Most people go into relationships intending to be monogamous, or at least convincing themselves they can remain faithful, but with cheap travel and dating apps, any small problem can become a permanent schism.

A new paper sought to understand if virtual reality can be used to examine the circumstances that will help people in a monogamous relationship resist the temptations of infidelity.

It is easy to believe ants disperse and walk randomly until they find something they want, but a new paper says they may have a more methodical approach.

At least one species of rock ant, Temnothorax rugatulus, doesn’t walk randomly at all. Instead, their search combines systematic meandering with random walks interspersed. They alternate left and right turns on a relatively regular length scale of roughly three body lengths.

SIR, shorthand for Susceptible people, Infected people, and Recovered people, modeling is, along with R0, a rule of thumb for disease epidemiology but it failed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with three coronavirus pandemics since 2003 they are the new normal, so the race is on to make better predictive analytics and restore public confidence.

A new model used COVID-19 data for calibration and integrated SIR compartment modeling in time and a point process modeling approach in space–time, while also taking into account age-specific contact patterns. To do this, they used a two-step framework that allowed them to model data on infectious locations over time for different age groups.

Is there an addiction that primarily affects one gender in one age demographic in rich countries? Survey data using the National Poll on Healthy Aging says there may be. 

The results were that about 13 percent of people from ages 50 to 80 responded in ways that could be interpreted as addiction to foods and beverages in the past year. Prevalence was much higher among women than men – older Generation X and younger Baby Boomer women.

Yesterday I profited of the kindness of Cesar Ocampo, the site manager of the Parque Astronomico near San Pedro de Atacama, in northern Chile, to visit a couple of places that the SWGO collaboration is considering as the site of a large array of particle detectors meant to study ultra-high-energy gamma rays from the sky. 

SWGO and cosmic ray showers

If you fish you know that catching a muskie (muskellunge), the “fish of 10,000 casts”, is like hitting a hole-in-one in golf. You will talk about it a lot.

But it doesn't need 10,000 casts because that would mean having one strike is random. Instead, it helps to learn how they behave. A recent experiment evaluated behavioral traits – activity, aggression, boldness, and exploration – for 68 young muskies in laboratory tanks before transferring the fish to an outdoor pond. Then they fished the pond every day for 35 days.

Government lockdowns may have been terrible for diagnosing disease and the mental health of kids but it reduced terrorism, according to a new paper. If no one can travel, government agents helping fifth columnists do their damage are useless. When the pandemic struck, terrorists vowed to increase their attacks and create a tipping point but that did not happen.

Instead, government-imposed curfews and travel bans instituted to protect public health in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt were significantly associated with a reduction in ISIS attacks, especially in urban areas and locations near their bases of operations. It likely meant fewer attacks by al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram also.

Superionic materials, needed for solid-state electrolytes that could replace the liquid organic electrolytes in current electric car batteries and make them safe for mass usage, face challenges in going from conception to production.

Lithium ions are very mobile at ambient temperatures in solid-state ionic conductors, and that means atoms do not simply vibrate around their equilibrium positions. Disorder is bad in production systems. 

Small micron particulate matter, commonly called PM_2.5, needs an electron microscope to be visible to you but once real smog, PM₁₀, declined by the 1990s, air pollution activists began to tout this new killer. Since it is 1/4th the size of real pollution air quality maps could often be red, or at least yellow, and that is good business for trial lawyers.

The problem quickly became that no one ever died from it, humans would've been extinct 50,000 years ago if that were even possible, so they pivoted from deaths to hidden effects that can be claimed using statistics. 

Until Alfred the Great managed to isolate and contain invaders from Scandinavia, Lyminge, a monastery in Kent, was on the front line of long-running Viking hostility.

Lyminge endured repeated attacks for almost a century through effective defensive strategies, University of Reading archaeologists now say. Despite being in a region of Kent which bore the full brunt of Viking raids in the later 8th and early 9th centuries, they survived. rebuilt, and recovered more completely than historians previously thought. 


The excavation at Lyminge, Kent. Credit: Dr. Gabor Thomas