Europe’s past booms and busts, often driven by natural changes in climate, has been revealed using thousand-year-old pollen, spores and charcoal particles fossilized in glacial ice.

The analysis of microfossils preserved in European glaciers also revealed earlier-than-expected evidence of air pollution and the roots of modern invasive species problems. The study looked at pollen, spores, charcoal and other pollutants frozen in the Colle Gnifetti glacier on the Swiss and Italian border. The research found changes in the composition of these microfossils corresponded closely with known major events in climate, such as the Little Ice Age and well-established volcanic eruptions.

If we want people to trust disease epidemiologists during the COVID-19 pandemic - and the next pandemic after that, since this was the third one of just coronavirus in 17 years - then we have to start holding suspect epidemiologists accountable.

In the Atacama Desert in Chile east of Pampa del Tamarugal, a plateau in northern Chile nestled between the Andes Mountains to the east and the Chilean Coastal Range to the west, fields of dark green and black glass inhabit a corridor stretching for 30 miles. If you've ever seen a glassblower at work, you know high heat will do the trick, but lacking a crucible 12,000 years ago, it has been a mystery what provided the 2,400 degree heat needed to turn the sand into molten glass that then solidified.

A new study finds it was not of this earth. 

In the world of activists and pundits, companies making changes involve all reward and no risk, and if companies don't do it they are just greedy. That thinking is why poor people are subsidizing electric cars and solar panels for the rich, which has made reliance on fossil fuels greater in the past decade.

In the real world, companies hesitate because there are no answers to the questions that smart people have. When it comes to reusable packaging, there are more science and technology questions than answers, and there are four reasons companies are hesitating.

1.The potential to hurt brand reputation if this new environmental scheme doesn’t turn out to be better for the environment.

Polyurethane is a plastic material used as foam for medical applications, like tubes for intravenous catheters, mattresses, as packaging material, as construction foam and much more. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institutes for Applied Polymer Research IAP, for Chemical Technology ICT, for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAM and for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT are now exploring new ways to produce this type of plastic sustainably and without the use of materials that can be toxic at high levels.

Everyone says they have impostor syndrome about something, so perhaps many people just mask it and appear confident. Do men mask it better than women? 

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, 28 states experienced higher gun deaths, including suicides. New York, Minnesota, and Michigan saw numbers go up more than 100 percent, according to a recent paper. Only Alaska, which often leads the US, had significantly lower rates of gun deaths during that period.

In the next few days I have a busy schedule with a few lectures gravitating around the use of deep learning technologies for fundamental physics research. This is of course no news, but I thought that my blog is the proper place to list a few pointers, in case some of you is interested in following one or two of these events. After all, deep learning is all the rage these days, and even if fundamental physics is not your bread and butter, you may hopefully find useful inspiration in the kind of use cases that field provides for cutting edge applications of artificial intelligence.

Children have a higher tolerance for thrills than most parents believe.  In 1989, when Disney returned to form with "The Little Mermaid", Ursula was among the scariest villains ever. She got impaled by the mast of a ship. That didn't bother kids a bit.

It's more often parents that are overthinking this stuff. I am not saying you should hand your 6-year-old a "Saw" DVD but for the second consecutive year of the pandemic let's stop the usual apocalyptic worry about sugary treats plus the concern about COVID-19. They'll be okay on both counts. 

Here are 4 reasons why we as a society need to dial it down on Sunday, and maybe every day after that.

If there is an Eye of Sauron in space, ot at least a Marvel villain like Apocalypse, it might look a lot like CW Leonis, roughly 400 light-years away in the constellation Leo.