The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown
Learning Through Student Feedback
By Mark Pierce
Halloween Science: Your Ancestors May Have...
Epidemiologists Blame 15th Century Science...
As someone who is keen on astronomy, I am of course keen on the Thirty Meter... Read >
America uses less energy per capita than we did in World War II, and even World... Read >
The process by which the nervous system continuously receives and interprets... Read >
The
headline almost jumps out at you – “BPA
Substitute Could Cause Adverse... Read >
Among others oozing angst about “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani’s... Read >
Ranchers and vegans don't agree on much but they agree that lab-grown meat... Read >
Kennedy Effect: Now NIEHS Scaremongers Any 'Detectable' PFAS Levels
A National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences paper(1) is sounding the alarm about detectable per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in blood samples of Delaware residents.It sounds scary, but scientifically there are two things to keep in mind:1. We can detect anything in anything ...
Make Your Own Halloween Slime - In Both Gen X And Hippie-Dippie Baloney Versions
If a politician who used to be a Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer hasn’t banned all food coloring by the time
you read this, here is how you can make your own green slime. In both Gen X - chemicals that sound like chemicals - and more natural-sounding versions of chemicals. Basically ...
AT 2024tvd: A Black Hole Is Eating A Star Outside A Galaxy Center, And Spitting Parts Back Out
When you picture a black hole, you probably picture in the center of a galaxy with matter swirling toward it. You're not wrong but that is why the exception proves the rule.A recent study detected a surprising tidal disruption event where a black hole outside the center of a galaxy is tearing apart ...
Interna
With this post I would like to present a short update of my personal life to the few readers who are interested in that topic. You know, when I started writing online (over 20 years ago!), blogs used to contain a much more personal, sometimes introspective, description of the owner's private life ...
Humans Made California Wildfires More Dangerous, Though Not With Emissions
A new call to action by ecologists uses a numerical model to note that wildfires in places like California have been made worse by humans. That doesn't mean it is human emissions. For decades, California government has banned logging. They let people move to risky fire areas and then not pay ...
UCLA: Asthma Sufferers Are Contributing To Climate Change
A new cross-sectional analysis estimates that asthma inhalers contribute the same carbon emissions as 530,000 cars each year. That's over over 2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases annually from the three types of inhalers approved for asthma or COPD during the years 2014 to 2024. ...
How The Ancient Volcanoes Of Ultima Thule Impacted Climate Then And Now
Some sixty million years ago a fountain of hot rock that rises from Earth’s core-mantle boundary unleashed volcanic activity across a vast area of the North Atlantic, from Scotland to Greenland. We can detect the effects in spectacular basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland.But why ...
Why The French Get Grumpy When It's Warmer
The French look at not owning air conditioning as a point of pride, and it may have made them so grumpy it explains why they passed laws saying no one can install it unless they get permission from their neighbors, and perhaps even the city or prefecture government.They can talk about mitigating ...
A Way To Kill Salmonella In Chickens Both MAHA And The Organic Side Can Agree On
The pathogenic avian influenza (bird flu) that caused chicken and egg prices to skyrocket after millions of birds died was helped by the raw milk vector. Pasteurization, which has saved a billion lives, kills the virus. The same people who buy organic food and don't want chickens that have ever ...
The Cranberry Scare Of 2025 Is Not New, It's Been A Thanksgiving Tradition Since 1959
People are concerned about cranberries again this November, but it isn't a new phenomenon.Cranberries were actually the first modern chemophobia scare, when anti-science activists got government to first do what they have since done to weedkillers, trans fats, ultraprocessed foods, BPA, you name ...
Your Predator: Badlands Future - Optical Camouflage, Now Made By Bacteria
In the various 'Predator' films, the alien hunter can see across various spectra while enabling camouflage from our vision.That happens in nature. Octopuses, squids, and the scariest of them all, cuttlefish, in the cephalopod family have evolved the ablity to modify their skin to blend in with ...
Are We Stochastic Parrots, Too? What LLMs Teach Us About Intelligence And Understanding
Having interacted for a few months with ChatGPT 5 now, both for work-related problems and for private / self-learning tasks, I feel I might share some thoughts here on what these large models can tell us about our own thought processes. The sentence above is basically giving away my bottomline ...
Metformin Diabetes Drug Used Off-Label Also Reduces Irregular Heartbeats
Adults with atrial fibrillation (AFib) who are not diabetic but are overweight and took the diabetes medication metformin after a rhythm-correction procedure had decreased risk of AFib episodes for a year. Weight loss would usually be a confounder, since lifestyle changes such as that are often ...
American Heart Association: Thank Ozempic For Less Type 2 DIabetes
At the upcoming American Heart Association meeting, participants will learn of the epidemiological results of 63,656 military veterans with Type 2 diabetes in the Million Veteran Program who took GLP-1 receptor agonists (semaglutide - "Wegovy", dulaglutide - "Trulicity", etc.). The survey analysis ...
Forced Organ Donation Remains Problematic But A Science Solution For Transplants Is Coming
There is legitimate concern about increased social authoritarianism in governments worldwide. The state has gained more financial control everywhere. Even in the U.S nearly 60% of wealth is controlled by politicians, and it is the most "capitalist" country.It led to a culture where the American ...
In Longevity Studies, Old Dogs Can Teach Us New Tricks
The older you get, the more frail you become. The more frail you become, the greater the risk of falling, hospitalization, and shorter life expectancy.Doctors talk about physical activity to reduce frailty but less attention is paid to biology. A new paper suggests that the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal ...
Restoring The Value Of Truth
Truth is under attack. It has always been, of course, because truth has always been a mortal enemy for those who attempt to seize or keep power in their hands. But the amplification of the phenomenon by today's information technology is extremely worrisome. AI today can generate fake videos and ...
Drugs, Crime, And… Homelessness?
A commenter contested my statement that gang murders are a much greater menace to public safety than homelessness – at least, here in Albuquerque. So let’s unpack.PreliminariesWe’ll first acknowledge that we feel compassion for the unhoused who suffer from various kinds of PTSD (and may have ...
The Evolution Of Halloween
Samhain,
All Hallows Evening. Hallowe'en, Halloween. The name has changed but the
world’s fascination with a day of spooks and scares has never wavered. Except it
has also always been about harvests and farming and food.
It may
seem odd to lump together food and ghosts but that is Halloween ...
Why Dogs Get Addicted To Their Lamb Chop Toy
In 1956, prize-winning puppeteer Shari Lewis appeared on the Captain Kangaroo children's show and debuted a new...well, it was basically a sock with eyes.(1) She called it Lamb Chop, though, and her ventriloquism was a big hit with kids.Imagine what she would think if she knew Lamb Chop toys were ...
PAST AS PROLOGUE: An Engineering Legacy
1980s photo of the author, right; his father, center; and his sister, left.Science magazine launched the ‘Past As Prologue’ feature to share stories of how writers’ forebears influenced their offspring’s scientific careers. I submitted the following, just as the magazine ...
November First
Today is November 1st, the day dedicated to the dead, and I am in northern Sweden where daylight is scarce this time of the year. The two things conjure to arise thoughts of a darkish nature. [Above, a lousy picture taken this evening in a cemetery in Gammelstad, close to Lulea, in Norrbotten ...
Don't Marry A Ghost; If You Divorce It Will Haunt You
When I wrote Halloween Science 2.0, I wanted to get it down to a brisk 150 pages, which means taking a chainsaw to a lot of the material I had.(1)Like the woman who left her corporeal significant other to become a ghost groupie. Amethyst Realm, that is not her Dungeons&Dragons name, she calls ...
Impostor Participants Are Skewing Epidemiological Surveys
Impostor participants are people who fake data in order to take part in health research or are automated computer ‘bots’ which mimic human behavior and responses. As claims get promoted in journalism about harms related to PFAS in water, weedkillers causing cancer, or food coloring causing ...
Air India Flight 171 - Flawed EE Bay Water Ingress TheoryRichard Godfrey, in many videos on the... more »
As a member of the public, how can you determine whether Tylenol, also known as acetaminophen,... more »
In the past few years my activities on this site - but I would say more in general, as the same... more »
This came up on 2nd November 2024 (give or take a day), a broadcaster objecting to a carbon capture... more »
Sheer beauty — a beautiful Euhoplites ammonite from Folkstone, UK. These lovelies have a pleasing... more »
