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ISSNAF News
ISSNAF News - Community Update
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Friday, 13 August 2010 02:22 |
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Image credit
sciencebasedmedicine.org
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Summer Time Blues, the third Report in a series on Stimulus spending unveiled by senators Coburn and McCain on August 3, re-ignites debate over funding for science programs. A number of research on substance abuse and public health studies, supported by NIH and NSF grants fell among the hundred projects listed as "wasteful spending." NIH director Francis Collins and supporters of science stimulus package argued back. An article by Louise Radnofsky, published in the WSJ, offers an overview of the discussion.
Read more…
* Cochran Eddie: Summertime Blues Lyrics
Postilla -- Francis Collin's Balancing Acts. Meredith Wadman's report on Francis Collin's first year at the helm of NIH, published in Nature, highlights some of the most difficult choices that Collins is confronting vis a vis NIH grantees. Read here |
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Italian Physicists Get ERC Starting Grants |
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Sunday, 08 August 2010 00:00 |
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(Ino-Cnr)
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(Isc-Cnr)
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and INFN)
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ESA-NASA: Flush the Rivalry in the Name of Mars |
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Friday, 06 August 2010 03:50 |
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| Image credit www.cs.ucf.edu |
With ExoMars, the joint program for Mars exploration, ESA and NASA's relationship evolved from rivalry to partnership. Scientists worldwide were invited to propose the Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft’s instruments. INAF researchers, Giancarlo Bellucci, from INAF-IFSI in Roma, and Gabriele Cremonese, from INAF-Osservatorio astronomico of Padova, are among the Italian team leaders for two of the selected science instruments: SOIR/NOMAD, an high-resolution solar occultation and nadir spectrometer to detect trace constituents in the atmosphere and to map their location on the surface, and HiSCI, a high-resolution Stereo Color Imager camera to provide 4-colour stereo imaging.
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Higgs Boson Hunters -- a Lighter Catch? |
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Tuesday, 27 July 2010 00:18 |
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| Image credit: Fermilab |
The Higgs particle remains "the last not-yet-observed piece of the theoretical framework known as the Standard Model of Particles and Forces," but Fermilab physicists at the Paris International Conference on High Energy Physic show data which support "improved non-observation" and an "immense progress" on the Higgs' search. Fermilab's experiments "narrow the allowed mass range value for Higgs boson" and the race to be the first to spot the Higgs between the Tevatron teams at Fermilab and the LHC teams at the European particle physics laboratory (CERN) continue to be on as the possibility of finding the "goddamn particle" is seemingly closer.
Guido Tonelli, spokesman for CMS, looks favourably at the prospective of Tevatron and LHC working as "complementary" machines for the next 2 or 3 years -- assuming that the Tevatron continue to run, which is currently being debated and not yet decided.
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Time Traveling -- Paradox Free ? |
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Monday, 26 July 2010 00:06 |
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| Image credit: Seth Lloyd, et al. |
All theories of time travel have been faced with the challenge of the “grandfather paradox:” say, a traveler going back in time could kill his grandfather and thus prevent his own existence, which would also prevent the murder taking place. In the early 1990s, David Deutsch came up with a model which allowed the time traveler remember killing his grandfather without having actually done it -- an improvement which however retains inherent inconsistencies between the past remembered and the past experienced, remarks Seth Lloyd, director of the MIT center for extreme quantum information theory (xQIT), who has been testing quantum time travel theories with a team of researchers including the Italians Vittorio Giovannetti and Lorenzo Maccone.
Lloyd's group put forth a "post selected model" of time travel, an experimental simulation which censors "paradoxical situations" by "going back and outlawing" any event that would prove paradoxical in the future. The xQIT theorists' model beat the "Grandfather Paradox" -- or, as they put it, "no matter how hard the time-traveler tries, she finds her grandfather a tough guy to kill."
Read more...
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Rigorous "Science" -- On Hold |
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Saturday, 10 July 2010 01:47 |
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Jennifer Couzin-Frankel (July 8, 2010 Science Insider) interviews Paola Sebastiani and Thomas Perls about the "furor" raised by their "provocative" paper "Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans," published in Science. In a Newsweek article and in a number of blogposts in the internet, researchers criticized the paper's statistical power and technical accuracy. Though surprised by the focus of criticism -- "issues with the data," rather than the innovative idea of "looking at patterns rather than individual variants," which Sebastiani expected would "generate discussion" -- the authors are taking seriously the concerns that have been raised, and "re-checking" the paper's analysis.
It won't take months nor weeks, says Thomas Perls, but "rigorous science" takes time and people need to wait for the required "ultimate test of accuracy." Interestingly, the Longevity Study may become a case study on the self-correcting process of science; as Sebastiani pointed out, "there are errors in every paper. This is part of the scientific debate -- from errors, sometimes you can come up with very good ideas."
More later, as they say!
- Authors of Controversial Longevity Study Discuss the Furor, Science
- Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans, Science
- The Little Flaw in the Longevity-Gene Study That Could Be a Big Problem, Newsweek
- Longevity paper sparks debate, Nature
- New genetic test can predict your chances of living to 100, claim scientists, Guardian
- The inside workings of science: More on the genetic study of extreme longevity,
- Genetic Finding May Provide a Test for Longevity, NYT
- Serious flaws revealed in "longevity genes" study, Scienceblog
- Calling GWAS Longevity Calls into Question, Genomeweb
- Paola Sebastiani and Thomas Perls discussed the study's findings in a live chat about the Longevity Study on Wednesday, July 7. Here
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The Climategate Affair -- "What They Did" and "What They Said" |
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Thursday, 08 July 2010 04:14 |
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| Photo: Courtesy of The Guardian |
The Muir Russell Report. The last of the three inquiries generated by the “climategate” emails affair confirms the scientific integrity of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU).
The Muir Russell’s report, though, seemingly shares with the Oxburgh report the conclusion that CRU’s researchers are "ill prepared for public attention.” But “ultimately,” as Muir Russell remarked, the inquiry “has to be about “what they did,” and not “what they said.” The findings of the CRU scientists are not the result of manipulated data.
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