Does the Bigfoot exist?

You must have noticed that two days ago, news sources were hyping a claim of Melba Ketchum, a Texan veterinarian, that she has sequenced the DNA taken from Mr Bigfoot Sasquatch Jr.After a 5-year-long research, her DNA team in Nacogdoches has allegedly determined that he exists and he is the son of an American woman (because the mitochondrial DNA inherited from the mother matches homo sapiens sapiens) and her hairy male primate partner whose ancestors...

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Firewalls vs analytic continuation

Two new interesting anti-firewall papers and one pro-firewall paperThe black hole firewall argument by AMPS is probably invalid but it has already led to a significant new wave of research and discussions about the black hole information puzzle which is a good thing.There are some new papers since my most recent comments on the firewall controversy. But what happened today is kind of remarkable: just today, there are a whopping three papers on the...

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Dark matter discovery: behind the corner?

Clara Moskowitz did a pretty good jobTwo days ago, I read a popular article about dark matter:Dark Matter Mystery May Soon Be SolvedIt was written by Clara Moskowitz, an important editor of Space.com, and I thought that the article was unusually good.The article sketched what dark matter is, what it is composed of according to the most convincing theories (WIMP or axion, and speculations on hidden dimensions properly identified as a cherry on top of the pie), the arguments in favor and against of the superpartners as dark matter particle candidates,...

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Palestinian statehood and the U.N.

Update, vote: 138 Yes, 9 No (including Czechia), 41 AbstainThe State of Judenfrei Palestine was painfully accepted to UNESCO one year ago. Today, another vote of this kind is expected. It's almost certain that a vote will determine that the Israeli Arabs will win the same status in the U.N. that the Vatican enjoys – the status of a non-member state recognized by the U.N.It doesn't seem fortunate to me that just weeks after the Israeli Arabs launched...

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David Ian Olive: 1937-2012

Clifford Johnson mentioned some sad news.Off-topic but good news: Mathematica 9 is released today and it's big, offering the first useful "predictive interface" with suggestions in the world of software, analysis of social networks, interactive gauges, system-wide support for 4,500 units, systematic addition of legends, support for Markov and random processes, integration of Steve McIntyre's language R, and moreBritish field theorist and string theorist...

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Five greatest physicists' sex scandals

This is an extremely, extremely light topic. Popsci.com wrote a new article5 Of Physics's Greatest Sex ScandalsA TRF guest blogger finds himself in a pretty good company.Their list is the following:Paul Frampton and his sweetheart in Argentina, a cocaine-equipped fake Czech-born model Denise Milani (a recent news video at YouTube)Albert Einstein had a relationship with his cousin Elsa already when he was married to his hard-working first wife Mileva MarićMarie Curie who fell in love with his freshly dead husband's ex-student, Pierre Langevin. The...

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It's wrong to worry about the "fiscal cliff"

Starting from January 2013, America has a chance to restore some balance in its federal budget that's been getting worse since Clinton's surplus years around 2000 and that switched to seemingly permanent astronomical figures after the 2008 recession.If no bills were changed or added in the following 6 weeks, spending cuts would come into force and some temporary (mainly Bush) tax cuts would be abolished again. The deficits would instantly start to...

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Martin Rees' center studies 4 worst threats for mankind

Climate change is on par with robot uprisingThe cataclysm on December 21st, 2012 is less than a month away and I am regularly asked by people in the real life as well as those on the Internet whether a particular doomsday scenario they read about will happen. They are just polite when they ask; of course that if I explain to them that they don't have to worry, they keep on $hitting into their pants, anyway. ;-)Nude Socialist, Fox News, BBC, AP, and...

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Many worlds vs positivism and symmetries

About a dozen of TRF articles mention Hugh Everett and his "many-worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics. Exactly three months ago, I showed that "many worlds" don't exist as long as one uses the standard rules of quantum mechanics to answer the very question about their existence.If we use the same rules to answer the question "Do many worlds exist?" as we use for answering questions about the electrons' spins and other questions "obviously accessible to the experiments", the answer of quantum mechanics is a resounding No. There can't be any...

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