Since 2012, there have been increased calls for fossil fuel "divestment" - getting money out of fossil fuel companies. Despite an effort that peaked in 2015, spurred on by paid protesters from groups run by activists like Bill McKibben, they haven't made much difference.

Some schools and companies say they have done it, but like "sustainability" divestment has so many subjective meanings it is meaningless. 

If you're a music lover, you've likely had that feeling where a favorite song floods your system with pleasurable emotions, joyful memories, makes your hair stand on edge, or even sends a shiver or "chill" down your spine.

About half of people report that they get such chills when listening to music. 

Two large recent studies show that people hospitalized for COVID-19 in March were more than three times as likely to die as people hospitalized for COVID–19 in August.

The first study used data from three hospitals in New York City. The chance of death for someone hospitalized for the coronavirus in those hospitals dropped from an adjusted 25.6% in March to 7.6% in August. The second study, which looked at survival rates in England, found a similar improvement.

Viral respiratory epidemics like the flu spike cyclically during autumn and winter - but only in the temperate regions of the globe's northern and southern hemispheres.

In the equatorial belt, they happen all year round, at lower levels.

A new numerical model hopes to provide insight. The authors find that both the prevalence and evolution of epidemics are strongly correlated with the amount of daily solar irradiation that hits a given location on the Earth at a given time of the year. 

Finance and nature have an interesting mathematical connection.

Dear students,
If you ask about your grade, I’ll gladly tell you that you’re doing well in the course, or that you really need to do better, as the case may be. More specifically than that I will not say.
The main reason for this is that if I were a hiring manager at a company, the very last thing I would ever think to ask you about would be your grades. When you interview for a job, you should show that you understand the company’s situation, that you have knowledge, skills and experiences that prepare you to do the job, and that your personality and way of working fit the company’s vibe (okay, their “culture”). And that you can clearly articulate these things. All this is so much more important than grades.

In a classic "Charlie Brown" Halloween tale, one character believes in the pumpkin equivalent of an Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy, but NGC  2292 and NGC  2293 are real. At 109,000 light-years across, the diameter of our Milky Way, they don't just form a Great Pumpkin, they form the greatest pumpkin of all.

What looks like two glowing eyes and a crooked carved smile is a snapshot of the early stages of a collision between the two galaxies. The "pumpkin’s" glowing "eyes" are the bright, star-filled cores of each galaxy that contain supermassive black holes. 

The sanitary emergency presently affecting most countries across the World is highlighting the duties that each of us, as a member of a collectivity of individuals who share commodities, services and infrastructure, is called at times to attend to. In a well-functioning society paying taxes should not be enough to earn the right to be a citizen. Indeed, the "social contract" also demands us to, e.g., abide to laws. 

The Swiss are famously negative about everything. The anti-science attack site Swiss Public Eye, for example, routinely undermines the science community and claim the world is doomed unless people switch to products made by their funding sources.

It's a pretty bleak existence but they've bee surrounded by militant Germany, France, and Italy for much of their history. They have forts built into nearly every mountain, compulsory military service and almost as many guns as America. They have been expecting to be overrun for centuries.

Internal documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request show that the two largest teacher unions, the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers (AFL–CIO), have donated to a Democratic political advocacy organization named "Center for Media and Democracy" which produces numerous products for its base. One of them, Sourcewatch, is a wiki written by progressives to attack conservatives and they are also unsurprisingly opposed to most science. Because they think science is a vast right-wing conspiracy.