Avi Loeb he prolific Harvard astrophysicist, dances on the edge of cosmic controversy. His research spans black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the early universe, but it’s his extraterrestrial musings…

March is here, and with it begins a season of intense travel for me - something which for some combination of reasons has become sort of a habit. First, workshops and conferences are rarely scheduled…

The online discourse of our time has come to the issue of plagiarism. Now Claudine Gay and Neri Oxman of Harvard and MIT have been accused of plagiarism for what are basically political reasons. Gay…

In the past I have predicted certain things at the start of certain years.  This is a selection of those which I recall, along with issues I am watching out for the next year.  They include…

Christopher F Rufo has accused the president of Harvard of plagiarism in an effort so clumsy that his own case provides proof that he has no idea what plagiarism even is.   To use someone's…

A brief personal update as to what I have been doing.  There has been much interesting science news to discuss.   A possible galaxy comprised of not much more than gas and dark matter…

This plant above is what is regarded as a typical fern. However, a quite different looking type of fern played an important role in the development of Earth’s climate around 49 million years ago.…

How can you as a person who is not a scientist know if a given claim of having found alien life is valid?  In 2014 I used the planet Kepler 186f as an object for discussing this very question.…

Last week it was claimed that a material that would be superconducting at  normal pressure has been found.  This substance known as LK-99 was alleged to be superconducting at normal…

What are gravitational waves? What are Pulsars and what does it mean to time a pulsar? How does this relate to past and future observations of gravitational waves? These are all fundamental questions…

The UK Daily Mail published a story with the misleading headline “Humans DID live with dinosaurs…” The story then talks about placental mammals that coexisted with dinosaurs. This shows a lack of…

Most if not all deep submergence vehicles that take people to the deepest parts of the ocean have a spherical pressure hull, not a cylinder. There is a simple reason for this: symmetry. The spherical…

There has been a lot of talk recently of Betelgeuse possibly going supernova this century or not long after.  The basis of this is a paper referenced in this article: Betelgeuse is almost 50%…

Impressive research conducted at ETH Zurich did show that quantum entanglement applies to even macroscopic quantum systems. In that case, superconducting Qbits. They did not show that Einstein was…

Sabine Hossenfelder attempts to answer the question of transgender youth healthcare by applying a physicist mindset to the literature on this matter.   I've commented on this to her…

Direct imaging of a gas giant is not totally new. What is new is the combination of direct imaging with an indirect method that allows better understanding of the mass of gas giants in other solar…

A long time ago, this column used to report a lot of detail of my personal life and of daily news about my work-related travel and activities. The site does offer two modalities for posts: article…

The Restrict Act would ban anyone from accessing a online service ran by a US adverssary, which would mean any and all apps owned by Tencent.   Tik Tok is a very malignant and horrible app…

Dark matter is thought to be 85% of all the matter in the universe but we have no idea what it is. All we know is that there appears to be something that exerts gravitational forces that behave like…

I have recently watched two videos on climate change by Sabine Hossenfelder.  The first one deals with the understanding of the greenhouse effect.  It is far from being as simple as taught…