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A New Standard, Hallucinating Personality, Synthetic Brains, Anabolic Mustard, Icebergs Kill Invertebrates, 5 Giants, Justin Gets Embarrassed, The Dead Sea Lives, And Much More…
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New Standard Candle
Gravity Clusters for Einstein
Fermilab checking CERN
Magic Mushrooms Change You
Synthetic cerebellum
Spatial competition in the brain
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Natural steroids you can buy in your grocery store
A home remedy for spinal injuries
Red Wine Cures
Icebergs and biodiversity
A 5th Gas Giant?
The number one reason people should never trust Justin
New bacterial life
Darker than black
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I'm the host of this little science show. 
Standard Candles
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4632
You did a great job explaining this story!
There’s one point I’d like to clarify.
The “Z” number refers to redshift, not a measure of accuracy, but of distance.
In cosmology, the redshift of an object tells you its distance by Hubble’s Law.
Since Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are so bright, we can see them farther away.
This is where the numbers z=4 and z=1.7 come into play.
An AGN at z=4 (a measure of distance) is as bright as a 1A supernova at z=1.7.
Magic Mushrooms
http://csp.org/psilocybin/Hopkins-CSP-Psilocybin2008.pdf
This 2008 study is a totally tubular trip, man!
But it has some technical weaknesses:
1. Self-selection.
The volunteers knew the study was about a psychoactive substance.
This group may therefore be particularly sensitive to bias due to outcome expectations.
Hard to avoid this one in the social sciences, sadly.
2. Self-reported data.
Self-reported data is highly susceptible to many forms of bias.
Hard to avoid this one in the
3. Contextual emotional memories. (The big one.)
Personality scores are particularly sensitive to the mood of the subject.
This mood can be influenced by emotional memories associated with the environment.
The follow-up measurements were not blinded to association with the drug sessions.
Participants mood, and therefore personality scores, were biased by this experience.
This past experience was either (A) a mushroom trip or (B) a meth trip.
The results of this study might be accounted for entirely by the difference between A and B.
As opposed to true, permanent changes in personality.
The embarrassed/trustworthy catch 22 made me lol!
Thanks for the shout outs, too. 🙂
Just ran across your podcast and it was exactly what I was looking for. Or should i say listening for.
You have yourself a new listener…
–Darren