Sailors have told tales of giant tentacled sea monsters for millennia. In ancient times, it was the Kraken. In more recent work, Jules Verne delighted and terrified the public while reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

The monstrous Architeuthis dux, the giant squid, must have been terrifying to ancient mariners. They were the size of modern school buses, never a good thing when you are in a wooden trireme, with eyes as big as dinner plates and tentacles that can snatch prey 10 yards away.

During an evolutionary scale when most creatures got smaller, how did this squid get so big?
Publication of its full genome sequence may give us clues.

Since math is a language, there is no reason blind people can't learn it, but math and science textbooks in Braille require an enormous effort to produce. That means much higher cost for a small market, which means it can only be done by nonprofits on one economic end of the scale, or wealthy book companies on the other end, who want to offset their guilt at charging college students $200 for a book that should be $20 on Amazon.

Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are trying to out-compete each other in ways to wrap themselves in the flag of environmental sustainability, but some of the ways they want to do it are laughable. Amazon's Jeff Bezos wants to do his part to stop global warming and his plan is running a million small business owners in India into extinction; which is why a giant chunk of the country booed when the newest White Savior from a rich country got off his private jet.

The third "Machine Learning for Jets" workshop is ongoing these days at the Kimmel centre of New York University, a nice venue overlooking Washington Square park in downtown Manhattan. I came to attend it and remain up-to-date with the most advanced new algorithms that are been used for research in collider physics, as I have done last year. The workshop is really well organized and all talks are quite interesting, so this is definitely a good time investment for me.

The True Health Initiative (THI) describes itself as a nonprofit devoted to “fighting fake facts and combating false doubts to create a world free of preventable diseases, using the time-honored, evidence-based, fundamentals of lifestyle and medicine.” 

That sounds like a terrific place to be, Science 2.0 does the exact same thing.

Except we actually do that. We are not instead selling a belief system promoted by scholars here. And that is what True Health Initiative does, despite the legitimate-sounding name.

When will I die?

This question has endured across cultures and civilisations. It has given rise to a plethora of religions and spiritual paths over thousands of years, and more recently, some highly amusing apps.

But this question now prompts a different response, as technology slowly brings us closer to accurately predicting the answer.

Predicting the lifespan of people, or their “Personal Life Expectancy” (PLE) would greatly alter our lives.

On one hand, it may have benefits for policy making, and help optimise an individual’s health, or the services they receive.

There is no question that our microbiome is important to health, but just like science behind mitochondrial function inside cells set off an antioxidant craze in the 1970s, all of the applied health claims about probiotics in the 2000s are nonsense. If you enjoy the taste of expensive yogurt buy it, but if there was any chance it was really impacting your trillions of bacteria, it could just as easily be doing harm.

Every season has its characteristic star constellations in the night sky. Orion – one of the most recognizable – is distinctly visible on crisp, clear winter nights in the northern hemisphere. The constellation is easy to spot even in light-polluted cities, with its bright stars representing the shape of a person.

Earlier today, Dr. Leonardo Trasande and colleagues from New York University (NYU) published yet another in a series of economic studies which they interpret to indicate that low level general population exposures to some brominated flame retardants (PBDEs)¹ and organophosphate pesticides (OPPs)² are now causing a larger share of societal economic burden from IQ loss and intellectual disability than from what they regard as the more traditional threats of lead and methylmercury. 

Last week, Netflix dropped the trailer for Gwyneth Paltrow’s new show The Goop Lab. It is a six-episode docuseries launching on Jan. 24 that, according to the trailers, focuses on approaches to wellness that are “out there,” “unregulated” and “dangerous.” (Read: science-free.)