Small amphibian collider
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Art by immortal Abstruse Goose, poetry by @Yarbo 
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Michio Kaku on artificial intelligence
Nowadays, it is fashionable to hypothesize that an advanced AI, when it appears, will wipe pathetic humans out of the face of the Earth (risk of unfriendly AI, as transhumanists like to call it). I think, what’s not taken into account in these considerations is that humans will evolve as well, will be willing to technologically upgrade themselves as well.
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How many scientists fabricate or falsify their research?
This is the title of a rather intriguing paper recently published in PLos ONE. As it turns out, approximately 72% of researchers have seen at least once how their colleagues used inappropriate or incorrect methods of research.
The study by Dr. Fanelli contains analysis of 28 polls offered for answer to actively working scientists. Among different questions in each poll there were questions like “Did you falsify data in your study at least once?” and “Did you ever notice that your colleagues falsify data of their study or use other questionable practices?”. As a result, about 1.75% of all people entered the poll falsified data in their own work and about 30% used other questionable practices. (Hmm, I wonder what do they mean by questionable practices, teach me one, pleeease, science is so competitive field.)
These numbers differed strongly if the questions were not related with a person who was asked the question, but with his/her colleagues instead. As it turns out, 14% have noticed that their colleagues falsify data in their research and about 72% testified use of other questionable practices in the work of their colleagues (hehe, not surprising at all, is it? Gealous bastards 
).
According to the study, results don’t depend much on country where the poll was conducted, but do depend on the field of research – for example, inappropriate methods and questionable practices are more often used in medicine and pharmacology. Fanelli concludes that scientists who work in medicine and pharmacology are generally more honest than, say, physicists Yes, sure, Dr. Fanelli, and sociologists are even more honest than pharmacologists.
A somewhat similar study was conducted by Washington Post in 2005: people who recently received grants from NIH (National Institutes of Health) were offered to fill a questionnaire. According to the published results of the study, 5% considered possible to neglect facts in the study, 10% were included into a list of authors of a paper they did not contribute to in any way (well, this sounds familiar), 16% changed the results of their study so that they look like more favorable from the point of view of a sponsor of the study. It feels so good that we don’t have many sponsors in theoretical physics…
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An exoplanet near ultracool star
New record in astrometry and exoplanetology – the authors of 0906.0544 are talking about discovery of the planet in the vicinity of a very light star. The mass of the star is about 0.07 Solar masses, i.e., equivalent to 3-9 Jupiter masses – it is actually near the lower mass limit for an object to be called a star
The star itself have a temperature about 2700 K, its planet – about 400 K. Both objects have a similar apparent size – around 0.1 radius of the Sun – so the system looks almost like a double star.
The discovered system – VB10 – is denoted by red star
By the way, since the system is rather close to us (about 6 Pcs), it might be possible to resolve it with new generation interferometer devices (angular distance between te objects on the sky is around 60 milliarcsec). Right now, one can only study the system by astrometric methods.
Via sergpolar.
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Jim Simons and C.N. Yang interviewed by Bill Zimmerman
… about math (geometry)/physics interplay.
Yang: there are two types of modern math books – the ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and the ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence. Stinrood is of the latter kind.
LOL
Simons organizes new institute (6 faculty members, around 30 visitors per year), and Yang suggests that a part of the research program will be devoted to string theory. Simons agrees but says that he does not want the name of the institute to be completely associated with string theory.
They talk about LHC a bit, which will start running next year (unless they will see funding cuts, as Yang drops – he probably means the fact that Austria wanted to leave the project at some point). Simons replies that although he help to save RHIC, LHC guys will have to save the project themselves
Yang is very much excited about the possibility for Higgs boson not to be discovered at LHC.
Simons speculates that the nature of quantum mechanics may be related to behaviour of geometry at very small scales.
Via Peter Woit.
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