In a world of New York Times best-selling diet books and epidemiological claims about food and chemicals - even that if your mother used cosmetics it may have made you fat - it can be difficult for the public to know what to trust.

It won't be intermittent fasting, juice cleanses, or 10,000 steps, it will always be the calories. Energy balance matters, no matter how many times Center for Science in the Public Interest claims it's conspiracy to claim calories are why we gain weight.

After the 2020 census, it is expected that California will lose a seat in Congress and Texas will gain it. Texans tout greater personal freedom and lower taxes but a new study says it may be water.

California is mostly desert and gets the bulk of its water from other states. After another drought a few years ago the pubic demanded new water infrastructure, noting that California hasn't undertaken a major program since the 1960s while the population is over 100 percent greater. Housing costs are high because new construction can't take place without a water contract, forcing people to stay in coastal cities.

Smallpox was wiped out by using mathematical containment rings coupled with vaccines and it makes sense that one way to contain an infectious disease outbreak is to limit travel.

Unless travel bans are only bans for some people. In communist China, elites are still going on vacation, they are still traveling for business, they are still going to foreign colleges. The novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China, now known as COVID-19, has infected tens of thousands and killing hundreds while spreading to at least 24 other countries. That led many governments, including the United States, to restrict travel to and from China.

A few days ago I received from my esteemed colleague Massimo Passera, a theorist and an INFN director of research in the Padova section where I also work, a draft of a new article he produced with his colleagues Antonio Masiero and Paride Paradisi, which is relevant to my present interests. The paper discusses what new physics effects could be accessible by the precision measurement of elastic scattering of energetic muons off electrons, in a setup which is being considered at the CERN north area for the determination of the hadronic contribution to the effective electromagnetic coupling (the article has meanwhile being published in the arXiv).

Having trouble sleeping? Nervous about an important interview? Smelling your partner’s worn clothing may help improve your sleep and calm your nerves.

While it may sound strange to smell your partner’s clothing, these behaviors are surprisingly common. In one study, researchers asked participants if they had ever slept with or smelled their partners’ worn clothing during periods of separation. Over 80 per cent of women and 50 per cent of men reported they had intentionally smelled an absent partner’s clothing. Most of them said they did so because it made them feel relaxed or secure.

I got an email from an analytics group pitching an article about Valentine's Day movie results. 

It promised:

"If you’re planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day by watching a romantic film you’ll probably end up watching Isn’t It Romantic, according to the latest" blah blah blah (which) "analyzed Google Trends data of IMDBs list of ‘100 romantic films for Valentine's Day’ to reveal which films were the most popular in February 2019.

Mosquitoes rely on sense of smell to get what they need to survive. Females need blood to produce their eggs, so they find a host to bite and spots to lay eggs, while both males and females feed on nectar.

Their dominant source of food is nectar from flowers yet scientists know little about the scents that draw mosquitoes toward certain flowers, or repel them from others. Discovering this could help develop less toxic and better repellents, more effective traps, and lead to an understanding of how the mosquito brain responds to sensory information -- including the cues that, on occasion, lead a female mosquito to bite one of us.

In a new short paper in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, Roger A. Søraa from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and co-authors Eduard Fosch-Villaronga from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Adam Poulsen from Charles Sturt University in Australia discuss what a queering of robots might entail.

They point out that technology is not developed in a vacuum, but instead reflects biases and reproduces societal values and beliefs.

A primitive bee from 100 million years ago has two things in common with bees of today; pollen and a parasite that caused its demise, much like varroa mites cause periodic colony collapse disorder today.

The mid-Cretaceous fossil from Myanmar provides the first record of a primitive bee with pollen and also the first record of the beetle parasites, which continue to show up on modern bees today. Beetle parasites may have caused the flight error that was deadly for the insect. The Discoscapa apicula specimen became stuck in tree resin and thus preserved in amber, and has now been identified as a new family, genus and species. The new find has been classified as Discoscapa apicula, in the family Discoscapidae. 

An article in Manufacturing&Service Operations Management says that an increase in the number of stores directly decreases consumer waste. The reason is improved access to groceries which would men better distribution of inventory and price competition. 

Food waste is a big problem in all developed countries; Europe became a joke in the previous decade when they set out to ban sales of 'ugly' food. In the U.S., the Department of Agriculture estimates food waste at between 30-40 percent of the food supply.