On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became the first to have his pitch speed measured during a game. Rockwell International experts clocked the ball velocity at 100.8 miles per hour.

That was the fastest pitch ever recorded.

Yet last season over 50 pitchers in Major League Baseball threw 100 MPH and 140 more hit that velocity in the minor leagues. In September of 2010, Aroldis Chapman threw 105.1 MPH. Clearly, pitchers have gotten a lot faster, due to superior training and better scouting identifying athletes who will excel at pitching and getting them to play baseball rather than basketball or something else. 

Do you have a master in Science, and want to start a Post-Doc position directly? You can have it, in Padova (Italy), to work with me on the PHINDER project, an EIC-funded Pathfinder grantee.
I am offering a two-year position for research in nanophotonics-powered neuromorphic computing for particle detector development at INFN, Sezione di Padova. The call will open soon, so you should watch this space if you are interested.

Honeybees get attention in environmental fundraising campaigns because people don't understand pollination.(1)

Running a pro-science nonprofit is a poor business model. Especially compared to lawyer groups like Environmental Working Group or rich deniers like Greenpeace.

'Your food is safe' is a terrible call to action but 'evil chemical corporations are killing you' gets the money rolling in - even though the former is true and the latter is a paranoid conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.

Social authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people do with the government assistance they are now reliant upon. It keeps those in control in positions of power. The most recent example is with government funding for food coming attached to strings telling people what they can buy with the money.

Fibromyalgia is the term for a poorly-understood condition where people experience pain and fatigue while moving but have no testable inflammation or damage. Because fatigue is a non-specific symptom, fibromyalgia becomes a 'diagnosis of exclusion', where pain persists but testable conditions are ruled out. It is said to affect about four percent of the population.

The following position is a win for white. But how?


It seems like white is able to grab a knight for free. However, that would be not a wise idea, as the c4 pawn would then be free to run down to become a queen. You can easily convince yourself that 1.Nxd8? c3! wins for black. White also has its own knight en prise in the starting position, so a move not involving a knight move will result in its demise. E.g., 1.Kb6 seems a desirable attacking move to make, but 1....dxc6 2.dxc6 Nxc6! again turns the tables. 

The Usual Suspects of the anti-science movement, Center for Biological Diversity(1), Environmental Working Group(2) and more, are back in court to try and force California to accept that money is magic and rich homeowners with solar panels should be paid for electricity they send to the grid - at full retail price.
It sounds ridiculous. Imagine if a customer buys a vegetable your farm grows says they should have the right to force you to buy vegetables they grow in their garden at full retail price from them. Not the price you get, the full retail cost.

You'd laugh. You have tractors and employees and materials. Liabilities. Even more ridiculous, you helped give them the money for the land they used to grow the vegetables.

Next Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, you will find a new bulky paper in the arXiv. Titled "On the Co-Design of Scientific Experiments and Industrial Systems", the work is authored by over 80 colleagues. I directed them as co-chair of WG2 of EUCAIF (with Pietro Vischia) in assembling a view of the state of the art of the techniques and the issues connected with the simultaneous optimization of hardware and software of scientific experiments in fundamental physics. Complementing that is a parallel look at a few representative tasks in industrial settings.

The electric car industry is held back by reliance on conventional energy. Despite spending trillions of dollars on mandates and subsidies, solar and wind alternatives have made little difference in the share of energy filled by natural gas and oil. 

Some of that is economics. A subsidy prevents innovation because it props up the status quo, and environmentalists and the politicians they support remain opposed to nuclear power, but some is plain physics. Lithium-ion batteries are stuck in the 1990s because there are real challenges to be overcome in the next generation.