You've heard that you should get eight hours of sleep per night, a whole industry has built up trying to help people who can't do that, but like BMI, organic food, and 'alcohol in moderation is okay', there is no science to it.

The human race has made huge progress in the past few thousand years, gradually improving the living condition of human beings by learning how to cure illness; improving farming; harvesting, storing, and using energy in several forms; and countless other activities. 

Progress is measured over long time scales, and on metrics related to the access to innovations by all, as Ford once noted. So it is natural for us to consider ourselves lucky to have lived "in the best of times". 

Why, if you were born 400 years ago, e.g., you would probably never even learn what a hot shower is! And even only 100 years ago you could have been watching powerless as your children died of diseases that today elicit little worry.

Almost 2,000 years ago in modern-day Uttar Pradesh, India, someone deposited a cache of gems inside a reliquary (a container for holy relics), along with some bone fragments and ash. The gems were precious, but the bones and ash even more so, for according to an inscription on the reliquary, they belonged to Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.

A Fallen Spacefarer Returns to Earth

A few drops of saliva can now reveal what used to require a scalpel, a syringe or a scan.

Scientists have developed ways to analyze spit for the tiniest traces of illness – from mouth cancer to diabetes, and even brain diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Unlike blood tests or biopsies, saliva is easy to collect, painless and inexpensive. During the COVID pandemic, some countries used saliva-based testing for rapid screening.

Humans are the only species on earth that uses language, combining sounds into words and words into sentence with infinite meanings.

We do this using linguistic rules for calls and sentence structure. "A dog eats" tells us one thing while "a big dog" means another while "you're such a dog" from a friend at the bar means something else completely.

Humans have mastered syntax.

How did that evolve? The comparative approach, comparing the vocal production of other primates, with that of humans, provides some answers. Other primates typically use a single call type while some species combine calls, it is mostly as an alarm. All those known are too limited to be a precursor to the complex, open-ended combinatorial system that is human language.

As the Trump administration continues to make significant cuts to NIH budgets and personnel and to freeze billions of dollars of funding to major research universities – citing ideological concerns – there’s more being threatened than just progress in science and medicine. Something valuable but often overlooked is also being hit hard: preventing research abuse.

Homeopathic levels of plastic are the latest environmental scaremongering fad (Nanoplastics! Microplastics!) dominating partisan corporate media when they are not suddenly simping for Trickle Down Economics, Vaccines, and Capitalism they distrusted just a short while ago.

Naturally, companies are rushing to keep you safe from plastic which can be detected in everything. If you want to detect it in your home and annoy your family talking about how much virtual cancer you want to avoid, A McGill team fired up the 3-D printer and made the hollow-laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (HoLDI-MS) test platform.

That's right, a plastic detector made from...plastic.

Last year, companies began to pull back from promoting their Diversity Equity Inclusion efforts and social justice activists blamed the incoming Trump administration. It has been a violation of federal law to discriminate for 60 years so to moderates it seemed odd to add a layer of discrimination in hiring, even one deemed positive. And they never considered it may have instead been done at all due to pressure from the previous administration.

The backlash was entirely predictable, but in both cases it was on the fringes. For no benefit, corporate CEOs were ignoring the 'stay out of it unless your customers are dominated by it' mantra.

Some psychologists believe our brains and bodies don’t just understand music, we become it. We physically resonate with it. They call their belief Neural Resonance Theory (NRT). 

They use Theory is in the name, but it is not a theory like gravity or evolution, the proper name means it is more like String Theory. An idea that needs scientific rigor to be shown true. 

NRT maintains that rather than relying on learned expectations or prediction, musical experiences arise from the brain’s natural oscillations that sync with rhythm, melody and harmony.