For the last 20 years, insects have been touted as the next big thing in food, because they have a lot of protein and would be reasonable to produce at scale. And people who don't understand agriculture think land only suitable for animal husbandry could magically support amber waves of grain if we stopped eating steers.

But are insects too icky? Perhaps to people who have never seen animals slaughtered but have killed an insect. However, people who claim to know a lot about animal welfare and food, vegetarians, are okay with insects. Zoologically, they are correct, insects are not animals the way they think of animals any more than sponges are, though all share the broad Animalia kingdom.

Statins are cholesterol lowering drugs that are widely prescribed to patients at increased risk of heart attacks or strokes. Though evidence from randomized trials has shown that statin therapy reduces absolute risk among a wide range of individuals there has been uncertainty about their benefits in older people, along with uncertainty about how big a risk factor cholesterol is.

In the past, trials that looked at the effect of statin therapy reported statistically valid cardiovascular risk reductions in the 65-70 age group but statin therapy is often discontinued in patients 75 and older in part because of this question around risk (e.g. myopathy) and benefit.

Exercise is good for you but some people worry there can be too much of a good thing, especially for middle-aged athletes. Extreme running and high-endurance exercise were a concern to some doctors but a study using coronary calcium scanning, an imaging test that helps physicians classify patients without cardiac symptoms as low, intermediate, or high risk for heart attack, show the fear is unfounded.

In a multi-center trial of almost 900 smokers(1), e-cigarettes were shown to be twice as effective as pharmaceutical "gold standard" approaches like gums, lozenges, and patches.

Through our evolutionary history, change is the one constant. 99.9999% of species that have ever existed are extinct and new ones emerged that adapted to constantly changing environments. 

Baboons, with six species widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, are a modern example of adaptation and well studied when it comes to morphology, behavior and ecology. but less is known about their evolutionary history. That is why they are the subject of a new study on how speciation by lineage splitting, speciation by hybridization and associated gene exchange occurred. 

UPDATE - NO HIT - AS PREDICTED BY ASTRONOMERS - The red top tabloids were quoting from something astronomers said 16 years ago. They aren't like the false prophet date setters. If they give a date they also give a time and timezone, just as they do for eclipse forecasts. It was 11:47 UTC (same as UK time in winter) . That's over an hour ago now.

If you read media accounts, Republicans deny global warming and evolution while Democrats deny vaccines and GMOs. Republicans hate immigrants and Democrats hate unborn babies.

Yet such simple 'us' and 'them' narratives aren't true, even if it makes for compelling framing, according to a new paper. 

Rembrandt van Rijn was a master of light and shadow and a characteristic plasticity generated by a technique called impasto.

A new study shows he was also something of a chemist. An analysis of impasto layers in some of Rembrandt's paintings show they contain a very rare lead mineral called plumbonacrite, which means Rembrandt used a unique paint recipe. Plumbonacrite is extremely rare in historic paint layers. The only other notable occurrence was linked to degradation of the red lead (minimum) pigment in a Van Gogh painting.

If you've read anything about computers for the last 25 years, you've read the hype about quantum computing and how it is going to be better and faster and with less heat and replace conduction-based chips and it will generally be awesome. And then nothing happens outside a lot of arXiv papers and some physics magic published in journals. Quantum computing has basically gotten the best marketing free pass ever, because it is always five years away and no one seems to get cynical.

Now it's only two years away. 

On March 25 to 27 will be held the school titled "Data Science in (astro)particle physics and cosmology", in Braga (Portugal). The lecturers are prof. Glen Cowan (RHUL), who will cover Statistics, and myself, who will cover topics in Machine Learning. I thought I would mention this here, as for me it is a novelty - in the past years I have often given lectures in advanced statistics topics at various Ph.D. schools around the world, but I never focused explicitly and solely on ML.