Minnesota is having a challenging year, so challenging they are approaching California as the wackiest state, according to other states. They have a chronic anti-Semitism problem, including a member of Congress who may soon have to register as a foreign national, a Governor so completely associated with violent protests that mainstream Democrats were baffled he was designated as their Vice-Presidential nominee in the 2024 election, and rampant distrust of science that made Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the darling of events there.

USERN (Universal Scientific Education and Research Network, https://usern.org) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that supports interdisciplinary science across borders. Founded in 2015 by a distinguished Iranian Immunologist, Prof. Nima Rezaei, USERN has grown to acquire a membership of 26,000 members in 140 countries, from 22 scientific disciplines. From November 2022 I am its President.

Attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his US followers over the last 25 years have staunchly opposed vaccines, latching on to any claim that they cause autism or should be available for lawsuits even if they harm no one.

They really won't like a new experimental vaccine for Smallpox and Monkeypox that avoids the side effects of a current live virus version while not needing two doses, as the replication-deficient virus version does. It uses the horsepox virus as a protective agent to confer the safety of a multi-dose vaccine in a single shot. 

Italy as we know it today had not been such since the days of the Roman Empire. You can see that last remnant today in the existence of The Vatican smack in the middle of Rome but at one point they held a substantial amount of territory. 

Like Americans, Italians are inherently rebellious. If you are on a plane flight and a flight attendant complains about someone smoking a cigarette, savvy travelers know it's an Italian in the bathroom. It is part of the reason Americans love Italian people. Unlike Americans, Italians had to fight not only each other for over a thousand years, they had to fend off French and Germans and even Africans.

In 2008, fresh off a decisive victory over Democratic establishment candidate Senator Hillary Clinton in the primary and one over highly-regarded Senator John McCain in the general election, President-elect Obama began to engage in worrisome behavior.

His transition team, those who set the tone for his Cabinet and first 100 days, was over-represented with UFO believers. His inner circle included a guy who thoughts girls can't do math. I was only two years into science media by then so I believed that science academics were a cross-section of America - diverse - and that President George W. Bush hated science and everything else. Yet none of the choices President-elect Obama made seemed to concern those who insisted that science was paramount.(1)  

Nowadays we study the Universe using a number of probes and techniques. Over the course of the past 100 years we moved from barely using optical telescopes, that give us access to the flux of visible photons from galaxies, supernovae, and other objects of interest, to exploiting photons of any energy - gamma rays, x rays, ultraviolet and infrared radiation, microwaves; and then also using charged cosmic radiation (including protons and light nuclei, electrons and positrons), neutrinos, and lastly, gravitational waves. 

When Senator Elizabeth Warren had her claims of native ancestry debunked by DNA testing, it was a warning shot to everyone who identifies that way - don't take a test. Most native Americans had long said that anyway, they knew how biology worked better Washington DC staffers. After five generations there is a chance there will be no evidence of an ancestor so natives have long told their communities not to participate. If there are only a few hundred in a database, the database is meaningless and natives tribes can continue their 'we agree you are and you agree you are native' policy rather than having evidence.

The 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, who many have called “the godfather of AI”. The award seems apt for the time we are in.