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It's an incendiary topic in academia -- the pervasive belief that women are underrepresented in science, math and engineering fields because they face sex discrimination in the interviewing, hiring, and grant and manuscript review processes. In a study published Feb. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cornell social scientists say it's just not true. It's not discrimination in these areas, but rather, differences in resources attributable to career and family-related choices that set women back in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, say Stephen J. Ceci, the H.L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology, and...

We always observe significant anniversaries, and this April 26th marks the 25th year of the ongoing nuclear disaster that began on that date in 1986 at the Lenin Nuclear Power Station, Chernobyl, in the Urkraine. The World did not find out about what really happened for some time, and the first indications that something had gone terribly wrong was when nuclear power stations all over Europe started experiencing radiation alarms from the plume of radioactive debris that Reactor 4 was spewing out like a volcano. I've been re-reading Gregori Medevedev's outstanding book "The Truth About Chernobyl" and the details of...

Nearly 25 years after the world's worst nuclear disaster, it has emerged that only half the money needed to safely secure the wreckage of the Chernobyl power plant has been raised. A new shelter is being built to seal the almost 200 tonnes of melted nuclear fuel rods within the remains of the damaged reactor. But construction may have to be halted if donor nations fail to provide funds. The shelter will sit over an existing "sarcophagus" encasing the reactor. I was shown into the control room of Reactor Four. The room is a mess: dusty and unlit, the semi-circular...

Discovery of dark matter's behavior would solve many outstanding mysteries in physics Dark matter makes up five times more of the universe's mass that visible matter (~25% vs ~5%), yet scientists have yet to directly observe this ultra-abundant substance.  Scientists also have yet to observe dark energy, which may well beat out normal energy in universal abundance.  This lack of direct observations means that scientists no precious little about two of the most important physical components of our universe. That could soon change.  CERN's Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile long circular underground track that is chilled to almost zero degrees Kelvin,...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Inspired by the popular confidence trick known as "shell game," researchers at UC Santa Barbara have demonstrated the ability to hide and shuffle "quantum-mechanical peas" –– microwave single photons –– under and between three microwave resonators, or "quantized shells." In a paper published in the Jan. 30 issue of the journal Nature Physics, UCSB researchers show the first demonstration of the coherent control of a multi-resonator architecture. This topic has been a holy grail among physicists studying photons at the quantum-mechanical level for more than a decade. The UCSB researchers are Matteo Mariantoni, postdoctoral fellow in...

The end of a black hole’s evolution may be a mind-bending kind of space-time independent of time. A new study proposes a method to tell how far any black hole is from reaching this end state. Black holes are some of the weirdest things in the universe. They occur when mass is packed into a tiny volume, squished to its ultimate density. Though observations suggest black holes are prevalent in the universe, scientists still don't really understand what goes on inside them. The equations of general relativity usually used to understand the physics of the universe break down in these...

A couple of weeks ago we reported that the Italian inventor Andrea Rossi has announced that he has a commercial ready cold fusion reactor that is safe and reliable, capable of producing 10 kW of heat; and is in process of going into production, with a 1 MW plant being built ganging 125 of these units together. Rossi has allowed outside scientists to perform tests on the module and report on their findings. Papers on these tests have begun to emerge. In a paper that came out Monday morning (Italy time), Prof. Giuseppe Levi of the University of Bologna describes...

Measuring the attractive forces between atoms and surfaces with unprecedented precision, University of Arizona physicists have produced data that could refine our understanding of the structure of atoms and improve nanotechnology. The discovery has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Van der Waals forces are fundamental for chemistry, biology and physics. However, they are among the weakest known chemical interactions, so they are notoriously hard to study. This force is so weak that it is hard to notice in everyday life. But delve into the world of micro-machines and nano-robots, and you will feel the force – everywhere....

According to PhysOrg.com, two Italian scientists from the University of Bologna have taken on one of physics' historically most discredited concepts, cold fusion, and have actually succeeded in creating a sustainable reaction. Aside from the major implications of the energy market should this be validated and recreated (an issue that buried the original Cold Fusion discovery by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann), one of the more economically important side effects of this purported rediscovery is that one of the byproducts of the reaction is none other than recently uber-bubbleicious copper.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927952.900-scorn-over-claim-of-teleported-dna.html A Nobel prizewinner is reporting that DNA can be generated from its teleported "quantum imprint" A STORM of scepticism has greeted experimental results emerging from the lab of a Nobel laureate which, if confirmed, would shake the foundations of several fields of science. "If the results are correct," says theoretical chemist Jeff Reimers of the University of Sydney, Australia, "these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry." Luc Montagnier, who shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 2008 for his part in establishing that...

