In struggling to make sense of the stock market, people reach and stretch for metaphors. Sometimes they even contort, dislocate, and mangle. In 1995, Geoff P Smith of the University of Hong Kong made a grand unified effort to gather and classify those metaphors.

Smith congealed the metaphors and his thoughts into a monograph called How High Can a Dead Cat Bounce?: Metaphor and the Hong Kong Stock Market. It appeared in the journal Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

The FDA is poised to decide whether biotech animals should be sold as food.

A genetically engineered strain of Atlantic salmon that's designed to grow twice as fast as its unaltered cousins may soon be eligible for dinner. After a decade of debate, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this month will review an application to market fish created by AquaBounty Technologies, a company headquartered in Waltham, MA. If approved, the salmon would become the first "transgenic" animal--one that has DNA from another animal--in the world to be sold for human consumption.

A new transport method involving ice crystals could make it practical to get natural gas from remote areas, with no worries about explosions.

Storing and shipping natural gas by trapping it in ice--using technology being developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy--could cut shipping costs for the fuel, making it easier for countries to buy natural gas from many different sources, and eventually leading to more stable supplies worldwide.

Much like Netflix can suggest movies, an Internet recommendation engine called Wings points you toward dating prospects.

A computer might be able to discern your tastes in romance even better than you can.

9月6日-10日的《美国科学院学报》新闻摘要内容为： 收入对幸福感的影响; 选择性杀死癌细胞; 科学家揭示出森林砍伐的碳排放; 增加动物生产率从而促进更环保的牲畜管理; 哺乳动物的母亲培养了大的大脑; 非洲内战的原因不应归咎为气候。

英国诺丁汉大学的科学家指出，蟑螂对人类健康带来的益处要超过害处。 研究人员发现，蟑螂和蝗虫脑部的神经系统组织可以消灭掉90%的超级细菌或是肠病毒，同时又不会破坏人类的细胞。主持研究的博士后Simon Lee说，目前的药物还没办法消灭超级细菌、肠病毒，一旦新药开发成功就有解药了，而且副作用比较少，将来或许能取代现有的一些抗生素。他表示，由于这类昆虫往往生活在极度不卫生的环境下，所以它们对于各种不同类型的细菌，有很多不同的抗体来保护自己，才能避免受到微生物的攻击。

NASA最近申请的一项专利透露，未来的飞行器在发生故障或可能威胁其它飞行器时能执行自杀。 NASA预想，执行未来太空任务的将不再是大型飞行器，而是廉价的小型飞行器群，它们将会协同工作，类似合成孔径射电望远镜阵列，不同飞行器装备了光学、红外线或雷达传感器去共同完成一项科学任务。但是当其中一个飞行器发现自己生命即将终结，并且可能威胁到同伴时，它需要为了集体的利益而离开。要实现这一点，系统需要不断对每个飞行器检测其关键的电力系统，当察觉到某个模块发生故障，飞行器将转换到自我牺牲或自我毁灭模式，而健康的同伴需要重新编程绕开故障的伙伴。

东西网 写道 "研究人员发现， 蚂蚁是大象生活中的恐惧之源。 非洲大草原上的大象都会故意绕开布满蚂蚁的树木，以防这些小生灵爬进它们敏感的象鼻中。肯尼亚穆帕拉研究中心与佛罗里达大学的托德·帕尔默博士说：“这些成群结队的蚂蚁每只体重仅为5毫克，却可以保护树木不受大型动物的蹂躏，而且这些动物的体型是它们的几十亿倍。……这又是一个弱小生灵战胜强大动物的绝佳事例。”科学家认为蚂蚁的这一行为保护了非洲草原上的脆弱植被，从而防止了森林采伐并且有利于保护农作物。而破坏农作物正是东非大象遭厌恶的原因之一。

Short report from a meeting. leinster http://www.maths.gla.ac.uk/~tl/ T.Leinster@maths.gla.ac.uk

Whether money can bring contentment depends on your definition of 'happy', says Philip Ball.

Whether money can bring contentment depends on your definition of 'happy', says Philip Ball.

Clean-up of Potomac River offers hope to environmentalists worldwide.

Claims that global warming can drive civil unrest are hotly disputed.

It is time to continue our quest to prove that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges. We have one more ingredient to put into place. I am referring to the notion of a Taylor series. The idea is this: Some functions, like those from trigonometry, are difficult to evaluate precisely. It would be nice to be able to approximate them via some other, more manageable, function. And since polynomials are the most manageable functions there are, why not try one of them?

So, let f(x) be a smooth function we wish to approximate. For simplicity, let us assume that we seek a polynomial that approximates the function in a neighborhood around the point x = 0). For further simplicity, let us see how far we can get with a linear polynomial.

Recall that any straight line has an equation of the form

\[
y=mx+b,
\]

 

where m is the slope and b is the y-intercept (that is, the value of the function at x = 0. It follows that a straight line can encode two pieces of information: a point and a slope.

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The active chemical in magic mushroom has been shown to lessen anxiety and improve mood in people with late-stage cancer

The recently opened Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SNAL) provides scientists around the world with a brilliant new tool to understand fundamental properties of atoms and materials at previously unreachable dimensions.

Five thought-provoking posts in six days:

What Is Management About: “Business is much more about being organized and managing people than it is about ideas. Past a certain scale, ideas don’t seem to matter much … Much of the time spent discussing `ideas’ in a business context is actually time spent slowly maneuvering large groups of managers into a compatible mind-space so that they can work together effectively.” (more)

Why Little Airline Plain Talk: Half of [employees] dislike or sometimes even despise their customers and that their natural speech patterns, given their true feelings, would come across negatively. … They face lots of customers, with varying and often unreasonable expectations, and they have few resources to buy them off with. (more)

Most Story Protagonists Kidless: “At least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced.” … The decline of the heroic ideal in literature, and the decline of the journey of adventure, seem to be stronger forces in predicting fictional family size. (more)

Why Corporate BS Talk: Since it is hard to oppose fluffy generalities in any very specific way, a common strategy is to stack everyone’s opinion or points into an incoherent whole. Disagreement is then less likely to become a focal point within the corporation and warring coalitions are less likely to form. … Rule of thumb: when you see the demoralizing, start with the premise that it is being done for morale. (more)

Happiness As Bad Signal: “Happiness” to me sounds boring, as if the person has a limited imagination when it comes to wants and an inability to be frustrated by the difficulty of creating new peak experiences. … Viewed as a signaling problem, “happiness” fails when it comes to credibly demonstrating the possession of some extreme quality or another. The busier people are, and the higher wages are, the more important it should be to signal extreme qualities to command the attention of interesting others. (more)

Don’t stop now Tyler!

The brains of humans, apes and monkeys are enormous compared with their bodies – it seems these brainy animals have their mothers to thank

We may have to dramatically revise our estimates of how much carbon rainforests contain – apparently similar forests hold vastly different amounts

The first rocket-launch attempted by the non-profit Copenhagen Suborbitals didn't leave the pad, but its inventors haven't given up yet