A Million-Year-Old Mammoth May Hold The Key...
By Irena Šoljić
First Nation Shell Middens And True Oysters
Up-to-date With The Big Bang, Mass, And Protons
What Will It Take For Real Farming In Space?
These days I am in the middle of a collaborative effort to write a roadmap... Read >
With a 4th generation nuclear plant finally getting built in the U.S., 30 years... Read >
It is easy for wealthy countries to spend $135 billion on an organic food process... Read >
A multi-institutional study has found that a shorter course of post-mastectomy... Read >
Center for Food Safety, a controversial litigation group that has been shown... Read >
Once upon a time, wealthy white women virtue signaled to other wealthy white... Read >
Some Notes On The Utility Function Of Fundamental Science Experiments
Earlier this year I mentioned here that I would be writing an article on how the utility function of experiments in fundamental science could be specified, as an enabling step toward the formalization of a co-design optimization problem. Now, as the deadline for submission approaches and the clock ...
Understanding Expected Limits, Observed Limits, Exclusion Regions In Particle Physics Graphs
I recently got engaged in a conversation with a famous retired mathematician / cosmologist about the phenomenology of Higgs bosons in the Standard Model of particle physics, and very soon we ended up discussing a graph produced by the CMS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which details ...
Thanks To 2024 PT5, Earth Now Has Two Moons
Starting tonight, and lasting until Thanksgiving, Earth has a second moon.Our Mini Me is named 2024 PT5, an Arjuna asteroid discovered on August 7th of this year by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. Arjuna asteroids are defined as small objects "moving in orbits with low eccentricity ...
Optimization In Valencia
Last week I was in Valencia, to attend the fourth MODE Workshop on Differentiable Programming for Experiment Design. It was a great meeting, with 80 participants eager to discuss their latest results in application of complex deep neural network models and similar concoctions to problems in fundamental ...
American CO2 Is Below War War II Levels But We Keep Emissions High In Poor Countries
In politics, one way to make your belief in alternative energy seem feasible is to make its competitors expensive. President Obama did that when he began to subsidize the domestic solar energy industry at unprecedented levels.(1) He brought in Dr. Stephen Chu, who had advocated $9-a-gallon gasoline ...
Mercury Emissions Are In Decline Yet Doomsday Prophets Claim They Are Up
If you read environmental groups, we are closer to our doom than ever. Bees are nearly extinct, cell phones are causing cancer, and hydroelectric power is devastating the land.None of those are true yet they all have claims found in journals and in media. So it has been with mercury emissions, ...
Simulation Predicts 50% Of Recurring El Niño Events Could Be Extreme In 25 Years
The recurring El Niño phenomenon was in full force from mid-2023 to mid-2024 and as predicted it brought higher temperatures. In this case, it brought the highest temperatures since accurate records have been kept, for 12 straight months.A team of climate scientists created a numerical simulation ...
Does Air Quality Cause Postpartum Depression?
New mothers are under a lot of pressure. They are told they have to breastfeed and if they don't, the formula they use may cause their child to have worse grades in school. And if the government shuts down formula factories for no coherent reason and imports aren't allowed because the identical ...
Bacterial Genes Can Be Genetic Shapeshifters
Prokaryotes, single-cell organisms such as bacteria, undergo inversions which cause a physical flip of a segment of DNA and change an organism’s genetic identity the way you might change a wig. They can occur within a single gene, in defiance of the more common 'one gene codes for one protein' ...
Wuhan Seafood Market: Evidence Of COVID-19 Origins Revealed
When COVID-19 broke out, it was a US election year and that meant a lot of common sense gave way to politics. Democrats charged that then-President Trump was putting lives at risk by telling FDA to fast-track a vaccine, after insisting that closing airports to China was racist and xenophobic because ...
Normal Sleep Duration 50% Less Common After A Stroke
Getting enough sleep is correlated to brain and heart health and after a stroke that is even more important. A new survey finds that is when people who need it are least likely to get it. A cohort of 39,559 people were asked every two years how much sleep they usually get at night on weekdays ...
