About 74,000 years ago on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, the largest volcanic event over the last two million years, 5,000 times larger than the Mount St. Helen's eruption in the 1980s, ushered in…

In recent years the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have manufactured a lot of concerns they then ask Congress for money to help solve - Zika, Prediabetes, vaping in kids are all…

What do you conclude when different foods are claimed to be eaten on surveys by people who have one type of stroke but not another? Not much. But it will still be a food frequency questionnaire…

In an age of deepfakes and alternative facts, it can be tricky getting at the truth. But persuading others – or even yourself – what is true is not a challenge unique to the modern era. Even the…

Edgar Allan Poe, The author, poet, editor, and literary critic, died in 1849 at age 40 in Maryland. He was chronically depressed, he had even tried to commit suicide using laudanum a year before his…

Katherine Johnson, a Mathematician doing a job known as being a “computer” for NASA in the movie “Hidden Figures” died today at the age of 101.  She started out at a time where being such a…

A new paper claims that the Mediterranean diet may increase "longevity" and it created its mystical conclusion using the favored magic wand of food studies, epidemiological correlation, sprinkled…

Tomorrow morning the Cornell arXiv will publish the preprint of a long scientific article, the result of 4.5 months of painstaking work by yours truly. So I thought I would give you a preview of its…

Merge is a controversial belief by some that human language faculty arose in humans through a single gene mutation, rather the evolving gradually. This human burst of genetic exceptionalism is…

A new paper says scientists can make their work more appealing to the public by making it more personal. I learned of it through a paid university PIO but few scientists will see the irony in that. I…

You might know blue whales are an endangered species while pandas are not. Yet there are 25,000 blue whales and only 2,000 pandas.  There are 100,000 sea otters yet they are still classified as…

After Valentine's Day, two important things happen in Florida: baseball spring training and snake orgy season. Nerodia fasciata fasciata, the banded water snake, doesn't want to bite you, and they…

After Valentine's Day, two important things happen in Florida: baseball spring training and snake orgy season. Nerodia fasciata fasciata, the banded water snake, doesn't want to bite you, and they…

Sildenafil (viagra) is used to treat erectile dysfunction and is safe, with known side effects, but a few people have experienced light sensitivity and color vision impairment at the highest…

A recent study identified the coronavirus responsible for the pneumonia epidemic in the Hubei province of China and finds the bat-origin virus is related to other known pathogenic coronaviruses. The…

A recent paper finds that vaccine disinformation is common on social media while a few years ago I had employees watch food documentaries on Netflix and write about their impression and the results…

If you were long concerned about Russians exploiting American media for their gain, you turned out to be right. But before they were meddling in American elections, they were meddling in American…

A new study shows there is a reason USA Today is the most popular newspaper in America - they won't specify "laparoscopy" when "minimally invasive surgery" gets the point across to more people. While…

We know the left and right side of our brain are specialized for cognitive abilities like language (left hemisphere) and the right hand. That functional lateralization is reflected by morphological…

Waves of geometry in four-dimensional space-time, that is what gravitational waves are.  The very definition of distance between points in space-time changes as these waves pass.   The…