Quantum gravity has fascinated scientists for over a century.

As Peru's Wari kingdom sought to shore up their crumbling empire over 1,000 years ago they did it with their own form of bread and circuses - cocaine, ayahuasca, and a beer with psychedelics mixed in.

Since the concoction was only made by elites without a penalty of death, festivals became a way to exercise political control among friends and challengers alike. It obviously didn't work forever, the Incas conquered them, but the archaeological evidence provides a compelling look into South American culture of 1000 AD.

We all know there is no Beepocalypse by now, right? Seeing it referenced in sit-coms from the 2010s  is as anachronistic as watching "Soylent Green" from the 1970s and seeing them lament that they didn't listen to scientists and make the hole in the ozone layer larger. Sure, Washington Post readers probably still believe bees are dying, just like their contributors think "Soylent Green" got a lot right, but it's as unscientific as acupuncture. 

The title of this post is no news for particle physicists - particle detectors are complex instruments and they work by interpreting the result of stochastic phenomena taking place when radiation interacts with the matter of which detectors are built, and it looks only natural that deep learning algorithms can help improve our measurements in such a complex environment.

However, in this post I will give an example of something qualitatively different to providing an improvement of a measurement: one where a deep convolutional network model may extract information that we were simply incapable of making sense of. This means that the algorithm allows us to employ our detector in a new way.

When you see a TV weather personality put up an air quality map for the last 10 years, it might make you believe that pollution is far worse than when you were young.

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Do amputee sprinters using running prostheses, or blades, have a competitive advantage?

The world’s fastest 400-meter sprinter, Blake Leeper, was ruled ineligible to compete in the Tokyo Olympics due to having an assumed advantage, but a new study with the most comprehensive set of data ever collected from elite runners with bilateral leg amputations compared performance data from Leeper, South African “blade runner” Oscar Pistorius and other bilateral amputee sprinters with those of the best non-amputee sprinters in the world across five performance metrics and found no advantage.

A survey of over 1,000 mothers who were part of the Understanding Parental Estrangement Survey conducted by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center in 2019 and estranged from their adult children revealed a disconnect between what the kids might say is the reason and parents believe. 

If you read social media, you might believe we're teetering on the brink of societal collapse due to COVID-19 but one metric tells the real health story; ICU beds.

Deaths have been cut almost in half from this time last year while ICU occupancy is down 40 percent. If you're a positive person, you'll note that this is a win and big thanks go to the health care system that critics demand be replaced by something like VA hospitals, which very few veterans agree is good, or Medicare, which very few old people think is good. You'll also note that vaccines work, and those are the product of Big Pharma that similar critics decry as greedy evil opportunists.

Early-onset scoliosis is a potentially deadly curve in the spine that can damage a child’s heart and lung function as it progresses. Adolescents with scoliosis are traditionally treated with a single spinal fusion, where rods and screws are inserted to fuse the spine in a straighter position.

Parents want to make informed choices and a new study finds that preadolescent children with severe neuromuscular scoliosis who are treated with growth-friendly surgery prior to spinal fusion have more complications and unplanned subsequent surgeries than those who only have the spinal fusion.