Recently in Science Category

"When Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher, tested 232 people for how they read pages on screens, a curious disposition emerged. [...] Nielsen has gauged user habits and screen experiences for years, charting people's online navigations and aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests. In this study, he found that people took in hundreds of pages 'in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school.' It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. 'F for fast,' Nielsen wrote in a column. 'That's how users read your precious content.'" - story

"...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats 'just don't get it,' this is the 'it' to which they refer." - Jonathan Haidt (italics as in original text)

While looking for something entirely different today I found an archive with unedited scans of the Hasselblad cameras used aboard the Apollo 7 till 17 mission: Go here, and then click on "Full Hasselblad Magazines." That way, you can look at the contact sheets of the Apollo space missions.

Some juicy new research I just couldn't walk past (even though I dislike all kinds of sausages, meat or no meat): "According to the researchers, how we feel about a sausage, regardless of whether it's soy-based or beef, says more about our personal values than about what the sausage actually tastes like. In fact, most people can't even tell the difference between an ersatz vegan sausage and the real thing." (source)

I admit that as an astronomer I'm a bit jaded about astronomy photos, and I'm particularly uninterested in new Mars images (and even more uninterested in the almost comical fuss NASA creates every time yet another little robot going to Mars sends back photos that look like... well... all the other Mars robot photos - give me a break already!). But these images here are really quite spectacular.

The short answer is "Of course not." A somewhat longer and more detailed answer is provided by an expert from the reality-based science community, Brian Cox.

Chances are you have heard of CERN's LHC experiment, or maybe not. It probably is the most ambitious science experiment ever done ("One of the LHC's detectors - Atlas - weighs as much as 100 Boeing 747s. Looking like a cross between some improbably big communications satellite and the largest electric dynamo you can imagine, Atlas is the work of 1,900 scientists drawn from 164 universities in 35 countries." [source]), and if you want to find out more about its goals etc. this is the place to go. Oh, and it's not going to blow up the planet.

PS: It does say quite a bit about the state of affairs of the US media to see something like this, doesn't it? No serious, self respecting scientist expects the collider to create a doomsday; just like no serious, self respecting scientist denies that global warming is a reality and a gigantic challenge for humanity.

"When you look at a painting, what do you think you process first - the painting's content or its style? According to Dorothee Augustin and colleagues it is the content of a painting that we register first, with dazzling speed - within 10 ms (less than a hundredth of a second) - while processing of a painting's style comes later, from 50ms onwards. [...] The research also shows that even people without any expertise in art are impacted early on by the artistic style of a painting. 'If we consider style the characteristic of art,' the researchers concluded, 'this characteristic needs some time to unfold - but still, it unfolds quicker than you may think.'" (story)