Saturday Night Delights

Hi!

Thought I’d put up an open thread with some interesting tidbits that I’ve seen in the news recently.  I also wanted to update you on a few tidbits about the blog too.  On  Thursday, we reached our 3 month name change (actually, it’s the permanent addie that changed) anniversary.  On the 27th, we’ll have left file cabinet status for six months now.  If you look down there at the print screen captured from Technorati earlier this week, you’ll see that we made Top 100 US Political blogs. Actually we did it twice this week and we’re still lingering at the high end.  This one was the second occurence and we were sitting squarely on number 100.  We’re the little blog that can ’cause we try harder!

So, here’s some interesting ‘stuff’.

NPR reports that Egyptians Mummies have been found with clogged arteries.  Guess there was high cholesterol around back then too.

Heart disease is supposedly a modern affliction, the result of a diet rich in animal fat and too many hours spent on the sofa. But recent discoveries suggest that strokes and heart attacks may have been bedeviling humans for millenia.

Dr. Greg Thomas is part of a team of scientists that recently discovered the earliest known case of atherosclerosis — clogged arteries — in ancient Egyptian mummies. The startling findings mean scientists may not understand heart disease as well as they think they do.

The Large Hadron Collider appears to be on the verge of finding a new particle according to Wired.  Physics has to be the neatest science on the planet right now.

Theorist Moira Gresham of the University of Michigan says many explanations for the Tevatron asymmetry predict new particles that could be seen at the LHC — even though it is now running at only half its maximum energy. She and her colleagues posted a paper on the proposed properties of several such particles at arXiv.org on March 18, one of a flurry of articles that have appeared in response to the Tevatron finding.

Among the possible particles is a heavy cousin tothe massless gluon, the particle that binds quarks together. Another idea, noted in a paper posted at arXiv.org on April 1, posits the existence of a particle called the Z’ boson, a heavier version of the Z boson, a messenger particle for the weak interaction. The Z’ boson would transforms one type of quark into another, leading to the asymmetry.

“Particle physicists know that the standard model is incomplete,” Gresham says. “We’ve been waiting a long time to get some more concrete hints.”

Okay, I’m going to share one that you’re sure to like. Here’s a list of the best chocolate bars from Real Simple magazine. They also have stuff there like the best 50 recipes using chocolate too.  Here’s one that sounds great!

Double Chocolate-Chip Cookies

This week’s Rolling Stone‘s asked the  question “Who is the best lead singer of all time?”.  You can go answer them or maybe you can offer up your own.  Here’s my two offerings.  Robert Plant singing a song with Queen in a tribute to Freddie Mercury.  Oh, and it’s a Led Zeppellin song before he switches to singing ‘Crazy Little thing called Love”.  Every time I’ve see Robert Plant in concert, I go weak in the knees. He did to me as a teeny bopper and he still does it to me today.  Even, if he’s traveling around with Allison Krause.

Okay. So, hopefully this puts you in a good mood and we forget the beltway madness for awhile!  Happy Saturday Night every one!  Oh, and share!!!   I want folks to top my chocolate recipes, lead singer suggestions, and discovery trivia!