Новости за 13.06.2016

Michele Redi, SciAmerican
It’s December 15, 2015, and an auditorium in Geneva is packed with physicists. The air is filled with tension and excitement because everybody knows that something important is about to be announced. The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has recently restarted operations at the highest energies ever achieved in a laboratory experiment, and the first new results from two enormous, complex detectors known as ATLAS and CMS are being presented.

Science 2.0
Though they meet thousands of new people in their lifetime, what underlying psychological factors might couples use to stay committed to their partners? According to a recent study, people in relationships actually see tempting people outside of their partnership as less attractive.

Roff Smith, Nat Geo
Imagine sunrise on the last day of the Mesozoic era, 66 million years ago. Shafts of sunlight rake through the swamps and coniferous forests along the coast of what is now Mexico’s Yucatn Peninsula. The blood-warm seas of the Gulf of Mexico teem with life.

Richard Hollingham, BBC
“This is not the crazy stuff,” says Sebastian Willems, as the researcher leads me past a glass case full of futuristic models of sleek silver spaceplanes at the German space agency’s (DLR) wind tunnel facility in Cologne.

Ian Chant, Nautilus
In 1868, on a hot, midsummer day, 28-year-old Mary Lynch was admitted to the Philadelphia Almshouse and Hospital, the city hospital for the poor, better known as “Old Blockley.” Lynch had tuberculosis, which was soon to be compounded by the parasitic infection trichinosis.

Joshua Rothman, NYer
Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology event in California.

Mary Roach, Science Friday
The chicken gun has a sixty-foot barrel, putting it solidly in the class of an artillery piece. While a four-pound chicken hurtling in excess of 400 miles per hour is a lethal projectile, the intent is not to kill. On the contrary, the chicken gun was designed to keep people alive.

Brooks Hays, UPI
New research suggests the wild macaques of coastal Thailand have employed stone tools to pry open oysters and nuts for several generations. Their use of tools may date back thousands of years, scientists at the University of Oxford say.

Nsikan Akpan, PBS NewsHour
Boulder smells of peppermint…and crisp snow. The frozen water smells pure, as if still trapped in the clouds hanging just overhead. The sun glints off the Rocky Mountains, their iron musk mixes with mountain pine. Before crossing the road to enter the University of Colorado Boulder, a truck dashes by, muffling these scents with sulfuric exhaust.

Ethan Siegel, Forbes
The Standard Model of elementary particle physics — the particles and interactions that describe everything we’ve ever created or smashed together in a lab — do a remarkable job of predicting exactly what our experiments see.

Will Knight, MIT Technology Review
Flying cars have always been something of a joke in technology circles. They’re the future, and always will be, the saying goes. Well, now we might have to take them just a teeny bit more seriously.

Stephen Heard, Scientist Squirrel
If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will: you submit a manuscript for publication and get back a peer review that makes you spit with fury. “What an idiot!” you snarl, “how could a reviewer ever think that?”

David Sumpter, 1843
Until September last year, I had never really gambled. I’d been to the dog tracks a few times when I lived in Manchester and once went to Aintree to watch the Grand National. Some of my friends would bet on the football, and I could see how it could add an extra dimension to watching the game.

Jesse Luke, Science-Based Medicine
Being an avid reader of SBM and a cancer patient, I have come to deeply appreciate the writing and respect the various contributors for their expertise and attention to detail on a topic as important as cancer treatment. I have unfortunately found SBM lacking when it comes to a patient’ or lay-person’s’ perspective.

Atul Gawande, The New Yorker
If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation.