What would you do to get more likes or shares on your favorite social media platform this April Fool’s Day?

Would you blast an airhorn in your partner’s ear while they’re sleeping, record and upload their reaction online? Would you put hot chilli in their food, then film and share their distress?

Online prank videos are nothing new, and while many are lighthearted, a concerning sub-genre called “clout-lighting” has been emerging across the internet.

But in case you might be planning to clout-light your partner this April Fool’s Day, research shows it’s a surefire way to get dumped.

Radio telescope observations using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed a cold stream of intergalactic atomic carbon gas feeding star formation in a massive radio galaxy in the young Universe.

The findings of galaxy 4C 41.17 provide observational evidence supporting hypothetical cosmological models and offer new insights into the origins of the cosmic materials that enable galaxy and star formation.

A new paper notes that they can detect per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances - deemed by environmental activists as "forever" chemicals because they persist from to eight years - in 42 samples of food packaging. Like food bowls that are compostable and sustainable and better for the environment than plastic.

Ironically, this new detection, and resulting scare, happened because consumers demanded alternatives to plastic after environmental public relations campaigns saying all the fish were dying. Most foods will not be safe in paper(1) unless you eat them right away. And yet the alternative is now claimed to be worse than the thing they wanted replaced.

An object over 30 billion times the mass of our Sun has been detected thanks to gravitational lensing - where a foreground galaxy bends the light from a more distant object and magnifies it.

When news about the climate is published, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, frightening headlines like “final warning” or “now or never” are often the norm. Some activists call this approach “climate doomism”, and are quick to criticize media publications and other influencers for it.

When smog was prevalent, it was easy to see. Particulate matter 10 microns in size hover in the air, the famous London Fog was not natural moisture, it was PM₁₀ pollution. In one event, nature combined with smog in London to kill 12,000 people.

After that, wealthier nations engaged in pollution control, and then PM₁₀ and its health issues began to dissipate. In the 1990s and with much cleaner air, pollution activists and allied epidemiologists began to 'define pollution down.' PM_2.5 was suddenly the new goalpost, they said, and showed air quality maps with red and orange to prove it.

I) An article recently published in Nature concludes that the percentage of disruptive scientific findings and patents is much lower than it was a few decades ago.

I am exploiting my column today to advertise a workshop that the collaboration I lead, MODE, is organizing at Princeton University this coming July. The workshop, the third of its series, aims to bring together physicists and computer scientists to join forces in the solution of complex optimization problems in experiment design.

The anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety says someone is fatally shot or injured in a road rage incident every 16 hours.  Is that number real? Yes and no. The Gun Violence Archive they drew their claim from lumps criminals doing drive-by shootings and criminals being shot by police committing violent acts in with innocent victims. Even if it's only over half of the 500 they claim that is still over 300 per year.

If you buy TheraFlu or some other product and swear it helps, you may be right. The placebo effect is real and while OTC "remedies" and supplements can be sold with no proof needed, to be called actual medicine it can't simply work as poorly as a sugar pill.

Yet about 30 percent of the time, people who take a placebo do feel better, the same way people who eat food labeled Non-GMO feel better taking a nocebo. Neither is improving health but a lot of things can sound like science or health if you look at statistics and create correlation.

That's epidemiology, an entry point to science, and epidemiology findings led to continued interest in various off-label treatments for COVID-19, such as ivermectin.(1)