The Bambino

Footage of the giant of American sports, Babe Ruth, is rediscovered.

(image credit: Babe Ruth in 1920, Library of Congress)

 
 
 

Building a Brain

Henry Markram discusses the extraordinary Blue Brain Project - using the mathematics of neurons to understand perception and reverse engineering the brain in 10 years.

Craziness and the Collider

Dennis Overbye relates the much discussed and ridiculed theory that the possible future creation of the Higgs boson may be sabotaging the LHC, as Overbye writes, "like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather". Physicists Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya suggested the fantastic theory and a cinematic test - see if the one "shut down the LHC" card is pulled from a million-card deck. Sean Carroll (quoted in the article) discusses the theory and the controversy here.

(image credit: CERN, simulation of the decay of a Higgs particle following collision of two protons)

Roger Penrose

Discover interviews physicist Roger Penrose on his father, M.C. Escher and his view of the wrongness of modern physics. More on impossible objects here.

(image credit: Oliver Chanarin, discovermagazine.com)

IBM trying Genomics

I.B.M. is trying genomics. CEO Sam Palmisano will outline their approach in a health care talk at the Cleveland Clinic tomorrow. Quoting nytimes.com:

"The I.B.M. approach is based on what the company describes as a “DNA transistor,” which it hopes will be capable of reading individual nucleotides in a single strand of DNA as it is pulled through an atomic-size hole known as a nanopore. A complete system would consist of two fluid reservoirs separated by a silicon membrane containing an array of up to a million nanopores, making it possible to sequence vast quantities of DNA at once."

More on nanopores here.

(image credit: IBM simulation of the "DNA transistor", J. Michael Loughran, via nytimes.com)

Ardipithecus

Ardipithecus ramidus, our 4.4 million-year-old ancestor, is introduced. Carl Zimmer outlines some of the revelations.

(image credit: C 2009, J.H. Matternes)