The class of particles that obey Bose-Einstein statistics, bosons, was named after him by Paul Dirac.

A self-taught scholar and a polyglot (mastery of multiple languages), he had a wide range of interests in varied fields including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature and music. He served on many research and development committees in independent India.

Velocity-distribution data of a gas of rubidium atoms, confirming the discovery of a new phase of matter, the Bose–Einstein condensate... Einstein adopted the idea and extended it to atoms. This led to the prediction of the existence of phenomena which became known as Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons (which are particles with integer spin, named after Bose), which was demonstrated to exist by experiment in 1995.

Sadly, it was in it the Superconducting Supercollider in Waxahatchie, Texas (there is such a place), where Lederman suggested as "the mother of all colliders" where we were supposed to discover the Higgs...oh, well!

R&D: Media covering the story gave lots of credit to British physicist Peter Higgs for theorizing the elusive subatomic "God particle," but little was said about Satyendranath Bose, the Indian after whom the boson is named.

"He is a forgotten hero," the government lamented in a lengthy statement, noting that Bose was never awarded a Nobel Prize though "at least 10 scientists have been awarded the Nobel" in the same field.

The gentleman you see removing his glasses (expressing a lot of emotion for a theoretical physicist), is none other than Peter Higgs himself (~0:51 into the announcement). A primer on the Higgs Boson (the Boson we have Satyendranath Bose to thank for) will post tomorrow...

Does "teaching to the test" increase student capabilities and knowledge?
This depends on whether the test is good. For multiple-choice tests, "teaching to the test" means focusing on the content that will be on the test, sometimes even drilling on test items, and using the format of the test as a basis for teaching. Since this kind of teaching to the test leads primarily to improved test-taking skills, increases in test scores do not necessarily mean improvement in real academic performance.

Teaching to the test also narrows the curriculum, forcing teachers and students to concentrate on memorization of isolated facts, instead of developing fundamental and higher order abilities. Washington Post

We've had fires and record heat waves; mild winters; hurricanes in New York and freak snowstorms on Halloween in New England (both resulting in power outages). Parts of the Midwest, Maryland and the eastern seaboard has for the most part been without power after freak violent storms. Yet, we question climate change as a result of a warming globe. More than a few Americans don't know what the decision by the Supreme Court on the Affordable Care Act means to them; that the origination of a mandate (for which derisive humor has been spun ad nauseum), came from former Republican Senator Bob Bennett and championed by Former Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Teaching to the test also narrows the curriculum, forcing teachers and students to concentrate on memorization of isolated facts, instead of developing fundamental and higher order abilities.

Like the higher order ability of governing a democracy. It's a bit of a stretch, linking climate change to education and governance, but not much.

We need reason and legislation that will create jobs, and an educational system that will prepare kids for future careers requiring skillsets to repair robots, not a high school diploma/GED to drill widgets on a production floor. We're fast becoming a nation predicted by James Boggs: automation and (his word) "cybernation" rules.

We need an educated electorate for this country to be successful, not a bewildered herd.

Oligarchy/Plutocracy are false equivalencies to democracy.

"By their votes, the people exercise their sovereignty." Thomas Jefferson

According to the standard model of cosmology, visible stars and galaxies trace a pattern across the sky known as the cosmic web, which was originally etched out by dark matter — the substance thought to account for almost 80% of the Universe’s matter. Soon after the Big Bang, regions that were slightly denser than others pulled in dark matter, which clumped together and eventually collapsed into flat ‘pancakes’. “Where these pancakes intersect, you get long strands of dark matter, or filaments,” explains Jörg Dietrich, a cosmologist at the University Observatory Munich in Germany. Clusters of galaxies then formed at the nodes of the cosmic web, where these filaments crossed.

The research, published last week in Nature, seeks a new approach to battery fabrication by using materials that can be spray-painted onto various surfaces. Combined with flexible printed circuits and research in spray-on solar cells, the technique offers the prospect of turning common objects into smart devices with computing power and storage. Another possibility is consumer electronics, such as cell phones or cameras, with a battery coating.

Astronomers ran across just such thing recently. Hubble observations of a distant galaxy cluster revealed an arc of light above it. That’s actually the distorted image of a more distant galaxy, and it’s a common enough sight near foreground clusters. But the thing is, that galaxy shouldn’t be there.

TECHIE BUZZ:
The Higgs announcement
The announcement is expected to a big one – especially with the predicted discovery of the Higgs by the end of the year. The status of the Higgs will not be changed to ‘discovered’, but we will get to know how far we have actually reached.

In the case of high-T_c superconductors, the key parameters are temperature and doping. The iron pnictide superconductor in the recent study was BaFe₂(As_1-xP_x)₂, where "x" is the doping fraction. (In this case, the pnictide is the arsenic.) The researchers picked this particular pnictide due to the ease with which pure crystals of the material can be grown and how clean the resulting data is. For x values roughly between 0.2 and 0.7, BaFe₂(As_1-xP_x)₂is a superconductor; outside those values, the material isn't superconducting at any temperature.

A QCP—if it is present—marks another type of phase transition [beyond solid-liquid-gas-plasma], where quantum fluctuations at absolute zero change the superconducting behavior of the material. While absolute zero isn't experimentally achievable, the quantum fluctuations start at (relatively) higher temperatures, changing the behavior of the flow of the charge carriers.

NPR: "[Professors] are not the beneficiaries of large increases in college spending that has gone on," he says. "In fact, the percentage of all students taught by non-tenure-track professors — adjuncts, teaching assistants — has gone up and up and up."

"I'm sure that most of those people [provost, deans, assistant deans] are working hard at real jobs," he says. "But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea to increase spending and pass along many of those costs onto students in the form of higher tuition. ...

"And the more the prices go up, the more that these students who are squeezed out of opportunity are middle-income students, low-income students, and the net effect over time is to make our college and university system no longer the engine of economic mobility that it once was."

Rant done...