I was saddened that names I respect as credible authorities - Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN and PBS News Hour could so botch reporting on cancer cures and climate change. I recall seeing the "possible cure for cancer" on CNN, which put me in a rather melancholy mood: my father died of lung cancer in 1999; my mother had been a smoker and at one time and a breast cancer survivor. She passed in 2009.

This is me typing: You can choose to believe it our not, as this particular post is only my humble opinion. However, when I see someones research I find interesting, I post excerpts of the article or abstract in italics differentiating the originator from my commentary (if any). I only post if I have the originator's permission, avoid it if some written instruction prohibits it. Usually at the end of the post, I provide a link to further review if the blog reader's interested. I give credit and links to photos and their origins.

Nanoantennas convert light to electrical power and vice-versa, and are essential in the design of tiny electro-optical devices. They have diverse potential applications in just about anything based on light–matter interaction, including optical sensing and signalling, microscopy, solar-power conversion and quantum cryptography.

Inspired by natural selection, evolutionary optimization algorithms work towards an ideal design rather than evaluating the performance of all possible designs. For the problem tackled by Feichtner's team, the latter would be impossible because more than 10¹³² antenna designs would need to be evaluated using a process that takes 20 minutes per structure. The team's goal was to find a geometry that would enhance the near-field intensity of an illuminating beam of light as much as possible, so they chose this as the "fitness parameter" that they would judge each design against. Just as in nature, the fittest patterns got the chance to pass on their characteristics to the next generation, while the weaker specimens were discarded. The highest-performing five from each batch were used to build a new generation of 20 structures via crossing techniques and mutations. The new structures were in turn pitted against one another, so the overall fitness of the designs improved generation by generation – over 100 generations – until the near-field intensity enhancement registered almost twice that of the reference antenna.

The resulting photograph is called the Pale Blue Dot and shows Earth as a tiny bluish-white speck against the vast emptiness of space. Sagan later used this phrase for the title of a book about his vision of humanity's future in space.

Given Earth's distinctive colour, an interesting question is what colour an alien Earth orbiting another star might be. Today, we get an answer of sorts from Siddharth Hegde at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and Lisa Kaltenegger at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Director, Theory Research Group and Jack S. Josey-Welch Foundation Chair in Science Regental Professor, University of Texas at Austin Nobel Laureate, Physics .

Steven Weinberg is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. His honors include the Nobel Prize in Physics and National Medal of Science, election to numerous academies, and sixteen honorary doctoral degrees. In 2004 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, with a citation that said he is "considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today."

Yes. A real warp drive, Scotty.

The snow on Mars fell from clouds around the planet's south pole during the Martian winter spanning 2006 and 2007, with scientists discovering it only after sifting through observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The Martian south pole hosts a frozen carbon dioxide — or "dry ice" — cap year-round, and the new discovery may help explain how it formed and persists, researchers said.

Snow fall - at least on Earth - is not wierd at all. However, I'd caution against trying to make a snowball with dry ice. Remember those roses shattered in high school chemistry class? Yeah, it'd be kind of like that.

Space.com: Snow on Mars: 'Dry Ice Snowflakes Discovered by NASA Probe

One such tantalising hint was discovered by the NASA Opportunity Rover, which found small spherical hematite balls, dubbed ‘blueberries,’ in the Martian soil.

These were originally thought to have provided the first evidence of liquid water on Mars, but their existence may hold an even more profound implication.

Now researchers from the University of Western Australia and University of Nebraska have found that such iron-oxide spheroids, when they appear on Earth, are formed by microbes.

The starry-skied planets are two so-called hot Jupiters, which are massive, gaseous orbs that are boiling hot because they orbit tightly around their parent stars. Each hot Jupiter circles a different sun-like star in the Beehive Cluster, also called the Praesepe, a collection of roughly 1,000 stars that appear to be swarming around a common center.

Poughkeepsie Journal: “Any way you dissect it, from a moral or religious standpoint, those protesters broke our commandments,” said Umar Ahmad, a longtime member of the Mid-Hudson Islamic Association located in the Town of Wappinger. “What happened in Libya is unforgivable.”

I am not a Muslim. I do have Muslim members of my family, as well as agnostic, Jehovah's Witness, nondenominational, etc. We respect one another. Proselytizing one another has never occurred in any conversations I've had with them. What counts most is the relationship; the familial bond.

I reject the notion any culture's sacred text - Buddhist, Christian, Hebrew, Hindu, Mormon, Muslim et al - is somehow in some bigoted comparison, worthy of desecration. I reject the notion of demonizing Agnostics or Atheists. I reject - as does the US Constitution - the idea of religious tests as a qualifier for elected office (though news pundits seem to count how many times the president uses the word "God" - and he does quite often - as if this is relevant). I reject the notion that an amateurish video of moribund, racist stereotypes falls under "free speech" and "our American values," unless those values now typify the classroom bully; the boot of empire stamped on the neck of the world. Freedom of speech does not give one the right to yell firein a building not ablaze!

I am as diminished by the loss of diplomats abroad as I am military service members deployed, as I am the senseless loss of life in inner cities across the United States.

Simple, elegant, sober, reflective and quite presidential.

It is in times of triumph and tragedy our leaders are called upon to quell our fears; raise our hopes. Personal vendettas and assaults are the mark of petty minds, I am particularly diminished by candidates that would take death so lightly as to score political points.

Isaiah 11:6 ends: ...and a little child shall lead them.I end with this photo from Facebook, the future meek that will "inherit the earth." I wish mom could see it. I think it would make her smile, and speaks more volumes than the cleverest self-serving sound bite:

Facebook

Happy birthday, mom.

Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University in Japan has released a 500-page proof of the abc conjecture, which proposes a relationship between whole numbers — a 'Diophantine' problem.

The abc conjecture, proposed independently by David Masser and Joseph Oesterle in 1985, might not be as familiar to the wider world as Fermat’s Last Theorem, but in some ways it is more significant. “The abc conjecture, if proved true, at one stroke solves many famous Diophantine problems, including Fermat's Last Theorem,” says Dorian Goldfeld, a mathematician at Columbia University in New York. “If Mochizuki’s proof is correct, it will be one of the most astounding achievements of mathematics of the twenty-first century.”

Like Fermat’s theorem, the abc conjecture refers to equations of the form a+b=c. It involves the concept of a square-free number: one that cannot be divided by the square of any number. Fifteen and 17 are square free-numbers, but 16 and 18 — being divisible by 4² and 3², respectively — are not.