parity

"If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring." -David Halberstam It was only a few months ago that both collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN -- CMS and ATLAS -- announced the discovery of a new particle at about 125-126 GeV of energy: something that looked an awful lot like what the Standard Model predicted the Higgs Boson should be. Image credit: the CMS detector at CERN, 2009. This was the result of decades of…
The UN climate talks going on in Durban aren't likely to lead to any major breakthroughs, but it would be nice if the US could at least avoid backsliding on the better-than-nothing steps it's taken on emissions. One important step for controlling emissions is ensuring the availability of affordable public transportation. Congress has helped make public transit more affordable for workers for the past three years by temporarily raising the limit on the monthly amount of pretax salary that can be set aside for transit. The problem is that limit, currently set at $230 per month, is set to drop…