More and more people over the age of 50 are taking up physical exercise. Medical associations resoundingly agree that this is a good thing. Physical exercise is not only key to disease prevention, it is also a recommended part of treatment for many illnesses.

However, starting to move at this stage of life requires some care. This is especially true for those who have not previously been physically active, or for people who are overweight or obese.

NFL Biosciences is has a Marketing Authorization Application for a smoking cessation technique derived from an allergen treatment in the 1970s that has been quietly used as an unauthorized smoking cessation tool for 10 years. A lot like vaping pens were before the Obama administration tried to claim all tobacco was as harmful as cigarette smoking, an actual carcinogen.

And it works better than placebo, just like vaping, but lots of people have quit using hypnosis and we know that isn't science. This helps due to off-target effects from its original purpose, preventing allergic reactions in workers who used tobacco plants, thanks to how it modifies glucose metabolism.

Illegal firearm trafficking is inseparable from the illegal drug trade: Weapons are often bought with drug money, can strengthen cartels and can be traded for drugs.

Lichens on stone, those “still explosions” as the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop named them, remain unseen to most, which is remarkable when you consider how commonplace they are. It seems these ecologically and culturally significant whatever-they-ares unfairly fall victim to something akin to plant blindness, a known phenomenon and tendency of people to overlook plants, which many of us – when we first encounter lichens – identify them as, even though that’s not what they are at all.

The other day I finally emerged from a very stressful push to submit two grant applications to the European Innovation Council. The call in question is for PATHFINDER_OPEN projects, that aim for proofs of principle of groundbreaking technological innovations. So I thought I would broadly report on that experience (no, I am not new to it, but you never cease to learn!), and disclose just a little about the ideas that brought about one of the two projects.
Grant applications 

Chicago Sun-Times writer Marco Buscaglia used the popular LLM ChatGPT to create the 2025 "summer reading list" they wanted for subscribers and had enough confidence in the result that he didn't check the work. 

The problem was that LLMs are not really AI, despite claims by companies selling this stuff that they are. They are certainly not Intelligent. So while the list had real authors, half of the books did not exist.

A new paper argues that academic ecology is culturally corroded. 

'Stay in your lane', 'do you want to die on that hill?' and other territorial and undermining behavior were reported by 44% of predominantly ecologists who responded to a survey. They say it was most common as graduate students, a third of the time by their own supervisor. Of those, 18 percent reported they had experienced it multiple times.

It is often joked that 'prostitution was the first profession' and, that it is not a profession aside, the sentiment may be true. Someone with a lot of food and the ability to prevent it being taken may have worked out a deal with someone who had no food but willingness to satisfy a different basic need. It would still mean food gathering was the first profession but that's not as funny.

Lots of animals barter and steal and fight, humans are not even very good at it compared to most creatures, but the anthropological consensus is that humans are the only species to understand 'money.' Money is a token whose actual value may be negligible but with intangible value that is not only agreed upon by a larger community, it is fungible. It can be traded for many goods.(1)

A new paper suggests that the world's largest polluters remain safe from the environmental damage they help create and the countries least to blame face the greatest threats because of, oddly, violent conflict.

This is counter-intuitive but it is the same argument we used to read about "virtual water". Those arguments are fine in a spreadsheet, it gets advocates worked up, but fails in the real world as readily as most economic projections do.(1) The authors argue that they correlate armed conflict and the environment.

In the 1950s, the global infestation of bed bugs was nearly eradicated, thanks to the pesticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, popularly known as DDT.

Due to outcry from environmentalists and concern about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring(1), and over the objections of scientists, the attorney who had been appointed to run the new Environmental Protection Agency created by President Nixon, William Ruckelshaus, banned it.(2)