Archive
Reuters blog archive
from Breakingviews:
Leave it to a hedgie to take on Einstein
By Kevin Allison
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Eric Weinstein, a New York hedge fund manager, thinks he has cracked one of the biggest mysteries in physics. The science establishment is rightly sceptical, but intrigued enough to admit Weinstein’s theory deserves further study. Even if he is wrong, it’s nice to see for once a Wall Street boffin applying his intellectual firepower to questions of beauty and truth.
The maths are way beyond the understanding of mere mortals, but Weinstein thinks he has discovered a way to reconcile Albert Einstein’s view of gravity with quantum mechanics. If true - that is a huge if - it would be one of the great breakthroughs in science history. Physicists have been struggling for decades to merge the two different ways of looking at the universe into a unified theory that can explain the deepest mysteries of the cosmos.
Finance is full of brainiacs who abandoned academia for the big paydays of Wall Street. Weinstein, who holds a PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard, writes economics papers and is a principal at Natron Group, a Manhattan investment firm, according to regulatory filings. A scan of his published work, which ranges from analyses of immigration and labour markets to a critique of the way hedge funds evaluate risk, suggests he is more of a polymath iconoclast than a reclusive geek or go-go financial trader.
from The Great Debate UK:
US-China research ties should be a wake-up call to Europe
--Dirk Jan van den Berg is President of Delft University of Technology, and was formerly the Dutch Ambassador to China and the Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. The opinions expressed are his own.--
Despite much media attention on disagreements, ranging from Taiwan to alleged cyber-attacks, as Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama prepare for their first major summit meeting in California, there is a relatively new and growing basis for warmer ties: scientific and technological collaboration.
from Photographers Blog:
A sheep with an artificial heart – or maybe not
Tianjin municipality, China
By Petar Kujundzic
I took a trip to the port city of Tianjin after China Central Television (CCTV) reported on a sheep with an artificial heart developed at TEDA International Cardiovascular Hospital. According to CCTV, the hospital recently unveiled a new artificial heart, which was implanted in a sheep two months ago. The sheep lived healthily for more than 62 days, a new record among similar experiments in the country.
This sounded like a very good reason to leave Beijing for a day and report about such an extraordinary achievement. Upon arrival we met the hospital’s administration director who told us that this was not really an artificial heart but a ventricular assistant device (VAD), which is basically a mechanical pump that's used to support the heart’s function and blood flow in people who have weakened hearts. He didn't know why CCTV had reported differently.
from Photographers Blog:
Mars in the desert
Outside Hanksville, Utah
By Jim Urquhart
I may be a Red Shirt but I made it to Mars.
According to Urban Dictionary (the finest source of American literature), a Red Shirt is defined as; A character in a science fiction or adventure story whose sole dramatic purpose is to get killed by the story's villain and/or itinerant monster. Taken from the propensity of security officers on the original Star Trek series (who typically wore red uniform tops) to be killed in the episodes' pre-opening-credits teasers.
When I was young I wanted to be an astronaut but I never had the discipline to follow through. At one point I wanted to be a scientist but I barely made it out of high school and later dropped out of college but not until after I learned a little chemistry for recreational use in my younger days.
from Jack Shafer:
Horsemeat hysteria
Disgust, the gag reflex and flights to the vomitorium greeted this week's news that horse flesh had breached the beef wall to contaminate burgers and frozen beef meals (lasagna, spaghetti Bolognese, shepherd's pie, meatballs) all over Europe. Some of the "beef" products contained 100 percent horsemeat, and early forensic tests hinted that the contamination might go back as far as August 2012.
Both the British government and the European Union called for "horsemeat summits" to investigate the food scandal, with British officials surmising that a criminal conspiracy would be found responsible for adulterating beef products with cheaper horse. But for all the horsemeat hysteria recorded and amplified by the press, "no risk to consumer health" was posed by the products, as the Food Safety Authority of Ireland reported. The injuries from eating horsemeat were not physical, they were psychological, and where they were not psychological they were anthropological, or else simply nonexistent. According to the Ireland health authority, every beef-and-horse burger it analyzed tested negative for phenylbutazone, a common horse medicine that's banned from the food chain.
from Breakingviews:
Review: Embracing the psychopath within
By Martin Langfield
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
If you’ve ever thought your boss is a psychopath, you may be right, according to psychologist Kevin Dutton. And if you’re a top-flight markets trader, captain of industry, surgeon or soldier, you may well be one yourself. But that’s OK, says Dutton. It may even be optimal.
from Emanuel Derman:
The Complexities of Advertising
I'm attending a meeting on complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, and today there was a panel during which someone bemoaned the absence of science reporting in US newspapers, and mentioned that even the NY Times Science section is mostly not serious. Someone from the UK then remarked that science programming on British TV is much better.
I postulate that you can understand what happened to the NY Times Science section by comparing nbcolympics.com to bbc.com vis a vis Olympic reporting.
from Photographers Blog:
Lost in collisions at the CERN
By Denis Balibouse
A big part of being a news photographer is doing research. Not just the search for themes or events to cover but also finding enough information before an event so that we are able to cover it correctly. Taking a photo is often one of the last things I do in a long job.
If there's one subject I have trouble understanding, despite almost 10 years covering it, it's the search for the Higgs boson in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. When it comes to CERN, I often find myself “lost in collisions”.
from The Observatory:
Biotech bogeymen: The San Francisco Chronicle’s muddled swipe at GE crops
If you’re worried about pesticides, then the San Francisco Chronicle has a sweeping indictment of genetically engineered (GE) crops to sell you.
At the end of April, the paper published an article by its Washington correspondent, Carolyn Lochhead, on its front page that used narrowly defined concerns about a new type of GE corn to mount a weakly reported tirade against all biotech crops.
from Felix Salmon:
The neutrino arbitrage
Nick Dunbar has a good column today on how derivatives have followed physics from being clean to being messy. Once upon a time, both physics and derivatives had beautiful, simple models: quantum electrodynamics and Black-Scholes, respectively. But nowadays they're both vastly more complex.
Physics has moved on to quantum chromodynamics, where complex interactions dominate the simpler ones and models get gnarly, while derivatives have found themselves in a world of counterparty risks and debit valuation adjustments and credit support annexes. Put them all together, says Dunbar, and the result is that the "derivative trading books at major banks lurch around like aircraft in a thunderstorm".
