In his just published final book, "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," physicist Satephen Hawking wrote, "There is no God. No one directs the universe" but in a universe where only 6% of what must exist is even matter that can be detected, the science community is unwilling to be as definitive as he was.

It may be that God is in the gaps, and different people have different definitions for what that is. Yet it may be perpetuating the false narrative that religion is on one pole and science is on another.

Lyme disease is the most prevalent tick-borne disease and is caused by the bacterial spirochete Borrelia. Using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended two-tier method, Garg et al., claim that 72 percent of individuals they examined classified "negative" by the CDC two-tier lyme disease test showed positive for the Borellia biomarker, and other microbes such as Babesia, Bartonella, and Ehrlichia.

That means some lyme disease patients do not follow the "one microbe, one disease" Germ Theory, according to an analysis of patients at different disease stages which found they respond to various microbes 65 percent of the time. And that ticks carry more than just lyme disease.

Anti-gun proponents like to produce headlines showing a young child accidentally shot another family member with a pistol, but that kind of cultural framing may be doing more harm than good, because a new study reaffirms what most gun owners knew: Gun harm is not caused by lazy or irresponsible gun owners letting their kids get them by mistake, it is from assaults by men. And teenagers at greatest risk for committing acts of violence are at greatest risk of receiving it, not pre-schoolers.

Of the over 75,000 youths who visited emergency rooms for gun-related injuries from 2006 to 2014, 86.2 percent were males and overwhelmingly in large cities.

Fake news has become a common claim, and for good reason. The Russians, for example, have been caught using environmentalists, food activists, "journalism" professors, and trade groups to promote fear and doubt about American science and technology
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But organic food shoppers and people scared of natural gas are not alone in believing fake news. A new study shows that dogmatic individuals, fundamentalists and delusional people of all kinds are more likely to believe fake news. The less open-minded a person is, the more likely they are to be swayed by fake news claims.

Before the arrival of European immigrants to the western United States, up to 12 percent of it would burn each year. Somehow, even though science is well aware of that fact, political media today claim that wildfires are unprecedented and we are doomed. 

A new study notes again that the amount of wildfire occurring in the western U.S. remains far below the acreage burning when native Americans were not managing the ecology. The context is not to debunk modern beliefs about how superior native Americans were, but to talk about water.

Using FORS2, an instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, government astronomers have observed the active star-forming region NGC 2467 — the Skull and Crossbones Nebula, called such because of the dust, gas and bright young stars gravitationally bound into the form of a grinning skull.

NGC 2467 skulks in the constellation Puppis, which translates rather unromantically as The Poop Deck. And this was taken in March, but released near Halloween, so ESO has something to talk about.