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Lux, another xenon-based dark matter detector. (credit: Lawrence Berkeley Lab)

Every year, the Dutch physics community gets together to celebrate the year in physics. These are some highlights from the meeting. Since it is a meeting, it is not possible to link to published work (a talk could cover multiple papers, or just parts of papers). Where possible, We've linked to the research group that presented the work.

This year, the search for dark matter seems to be dominating the minds of a lot of physicists. It is quite an intriguing issue. We have lots of gravitational evidence for dark matter at length scales from single galaxies to galaxy clusters—and even the cosmic microwave background. The variety of evidence is such that it is difficult to imagine a suitable modification to the laws of gravitation that would satisfy all these constraints.

Yet, actual dark matter remains elusive. I’ll discuss some details in a moment, but my take home from the dark matter talks is that, if it can be detected at all, then we should see it relatively soon.

(credit: Scott K. Johnson/Suzanna Soileau-USGS/Hanna-Barbera)

“In June, NOAA employees altered temperature data to get politically correct results.”

At least, that's what Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) alleged in a Washington Post letter to the editor last November. The op-ed was part of Smith's months-long campaign against NOAA climate scientists. Specifically, Smith was unhappy after an update to NOAA’s global surface temperature dataset slightly increased the short-term warming trend since 1998. And being a man of action, Smith proceeded to give an anti-climate change stump speech at the Heartland Institute conference, request access to NOAA's data (which was already publicly available), and subpoena NOAA scientists for their e-mails.

Smith isn't the only politician who questions NOAA's results and integrity. During a recent hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) leveled similar accusations against the entire scientific endeavor of tracking Earth’s temperature.

At the turn of the last century, German physician Heinrich Koch identified four critical criteria for determining whether or not a particular microbe causes a disease. The ideas behind them were crucial for advancing medicine and formalizing the germ theory of disease. Over the last century, these postulates have been updated as medicine has advanced.

In what may end up being the most recent of these updates, biologists Allyson Byrd and Julia Segre propose some adjustments to these classic medical postulates intended to bring them in line with analytic techniques based on DNA sequencing and the most current understanding of bacterial communities. Just as the previous updates to Koch’s postulates did, these proposed amendments incorporate cutting-edge scientific knowledge and add nuance to our understanding of the causes of disease.

Koch’s original postulates are that, if a microorganism causes a disease, then:

Nintendo has altered a controversial scene for the western version of Fire Emblem: Fates, a 3DS RPG originally released in Japan last year. The scene features a gay character who has her drink spiked by a male protagonist.

In the Japanese version, players are able to bond two characters together in battle, which can result in marriage. A gay female character, Soleil, is shown to have difficulty talking to other women, so a male protagonist secretly spikes her drink with a "magic powder" to make women appear to as men, and men appear at women.

Once the magic wears off, Soleil is then attracted to the male protagonist, and ends up proposing, saying that she fell in love with the female version of him, but now loves him as a male.

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Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and creator of the JavaScript programming language, has unveiled his latest project: Brave, a Web browser that blocks ads by default... and then replaces those blocked ads with its own ads. Brave Software, the company behind the eponymous browser, will take a 15 percent cut of the ad revenue generated in this way.

Brave is an open-source Web browser. There's a Brave GitHub repository for Mac/Windows/Linux, iOS, and Android. It looks like the iOS version, ironically enough, is based on Firefox for iOS, and the PC version is based on Chromium (an open-source project that somewhat parallels the development of Chrome). At first glance, it looks like the Android version of Brave is based on Bubble.

If you want to try out Brave, you have to download and build the browser from a GitHub repo. You can sign up to be a beta tester, which presumably grants you some pre-built binaries, but there's currently a waiting list.