Ian Sample writes in today’s UK Guardian that staff at the LHC have arranged a special seminar on Tuesday 13 December at which the latest results in the search for the Higgs … Read more

The Pale Blue Dot – A Tribute to Carl Sagan

Seth over at The Thinking Atheist has created a new visual translations of Cal Sagan’s famous words. The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of our home planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles). Earth is seen as a tiny … Read more

Hubble directly observes the disc around a black hole

An international team of astronomers has used a new technique to study the bright disc of matter surrounding a faraway black hole. Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, combined with the gravitational lensing effect of stars in a distant galaxy, the team measured the disc’s size and studied the colors (and hence the temperatures) of … Read more

Handling Back Pain: Yoga vs Stretching

Reuters reports here on a study that has just been published (Oct 24) in the Archives of Internal Medicine. They wanted to see which was best for back pain; yoga or stretching, and did this with a study involving over 200 adults with lower back pain. Chronic lower back pain is a common problem and yet … Read more

Claim: Global temperature rise could exceed “safe” levels of two degrees in our lifetimes

Reuters reports (here today) that Two research papers, supposedly published in the journal Nature, have warned that the global temperature rise could exceed “safe” levels of two degrees Celsius in some parts of the world in many of our lifetimes if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. It sounds credible, it sounds believable, it also … Read more

Global warming ‘confirmed’ by independent study

The news is out and many are reporting the details. Richard Black writes on the BBC … The Earth’s surface really is getting warmer, a new analysis by a US scientific group set up in the wake of the “Climategate” affair has concluded. The Berkeley Earth Project has used new methods and some new data, … Read more