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On June 25, the hottest man-made temperature has been recorded in a huge atom-smasher at New York at 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit - just 250,000 times hotter compared to the sun's core. This achievement occurred in the particle accelerator RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider), a 3.9-kilometer tunnel under New York that researchers use to smash particles into one another to replicate conditions that happened a split-second after the Big Bang. Creating the hot temperature in a controlled environment was done in Brookhaven National Laboratory through colliding gold nuclei with each other at the speed of light. Once the collision of ions happened, the huge amount of energy it emits will melt the protons and neutrons in the gold nuclei, turning into a liquid composed of smaller particles called gluons and quarks. At 7 trillion degrees Fahrenheit, normal matter would usually break down into sub-atomic particles, the gluons and quarks that supposedly composed the earliest plasma that scientist thought resembles the thing that consisted the universe right after the Big Bang happened, 13.7 billion years ago. According to the head of the Brookhaven program, particle physicists formerly thought that quarks and gluons would be in gas form but this new study revealed that it is behaving more like a liquid. And while they already expected to get to such extreme temperatures, they were really surprised of it having an almost perfect liquid behavior. Surprisingly, the liquid could occur at both ends of the spectrum - that is, a similar behavior of the liquid in trapped atom samples has been seen at extremely cold temperatures. "Other physicists have now observed quite similar liquid behavior in trapped atom samples at temperatures near absolute zero, ten million trillion times colder than the quark-gluon plasma we create at RHIC," said the head of Brookhaven's particle and nuclear physics program

(Helayne Seidman/For The Washington Post) - Neil deGrasse Tyson is director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York By Aaron Leitko, Published: February 20 font-family: Georgia,

U.S. Senate Committee hearing on NASA budget and space program By Amanda Doyle, 12 March 2012 Neil deGrasse Tyson gives evidence to the U.S. Senate Committee March 7 2012 U.S. Senate Committee hears submissions on NASA's 2013 budget request & U.S. space program The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has been hearing submissions regarding NASA's 2013 budget request and on the priorities, plans and progress of the U.S. space program. Witnesses appearing before the Committee on March 7 included Charles F Bolden Jr, NASA's Administrator, and Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and well known commentator on space exploration. Bolden, who flew on four space shuttle missions after a career in the Marine Corps, was appointed to lead NASA in 2009 after being nominated by President Obama. Administrator Bolden outlined the space agency's achievements in 2011 and updated the Committee on the status of current missions. His statement outlined how the requested budget of $17.7 billion for 2013 would be allocated and concluded by stating: "NASA's FY 2013 budget request of $17.7 billion represents a substantial investment in a balanced program of science, exploration, technology and aeronautics research. Despite the constrained budget environment facing the Nation, this request supports a robust space program that keeps us on a path to achieving a truly audacious set of goals. NASA is working to send humans to an asteroid and ultimately to Mars, to observe the first galaxies form, and to expand the productivity of humanity's only permanently-crewed space station. We are making air travel safer and more efficient, learning to live and work in space, and developing the critical technologies to achieve these goals. The coming year will include the first commercial cargo flights to the ISS, a nuclear powered robot the size of a small car landing on the surface of Mars, and the launch of the Nation's next land observing satellit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man Invisible Man is a novel written by Ralph Ellison, and the only one that he published during his lifetime (his other novels were published posthumously). It won him the National Book Award in 1953. The novel addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing African-Americans in the early twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity andMarxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man nineteenth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[1] Historical background In his introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition of Invisible Man,[2] Ellison says that he started writing the book in a barn in Waitsfield, Vermont in the summer of 1945 while on sick leave from the Merchant Marine and that the novel continued to preoccupy him in various parts of New York City. In an interview in The Paris Review 1955,[3] Ellison states that the book took five years to complete with one year off for what he termed an "ill-conceived short novel." Invisible Man was published as a whole in 1952; however, copyright dates show the initial publication date as 1947, 1948, indicating that Ellison had published a section of the book prior to full publication. That section was the famous "Battle Royal" scene, which had been shown to Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon magazine by Frank Taylor, one of Ellison's early supporters. Ellison states in his National Book Award acceptance speech that he considered the novel's chief significance to be its experimental attitude. Rejecting the idea of social protest-as Ellison would later put it-he did not want to write another protest novel, and also seeing the highly regarded styles of Naturalism and R

ETHICS AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHA Selective Chronology with References A summary overview in adapted bibliographical essay format of phases in the development of collective role responsibility for research integrity.  This overview, largely prescinds from the issue of human subjects research, which has its own special history. 1970sRise of Research Ethics Concerns in the United States 1974 William Summerlin (Sloan-Kettering Institute) "painted mice" case.  See Joseph R. Hixson, The Patchwork Mouse (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976). Scientific concerns about the dangers of recombinant DNA research lead to a shortterm voluntary suspension of such work and an Asilomar, CA, conference to develop safety guidelines. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Bar Association (ABA) jointly establish the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists (NCLS). 1975 John T. Edsall et al. report on "Scientific Freedom and Responsibility."  This report by an AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility (CSFR), which was first established on an ad hoc basis in 1970, led to the drafting and approval of a formal charter for the CSFR in 1976.  (Charter revised 1979 and again 1996.)  Among the first major post-Edsall activities of CSFR was the AAAS Professional Ethics Project, which produced a workshop report and collection of ethics documents: Rosemary Chalk, Mark S. Frankel, and Sallie B. Chafer, eds., Professional Ethics Activities in the Scientific and Engineering Societies (Washington, DC: AAAS, December 1980). 1978 Gerald Holton and Robert S. Morison edit a special issue of Daedalus (vol. 107, no. 2, Spring) on "Limits of Scientific Inquiry," examining the new social criticism of science; subsequently published as a book (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979). 1979 The first U.S. Student Pugwash Conference, emphasizing applied social responsibility.  Proceedings published in Sanford A. Lakoff, ed., Science and Ethical