C1QL1 - Multiple Sclerosis Research Tackles How The Brain Replaces Lost Myelin
The neurons in our brains are protected by an insulating layer called myelin. In diseases like multiple sclerosis, this protective layer is damaged and lost, leading to death of neurons and gradual disability. A recent study in The Federation of European Biochemical Societies Journal examined the ...
Taking The Book Of The Dead To Heart
In ancient Egypt, the heart was the key to a happy afterlife. It lived on after death, they believed, and in the Duat, the Netherworld, it revealed a truth man's words could not hide.The 42 gathered gods would measure the heart and if it weighed more than the Feather of Truth which adorned the ...
Humans Age In Two Bursts, At 44 And 60
Aging is not a smooth and gradual process. For instance, around 6.5% of people aged between 40 and 59 have coronary artery disease, a prevalence which jumps to 19.8% for people aged 60 to 79. Research inspired by such observations and published in the journal Nature Aging, has found that aging ...
Laughter Exercise Could Be Treatment For Dry Eye Disease
Dry eye disease is a chronic condition estimated to affect around 360 million people. Common symptoms include uncomfortable, red, scratchy or irritated eyes.Anecdotal claims are that laughter therapy alleviates depression, anxiety, stress, and chronic pain, while strengthening immune function but ...
Mpox Vaccine Effective In Preventing Infection
A health data simulation has concluded that a single dose of the Modified vaccinia Ankara-Bavarian Nordic (MVA-BN) was 58% effective in protecting again mpox infection, a disease caused by infection with the Monkeypox virus, which is most likely in men who have sex with men and which ...
How Social Media Affects Young People
Last year, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued a health advisory on the use of social media by adolescents. This was based on mounting scientific evidence that social media has both benefits and risks for teens, and that parents and guardians needed better advice on how to balance ...
Independent Voters Decide Elections, But Undecided Voters Least Likely To Vote
Get-out-the-vote campaigns matter, which is why U.S. political parties encourage those in their tribe to vote by mail long before any controversies can change their mind. Voting is so predictable that about six percent of voters actually decide the election.Passion motivates, and that is shown ...
Astrologers Deduce Personalities As Poorly As Anyone Else
Astrology is one of those things that makes no sense to literate people. The position of stars a billion light-years away determined your personality, but if you are in the eastern world that personality could be completely different than if you were born 2000 miles west? See: I was a Virgo this ...
Did Ancient Turks Beat The Greeks To Precession By 10,000 Years?
If you ever get the chance to visit Turkey, I encourage you to do so. Like Civil War battlefields in the southern US, you can trip and stumble across something old - except in the case of Turkey it could be 2,000 years old.Some sites are archaeological research and you can't just wander around ...
Ignore Critics, Gen Z, We Weren't Smarter In 1984
It's commonplace for older generations to criticize the young. In my early career, an older fellow told me he wouldn't hire anyone who didn't know how to use a slide rule. Another only a decade older than me said he only wanted to work with people who had built their own crystal radio or some equivalent ...
Slaves Of Satan: A Diabolical Subjugation Theory Of Everything
Do you think the 2008 financial meltdown was caused by religious evil? I don't, I think it was caused by populism in Congress that made it a potential prison sentence to deny anyone a mortgage and guaranteed mortgages for unqualified people.(1)If you instead think it was evil, "Slaves of Satan" ...
Choosing Between Inquiry-Based Learning And Direct Learning
Inquiry-based learning is at the heart of the controversial California Math Framework. Rather than teaching students through rote learning, which instructors believe gives a false sense of virtuosity that comes undone when students have to think for themselves and do difficult problems, students ...
Fit Fat: Exercise Helps Even If You Aren't Thin
Influences buoyed by epidemiological claims about gimmick diets can make fitness intimidating but ignore them. Even if you don't lose weight, if you exercise your belly fat is still going to be healthier than someone who does nothing.It just takes some consistency. Exercising burns calories ...
The answers to the title questions are, No, Yes, and why not. What I have been doing instead... more »
Sheer beauty — a beautiful Euhoplites ammonite from Folkstone, UK. These lovelies have a pleasing... more »
March is here, and with it begins a season of intense travel for me - something which for some... more »
This plant above is what is regarded as a typical fern. However, a quite different looking type... more »
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