Zombies have lurched to the center of Halloween culture, with costumes proliferating as fast as the monsters themselves. This year, you can dress as a zombie prom queen, a zombie doctor – even a zombie rabbit or banana. The rise of the living dead, though, has a surprising link to another recurring October visitor: the influenza virus.

Of all the sounds humans produce, nothing captures our attention quite like a good scream.

They’re a regular feature of horror films, whether it’s Marion Crane’s infamous shower scream in “Psycho” or Chrissie Watkins’ blood-curdling scream at the beginning of “Jaws.”

It's no secret to anyone with even modest command of history that America has long meant freedom. Every oppressed religion moved here, to the one country that did not have a national religion, separating it from the Anglican Church (imagine if the President got to approve the Bishop of Pittsburgh!) or any of the countries in the Holy Roman Empire.

Here I debunk an article in the Financial Times - although by the title it is supposedly about myths about green technology and renewables, it actually perfectly highlights most of the scientific and even financial myths about renewables propagated by some economists who claim that green growth is impossible.

I am annotating this article with Hypothes.is - the academic online web commenting tool. You may be able to read my annotations online here:

The cutting-edge method of growing clusters of cells that organize themselves into mini versions of human brains in the lab is gathering more and more attention. These “brain organoids”, made from stem cells, offer unparalleled insights into the human brain, which is notoriously difficult to study.

But some researchers are worried that a form of consciousness might arise in such mini-brains, which are sometimes transplanted into animals. They could at least be sentient to the extent of experiencing pain and suffering from being trapped. If this is true – and before we consider how likely it is – it is absolutely clear in my mind that we must exert a supreme level of caution when considering this issue.

“Witch hunt” – it’s a refrain used to deride everything from impeachment inquiries and sexual assault investigations to allegations of corruption.

If you have a minute to spend watching something really cool, why not having a look at the completion of the installment of GEM detectors in the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, ***RIGHT NOW*** (6PM CEST Oct 24th) ?

A National Academy of Medicine report released today says that a third to a half of physicians and nurses say they feel burned out, and that is even higher for medical students and residents at nearly 60 percent.

That could obviously affect patient care and, with lawyers waiting in the wings to sue, health care costs. 

The report says key issues will be:

Tackling clinician burnout early in professional development.

Fixing electronic health care record systems that increase frustration and stress.

Lowering administrative burdens and distracting clinicians from the care of patients.

Though a CBD supplement huckster was just convicted for selling synthetic marijuana and CBD oil is the culprit behind untold numbers of vaping illnesses and deaths, and a chiropractor was just lambasted by FDA for claiming his CBD supplement can fix everything from autism to Alzheimer's, if search engines are any indication, marijuana is not stopping.

ESO’s X-shooter spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope in Chile has detected a freshly made heavy element, strontium, in space, in the aftermath two merging neutron stars. 

That sounds obscure but it means that the heavier elements in the Universe can form in neutron star mergers, a clue in the puzzle of chemical element formation.