In Batavia, Ill. — just west of Chicago — you can walk along trails through a thousand-acre restored prairie filled with rare species like compass plant and rattlesnake master. From the edge of the prairie, you can see, as well, a four-mile ring of concrete and steel. That is the berm above the Tevatron, a high-energy subterranean racetrack for particle beams and the heart of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab. Since 1983, scientists have been using the Tevatron to create spectacular collisions between subatomic particles whose ghostly traces have helped reveal the fundamental constituents of matter, like the...

The Earth could soon have a second sun, at least for a week or two. The cosmic phenomenon will happen when one of the brightest stars in the night sky explodes into a supernova. And, according to a report yesterday, the most stunning light show in the planet’s history could happen as soon as this year. Earth will undoubtedly have a front row seat when the dying red supergiant star Betelgeuse finally blows itself into oblivion. The explosion will be so bright that even though the star in the Orion constellation is 640 light-years away, it will still turn night...

Finite formula found for partition numbersFor centuries, some of the greatest names in math have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting. Many mathematicians added major pieces to the puzzle, but all of them fell short of a full theory to explain partitions. Instead, their work raised more questions about this fundamental area of math. On Friday, Emory mathematician Ken Ono will unveil new theories that answer these famous old questions. Ono and his research team have discovered that partition numbers behave like fractals. They have unlocked the divisibility properties of partitions, and developed...

A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it made a life-changing misstep. The trio wandered too close to the galaxy's giant black hole, which captured one of the stars and hurled the other two out of the Milky Way. Adding to the stellar game of musical chairs, the two outbound stars merged to form a super-hot, blue star. This story may seem like science fiction, but astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say it is the most likely scenario for a so-called hypervelocity star, known as HE...

As if the idea ideas of quantum entanglement and time travel weren’t difficult enough to wrap one’s head around separately, two physicists at the Universtiy of Queensland in Australia have further compounded the headache by merging the two ideas via a new kind of quantum entanglement that links particles not across space, but across time. Quantum entanglement is that “spooky action” (Einstein’s words, not ours) that links two particles such that a measurement on one immediately influences the state of the other, even if the two particles are separated by miles, or even light years. Entanglement defies the intuitive way...

The last straw on my back, I can’t take it any more!!!!!!! Watching another fear mongering show on tv a while ago, and seen an on running lie that has been repeated all across tv and the net….. “big transformers” “No longer made in the united states” ………. “If they are destroyed” ………..”have to be shipped in from overseas.” “months or years lead time!!!!” In my previous posts on other threads, on other boards, I have tried to point out that even if they were not made here anymore, they still don’t need to replace them.. They can be rebuilt....

Italian inventor, Andrea Rossi, claims to have an industrial product ready to manufacture that produces large amounts of energy reliably, safely, and much cheaper than coal or natural gas power. It utilizes the fusion of hydrogen and the common element nickel at relatively low temperatures. Last Friday, January 14, we reported about a press conference held in Bologna, Italy in which Professor Sergio Focardi and Eng. Andrea A. Rossi, both of the University of Bologna, announced to the world that they have a cold fusion device capable of producing more than 10 kilowatts of heat power, while only consuming a...

Scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before. Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected. "These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams," said Michael Briggs, a member of Fermi's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He presented the findings Monday,...

In "Annual Editions: Archaeology (2010)," of all places, I stumbled across this: "Today the mass media is the major source of epistemology in the modern world, and it underscores cultural values and also creates cultural myths by which all humans are made to live. The media is as much a response to our demands as we are to its manipulations. ... But the media mind is characterized by fuzzy thinking and skepticism." Love it! Even misusing the word "epistemology" where I'm reasonably sure they meant to simply say "knowledge" (rather than "study of knowledge," which doesn't really make sense in...

Cold Fusion Nuclear Reactions by Horace Heffner DEFLATION FUSION The field of cold fusion (CF), the fusion of hydrogen in a metal lattice, as discoveredby Fleischmann and Pons, has been expanded to include the general class of nuclear reactions which can be initiated in low temperature environments, and named the field of low energy nuclear reactions (LENR)(1). A large number of peer reviewed papers and books have been published in this field (2-3-4-5-6-7). Extensive development continues, as do mysteries regarding various mechanisms of the experimentally well documented effects(8-9). Any theory that is to describe LENR has to explain not only...