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Former Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, former Utah governor and US Ambassador to China, took a battle axe to his own party, comparing it to China's Communist Party. Recounting his first experience on the presidential debate stage in Iowa in August 2011, Huntsman said he was struck by the question, "Is this the best we could do?"

Huntsman jokingly blamed his failed candidacy in part on his wife, who told him she would leave him if he abandoned his principles. “She said if you pandered, if you sign any of those damn pledges, I will leave you,” Huntsman recounted. "So I had to say I believe in science — and people on stage look at you quizzically as though you are an oddball."

In a report released yesterday, research think-tank Xegis Solutions noted that beards had a direct correlation to combat effectiveness. Said lead researcher Jonathon Burns, "We took 100 soldiers. 25 were Special Forces with beards, 25 Special Forces without beards, 25 were regular Army allowed to grow beards for the study, and the last 25 were regular Army without beards. All 100 of these subjects were in direct combat in Afghanistan during the study."

He continued, “Xegis Solutions had several teams of researchers embedded with these troops to make observations on their combat effectiveness. The results were overwhelming, out of the 50 soldiers with beards, zero were wounded or killed and they had a significantly higher accuracy of fire than the soldiers without beards. The soldiers lacking beards had a higher rate of weapons malfunctions and basically, shit went wrong most of the time.”

CENTCOM Commander Gen. James E. Mattis issued a statement to all US troops in combat zones: "The time has come for the Armed Forces to accept the facts, and the facts are that beards save lives. It is settled science. In light of this information we will enforce a rule requiring all males to wear at least one inch of facial hair at all times. Furthermore, any females able to grow facial hair are encouraged to do so as well."

The question, “If I were President I’d…” implies that if you swap out one leader, put in another, then all will be well with America — as though our leaders are the cause of all ailments.

That must be why we’ve created a tradition of rampant attacks on our politicians. Are they too conservative for you? Too liberal? Too religious? Too atheist? Too gay? Too anti-gay? Too rich? Too dumb? Too smart? Too ethnic? Too philanderous? Curious behavior, given that we elect 88% of Congress every two years.

A second tradition-in-progress is the expectation that everyone else in our culturally pluralistic land should hold exactly your own outlook, on all issues.

When you’re scientifically literate, the world looks different to you. It’s a particular way of questioning what you see and hear. When empowered by this state of mind, objective realities matter. These are the truths of the world that exist outside of whatever your belief system tells you.

One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist, Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, and host of NOVAScienceNOW

A study published in NeuroReport measured how long students could keep their hands in cold water. During the exercise, they could repeat an expletive or a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured 40 seconds longer. "Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it," says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University, who led the study. "I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear," he adds.

Earlier studies have shown that unlike normal language, which relies on the outer few millimeters in the left hemisphere of the brain, expletives hinge on evolutionarily ancient structures buried deep inside the right half. One such structure is the amygdala, an almond-shaped group of neurons that can trigger a fight-or-flight response in which our heart rate climbs and we become less sensitive to pain. Indeed, the students' heart rates rose when they swore, a fact the researchers say suggests that the amygdala was activated.

Scientists at Tulane University have discovered a novel bacterial strain, dubbed TU-103, that can use paper to produce butanol, a biofuel that can serve as a substitute for gasoline. They are currently experimenting with old editions of the Times Picayune newspaper with great success.
 TU-103 is the first bacterial strain from nature that produces 
butanol directly from cellulose, an organic compound.


"Cellulose is found in all green plants, and is the most abundant organic material on earth, and converting it into butanol is the dream of many," said Harshad Velankar, a postdoctoral fellow at Tulane University’s Department of Cell and Molecular Biology. "In the United States alone, at least 323 million tons of cellulosic materials that could be used to produce butanol are thrown out each year."

http://tulane.edu/news/releases/pr_082511.cfm

Japanese scientists have found a way to create artificial meat from sewage containing human feces. Somehow this feels like a Vonnegut plotline: population boom equals food shortage. Solution? Synthesize food from human waste matter. Absurd yes, but Japanese scientists have actually discovered a way to create edible steaks from human feces.

Mitsuyuki Ikeda, researcher at Okayama Laboratory, has developed steaks based on proteins from human excrement. Tokyo Sewage approached the scientist because of an overabundance of sewage mud. They asked him to explore the possible uses of the sewage, and Ikeda found that the mud contained a great deal of protein because of all the bacteria.

The researchers extracted those proteins, combined them with a reaction enhancer, and put it in an exploder which created the artificial steak. The "meat" is 63% proteins, 25% carbohydrates, 3% lipids, and 9% minerals. The researchers apply red food coloring and enhance the flavor with soy protein. Initial tests have people saying it even tastes like beef.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/international/japanese-scientists-creates-meat-out-of-feces/

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Colleagues and Friends!

A lot of praise has already been given to our work and the exciting new material graphene. We will certainly hear even more tribute as graphene’s impact on our lives becomes more obvious. So, let me refrain from further praise because today is also an occasion to celebrate something else.

The last decades were relatively peaceful and quiet for the planet. But with no obvious danger from outside, we are facing another danger, from inside. Instant information about everything and everyone often allows an individual opinion to compete with consensus and paranoia with evidence. It is a time when one blunt honest statement can finish a life-long political career, and one opinionated journalist can bully a government or a royal family.

Science is not immune from such pressures. For example, how many Nobel prize-winning experiments do you think would have been stopped, if ethics or health-and-safety regulations at that time were as zealous as they are today? I can think of more than a few.

Human progress has always been driven by a sense of adventure and unconventional thinking. But amidst calls for "bread and circuses", these virtues are often forgotten for the sake of cautiousness and political correctness that now rule the world. And we sink deeper and deeper from democracy into a state of mediocrity and even idiocracy. If you need an example, look no further than at research funding by the European Commission.

Against this backdrop I salute the Royal Swedish Academy for keeping the candle of merit alive. The great esteem in which the Nobel prizes are universally held is due to the fact that for several generations they have been given purely on scientific merit and not through lobbying and politicking. I do hope that it will stay this way, and the prizes will never be given according to the number of votes in live TV contests!

Let me also thank the Royal family for lending their unwavering support to the great Nobel tradition. It is a great feeling to partake in the lavish celebrations that put scientific achievement on such a high pedestal. The generosity of the Nobel foundation and all the Swedish people contribute to making the prize so very special.

From the very bottom of my heart, thank you all.

Andre Geim at the Nobel Banquet, 10 December 2010

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2010/geim-speech.html

In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?

In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of "scare quotes" to ensure that it is clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1/print

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Illustrated-Guide-to-PhD.pdf (23 KB)

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Illustrated-Guide-to-PhD.pdf (23 KB)

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

What could define god is thinking of god as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that god. They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible. There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.