Links for 2011-08-04

"Beer is the juice of grain skilfully treated: it is liquid bread. The first people to make beers as we know them today were the Sumerians, who cultivated cereal grains specifically for brewing and drank beer to honour their gods. Many cultures have seen beer as a gift from God (a medieval English term for yeast was godisgoode). It is an expression of place and tradition – one of the few truly regional foods to which we are regularly exposed.

Brewing is a combination of art and science and great brewers are blessed with a little of both. The artist in the brewer chooses the ingredients and balances the flavours and aromas of the finished product. The scientist understands and carefully orchestrates a symphony of chemical reactions between the grain, the water, the hops, and the yeast. The brewing process is complex and what follows can only be an outline of it."

"The Flynn effect has always been tinged with mystery. First popularized by the political scientist James Flynn, the effect refers to the widespread increase in IQ scores over time. Some measures of intelligence – such as performance on Raven’s Progressive Matrices in Des Moines and Scotland – have been increasing for at least 100 years. What’s most peculiar is how scores have increased:

1) Scores have increased the most on the problem-solving portion of intelligence tests
2) Verbal intelligence has remained relatively flat, while non-verbal scores continue to rise
3) Performance gains have occurred across all age groups
4) The rise in scores exists primarily on those tests with content that does not appear to be easily learned

What’s puzzling about this increase in general intelligence is that it appears where we’d least expect it. "

"The world is presently blessed with two competing particle accelerators smashing together subatomic particles, and several thousand physicists sifting the debris, in search of new laws of nature. The last year has seen a plethora of rumors and hints of what would be big discoveries if they hold up: bumps in the data signifying new elementary particles or forces, among other things, and “now you see it, now you don’t” rumors of sightings of the long-sought Higgs boson, famously said to be responsible for imbuing other particles with mass.
[…]
So which bump is the next revolution? Recently physicists have been turning over cards like crazy, most notably at a meeting in Grenoble, France. So far, the ace is still missing, and some of those potential discoveries have disappeared, but some physicists now think they may know which card the Higgs is hiding under — though they disagree on when it will finally be turned over."