I’m continuing to get scared PM's and posts to our Doomsday Debunked Facebook group about the lunar eclipse on 31st January. There is nothing at all to worry about. You’ve had lunar eclipses like this many times in your life and never noticed. Now it appears in Facebook Trending with comments - and many people, children and adults, get scared of it, with panic attacks. Some of the PM's and comments I get are verging on suicide about this.
For a shorter version of this, see my Short summary - why the super blue blood moon on Jan 31 can’t harm us
In 2018, you can guess the politics of many people by which newspapers they read, and you could also do that 100 years ago. Certainly some people, like me, read both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times but if someone defaults to MSNBC or Fox News, you can estimate their voting record with high levels of accuracy.
Yesterday, Democrats in the U.S. Senate which, along with the House of Representatives, form the two chambers of Congress, which are one of the three branches of government,(1) refused to fund a "continuing resolution" to essentially keep funding government as is while a long-term budget is negotiated.
Once again, there are a few claims that this will mean catastrophe for science funding, but many are now saying shutting down government is necessary and even courageous. Yet this exact same event occurred two, four, five, seven and even 22 years ago and it was framed as reckless and dangerous and a disaster for science.
What is different? Those other times a Democrat was President and Republicans were balking.
Plants somehow respond to environmental cues and dangers, especially virulent pathogens, despite a lack of eyes or ears.
How is that possible? It's thanks to hundreds of membrane proteins that can sense microbes or other stresses, but only a small portion of these sensing proteins have been studied through classical genetics, and knowledge on how these sensors function by forming complexes with one another is scarce.
SOCK-PUPPET: All your talk about betting strategies is irrelevant to the casino. The casino takes the money from those who just lost and gives it to those who won, from black to red or red to black. On average, every 37 times the ball hits the zero and the casino takes all the
money on the table.
I am currently spending the week in Leiden (Netherlands), attending to a
very interesting workshop that brought together computer scientists, astronomers, astrophysicists, and particle physicists to discuss how to apply the most cutting-edge tools in machine learning to improve our chances of discovering dark matter, the unknown non-luminous substance that vastly overweights luminous matter in the Universe.
Peer review is the backbone of high quality scientific publications. Although the idea that only articles that are approved by a set of anonymous nitpickers can ever see the light of publication on "serious" journals is old and perfectible, there is currently no valid alternative to identify verified, rigorous scientific work, and to filter out unsubstantiated claims, and methodologically unsound results - the scientific analogue of "fake news".
The 'Two Brothers' mummies, discovered by the modern world in 1907, reside in the Manchester Museum and are the mummies of, unsurprisingly, two elite men (they didn't mummify peasants), Khnum-nakht and Nakht-ank.
The remains date to around 1800 B.C. but there has always been argument about whether or not the two are actually related even though they share a joint burial site at Deir Rifeh, a village 250 miles south of Cairo. Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the coffins indicated that both men were the sons of an unnamed local governor and had mothers with the same name, Khnum-aa. It was then the tomb and the men became known as the Two Brothers.
Between 2003 and 2014, consumption of sodas and other sugar-sweetened beverages declined and yet obesity has continued to rise. Yet governments seeking new sources of revenue are looking for reasons to place sin taxes on soda are saying it's for public health.
When even Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health says it's not so clear, you can bet it's not clear. They are usually on the front lines of scaremongering some food types and promoting new food fads. However, not all groups showed a decline. Kids still like soda, as do black and Hispanic groups, which lends weight to concern by free-market groups that soda taxes are inherently racist.
The Chinese government’s ongoing attempts to create a social credit system aimed at rating the trustworthiness of people and companies have generated equal measures of fascination and anxiety around the world. Social credit is depicted as something uniquely Chinese – a nefarious and perverse digital innovation that could only be conceived of and carried out by a regime like the Chinese Communist Party.
