In case you're wondering, the number 2 to the 57,885,161 − 1 power is in fact the largest prime number yet found . Late last month, Curtis Cooper of the University of Central Missouri moved one small step closer to Euclid’s infinity, when he announced that 257,885,161-1 is prime. This is now the largest known prime number, eclipsing the previous record-holder, which had been discovered at UCLA in 2008. The new number has 17,425,170 digits—just writing them down makes for a 22.45-megabyte text file. The UCLA number had knocked an earlier number of Cooper's, from 2006, out of the record books. With apologies to the Magnetic Fields, the book of primes is long and boring, but an addition to that book is a good chance to look for the music within it.
Probably a decent chance that there's a twin prime around there somewhere. (Primes tend to come in twos.) (Which is ironic if you think about it.)
Doom is upon us...but not quite yet. http://news.yahoo.com/higgs-boson-particle-may-spell-doom-universe-152236961.html
Oh, great... thanks ASF... I was going to buy the box-set of 'The Wire'. Hardly seems worth it now I know it's all gonna end
Our genome is mostly bacterial--"We Are Living in a Bacterial World" The article has everything BigSoccer has in the comments, just smarter. Well, with one exception: The token creationist is just as silly as we're used to.
If I recall correctly, mosh pits run in a counter-clockwise direction (below the Equator my be different}. Mosh Pits and Molecules
More bacteria-related news... Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers Had Better Teeth Than We Do Not a total surprise, really. Hell, medieval guys who didn't take a quarterstave upside their face or managed to have not broken a tooth on a rock in their bread had better teeth than we do. Prehistoric humans didn't have toothbrushes. They didn't have floss or toothpaste, and they certainly didn't have Listerine. Yet somehow, their mouths were a lot healthier than ours are today. "Hunter-gatherers had really good teeth," says Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. "[But] as soon as you get to farming populations, you see this massive change. Huge amounts of gum disease. And cavities start cropping up." And thousands of years later, we're still waging, and often losing, our war against oral disease. Our changing diets are largely to blame. In a study published in the latest Nature Genetics, Cooper and his research team looked at calcified plaque on ancient teeth from 34 prehistoric human skeletons. What they found was that as our diets changed over time — shifting from meat, vegetables and nuts to carbohydrates and sugar — so too did the composition of bacteria in our mouths. Not all oral bacteria are bad. In fact, many of these microbes help us by protecting against more dangerous pathogens. However, the researchers found that as prehistoric humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming, certain types of disease-causing bacteria that were particularly efficient at using carbohydrates started to win out over other types of "friendly" bacteria in human mouths. The addition of processed flour and sugar during the Industrial Revolution only made matters worse.
Actually, eating shit gives us different sorts of bacteria . . . Fecal Transplants Found to Be Successful in Treating Intestinal Ailment
So much win in the last page. Who knew shit transplants would mean literally that, and not white trash moving to the city.
Everyone has kinda backed off that claim this afternoon - I posted a link on the BS in Space thread which has since been "Updated" with newer information, or with less information, I guess you could say http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astr...aft_has_apparently_left_the_solar_system.html
And it Still Doesn't Look a Day Over 12 Billion! New results from looking at the split-second after the Big Bang indicate the universe is 80 million years older than previously thought and provide ancient evidence supporting core concepts about the cosmos — how it began, what it's made of and where it's going. The findings released Thursday bolster a key theory called inflation, which says the universe burst from subatomic size to its now-observable expanse in a fraction of a second. The new observations from the European Space Agency's $900 million Planck space probe appear to reinforce some predictions made decades ago solely on the basis of mathematical concepts.
Can't help thinking the alternative phrase, "human probiotic infusions" in the article would attract more interest. Well, until they found out what it meant, of course.
"At Dannon, we get our feces from free-range, organic vegans living in environmentally sustainable eco-villages..."