Urban beards are all the rage this decade, often worn by men in Euroweenie tight suits who want to hearken back to older times, when men were manly and not afraid of science.

Not so today. If you wear a beard now, it means you want to look masculine while virtue signaling that removing certain chemicals in soap will prevent your erectile dysfunction.

In reality, such men probably needn't worry, women are swiping left because most don't want to date someone who looks ready for a Civil War re-enactment but they suspect has a bathroom filled with vegan skin care goop.


Not a Dr.

Prevailing sexual economics belief posits that women have less sexual bargaining power as they age. But Baumeister and Vohs' 2004 Sexual Economic Theory (it's a proper name, like String Theory, even though it isn't really a theory, also like String Theory) was built on the assumption that sexual (reproductive) access is an intrinsically valued commodity, the supply of which is controlled by younger women.

But in the modern era sex is about more than procreation, and survey results show older women are not in a worse position. And if the women are bisexual or pansexual, they even have more power than men who are such.

What is old hype is new again, which is to say population bombs, starvation in Africa, nuclear plant meltdowns, and atomic destruction because an aggressive American president makes a wholesome dictator in Russia nervous and nuclear bombs start going off.

These recurring doomsday narratives follow a predictable cycle:

1) Hysterical activist with a credible title engages in crisis inflation
2) It gets New York Times coverage and a whole bunch of other people talk about it
3) A few questionable academics jump on the bandwagon
4) Serious scientists debunk it, to little public acclaim
5) The original scientists back off
6) All the old critics die off
7) A new generation of activists claim it was not a myth

The U.S Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.) has had NASA on its High Risk list since 1990, due to persistent cost inflation and missed schedules of its programs.

Long before banks and General Motors set out to become "too big to fail", NASA had made it a core value.  There is no better example of how far NASA has fallen from the can-do group that gave us the Apollo program than the James Webb Space Telescope fiasco.

First proposed and funded in 1996 as the successor to Hubble, by 2002 they had told Congress that 11 years - longer than it took for the Apollo Program to put man on the moon from scratch - was not going to be enough time to send a mirror outside our atmosphere.

Aspirin is fine for headaches but like much of epidemiological correlation that suggests cause and effect, link aspirin to fewer heart attacks has been nothing but a subsidy for companies. New results of the ASPREE trial presented today at ESC Congress 2019 show it doesn't help older people even if they are in the highest risk of cardiovascular disease.

In America, where we have created pre-diabetes to try and convince people they are already ill and need medication, an aspirin regimen is common, due to belief it helps prevent cardiovascular disease. That is not the case in Europe for people who do not have free from cardiovascular disease  because there is increased risk of major bleeding (doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehw106).

This is a story running in the news, even on the BBC website, which is scaring a few people. There isn't any prediction of an accelerating population collapse. Indeed our population is increasing and is expected to level off some time between 2050 and 2100 and AFAIK nobody is saying our population will collapse in 2050 except these two CEOs in their interview.

This is another article I'm writing to support people we help in the Facebook Doomsday Debunked group, that find us because they get scared, sometimes to the point of feeling suicidal about it, by such stories. Do share this with your friends if you find it useful, as they may be panicking too.

The colorful Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) occur when charged particles from the sun interact with gases in Earth’s during darker winter months in high-latitude regions like Alaska, Scandinavia, and Iceland but a geomagnetic storm predicted for this weekend could result in aurora sightings even in Montana.

When particles from the sun interact with Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere and gases like oxygen and nitrogen, they gain energy and later release it, creating the light shows.

Late in the prehistoric Silurian Period, around 420 million years ago, a devastating mass extinction event wiped 23 percent of all marine animals from the face of the planet.

For years, scientists struggled to connect a mechanism to this mass extinction, one of the 10 most dramatic ever recorded in Earth's history. Now, researchers have confirmed that this event, referred to by scientists as the Lau/Kozlowskii extinction, was triggered by an all-too-familiar culprit: rapid and widespread depletion of oxygen in the global oceans.

We hear a lot about a crisis in organ donations but a whole lot of patients who died waiting for transplants got organs offered, but their transplant teams declined - and someone lower on the list got the transplant instead.

Candidates who died without a transplant received a median of 16 offers (over 651 days) while waitlisted.

And most patients were never made aware they got an offer at all.

Today I am back from the 8th edition of the ICNFP conference, which finished yesterday in Kolymbari (Crete). This event is very interesting because of its wide scope, bringing together physicists from quite different fields in a venue that, due to its very relaxing, secluded nature favours post-session discussions and exchanges among the over 250 participants.