| Blog - Best of 2010: Benford's Law And A Theory of Everything and Blog - Best of 2010: White Holes And Kitchen Sinks |
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In May, we saw how a new relationship between Benford's Law and the statistics of fundamental physics may hint at a deeper theory of everythingIn 1938, the physicist Frank Benford made an extraordinary discovery about numbers. He found that in many lists of numbers drawn from real data, the leading digit is far more likely to be a 1 than a 9. In fact, the distribution of first digits follows a logarithmic law. So the first digit is likely to be 1 about 30 per cent of time while the number 9 appears only five per cent of the time.That's an unsettling and counterintuitive discovery. Why aren't numbers evenly distributed in such lists? One answer is that if numbers have this type of distribution then it must be scale invariant. So switching a data set measured in inches to one measured in centimetres should not change the distribution. If that's the case, then the only form such a distribution can take is logarithmic. [Read the full article] Light movement: Showing how optogenetics could be applied to medical problems, researchers genetically engineered a mouse to express a light-sensitive protein (shown in green) in its sciatic nerve. They could then trigger muscle movement by shining light on the muscle.Credit: NatureTwo steps forward and one step back for stem cells, genome sequencing to diagnose disease, and the creation of artificial life.In October, 12 years after human embryonic stem cells were first isolated, a therapy derived from such cells was tested in humans for the first time (First Human Tests of Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy Underway). The therapy, developed by Geron, is designed to treat spinal-cord injury with an injection of differentiated neural cells into the injury site.Because the clinical trial is the first of its kind, Geron has had to forge a new path forward with the U.S. [Read the full article] Love at first click: Nancy and Jon Anthony, pictured here at their wedding, were among the more than 40 million Americans signed up for online dating sites.Credit: Sarah MesslerTwo years ago, Nancy Kaup was a 31-year-old single mother who was frustrated with dating. She had spent six months on the website eHarmony, filled out a 400-question survey about herself, and begun receiving daily "matches"—profiles of men whom the site deemed compatible. But none of them worked out. She decided not to renew her subscription. Two days before her profile expired, however, a man named Jon Anthony signed up for the service.Nancy showed up in Jon's first round of suggested matches, and he contacted her. "He was my last match and I was his first," she says. Their first date was at a wine tasting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they both live. Although it lasted only an hour or two, the next day Nancy told her friends at work that she had met her future husband. [Read the full article] 
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