When I was young, conservatives and liberals had equally high levels of trust in science. And it was high. Only progressives thought science was not a force for public good.

A calorimeter in physics is something that measures heat. However, there are mainly two categories of such objects: ones that measure macroscopic amounts of heat, and ones that measure the heat released by subatomic particles when they smash against matter. I am sure you guess which is the class of instruments I am going to discuss in this article.
A further distinction among calorimeters for particle physics is the one concerning the kind of particles these devices aim to measure. Electromagnetic calorimeters target electrons and photons, and hadronic calorimeters target particles made of quarks and gluons. Here I will discuss only the latter, which are arguably more complex to design.

Smashing protons

Over the last two years, generative AI has smashed our ideas of what intelligence means, what AI can and cannot do, and of our place in the cosmos. A two-thousand year old journey from Aristotle to today, has culminated in a moment where human exceptionalism has finally been challenged.

America is one of the most religiously, racially and ethnically diverse countries in the world, but that doesn't mean Latinos, Asians or Blacks believe that Democrats and Republicans want them as anything more than reliable voting blocs.

A new analysis finds that though voting eligible Asians were up 35 percent between 2010 and 2020, Latinos increased 23 percent and the Black population increased by 6 percent even as Whites decreased 2 percent, minorities didn't vote in numbers similar to their eligible voter population.

Estradiol is an estrogen hormone used medically during menopause and after hysterectomies to help reduce symptoms such as hot flashes and to prevent osteoporosis (bone loss) in women, but a new paper says it is linked to cocaine addiction.

Women are more likely than men to develop an addiction, try cocaine at a younger age, use larger amounts of the drug, and suffer from overdose. A psychologist says estradiol may be why.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, government health officials went to Congress to ask for more funding to help with Ebola. Prior to that they asked for more funding to help stop Teen Vaping. Prior to that they asked for more funding to stop the Prediabetes Epidemic.

After the pandemic they created regulations to keep landlords from evicting deadbeat tenants. They created regulations to force COVID-19 vaccines on everyone...except fellow government union employees. 

Republicans joined the anti-vaccine movement in 2021 but you might not know it xisted prior to that. Academics and allied journalists would roll out surveys showing that the anti-vaccine movement was similar on both sides to rationalize the behavior of their tribe - while ignoring actual data.

Data like that that coast of California had more vaccine exemptions for school kids than the rest of the US combined. Some coastal schools had vaccine rates of just 26%. Fortunately, we had physicians like Dr. Richard Pan on our side, willing to defy his political party to save kids. We pressured the Governor to sign a law banning arbitrary exemptions and now California is nearly as high as Mississippi and Alabama in vaccine uptake.

Like some soldiers become conscientious objectors if they end up in an actual military situation, or when over 300 armed government union employees suddenly forgot they had guns while kids were being murdered in Uvalde, healthcare workers, 18.8 million strong just in the US, were more likely to exit the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike the first two, healthcare workers were right to be afraid. 

In 1845, two ships under the command Captain John Franklin, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, left England on a voyage to chart the top of North America and a Northwest Passage that would connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. 

Like the interior of Africa and finding the source of the Nile, Great Britain was using some its imperial wealth to explore the unknown and a veteran skipper like Franklin wanted to be first to make the breakthrough across the north pole.

Their ships were state-of-the-art; interior heating and storage enough preserved food to last the 100-plus men for months at a time plus chicken, pigs, and even for the early parts.