Halloween Science: Your Ancestors May Have...
Quantum Leap Or Quantum Mirage? What Happens...
Learning Through Student Feedback
By Mark Pierce
Something Happened In Silicon Valley
A National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences paper(1) is sounding... Read >
For decades, scientists have assumed that the Holocene—the relatively quiet... Read >
In the various 'Predator' films, the alien hunter can see across various spectra... Read >
In early 2018, colleagues and I released The Next Plague and How Science Will... Read >
A recent analysis of Neanderthal bones from the Troisième caverne of Goyet... Read >
1980s photo of the author, right; his father, center; and his sister, left.... Read >
USERN: 10 Years Of Non-Profit Action Supporting Science Education And Research
The 10th congress of the USERN organization was held on November 8-10 in Campinas, Brazil. Some time has gone by, so it is due time for me to report on the event. I could not attend in person for a cause of force majeure, but I was connected via zoom, and I also delivered two recorded speeches ...
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 ...
Europe Rations Air Conditioning But The US Has Made A Map To Help People Optimize It
America uses less energy per capita than we did in World War II, and even World War I. Thanks to natural gas, we provide energy in most states at an affordable cost.(1) With the help of a new data set that shows where air conditioning is used, it will be even easier to know where things can be ...
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. ...
Mitochondria Replacement May Help Old Cells Feel Young Again
People who 'age' better don't share much in common at all about lifestyles like diet. Surveys are too unreliable and too many centenarians were only such because of inaccurate records or even fraud for valid epidemiology.But what they do share in common is superior energy production in cells. Their ...
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 ...
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 ...
The Organic Foods You Need To Avoid This Thanksgiving To Stay Cancer-Free
Though vegetable oil is all the rage this year, we need to remember that food scaremongering is designed to pile onto previous hysteria, not replace it. The Endocrine Disruptor/PM2.5/5G conspiracy community, dominated by the left for decades, finally got one of their into a position that was important ...
Lancet Is Doing For MAHA On Food What They Did For Wakefield On Vaccines
The Lancet, which championed both the 'vaccines cause autism' and the 'Frankenfood' movement, is now promoting the same bad epidemiology in their claims about ultra-processed food.Scientists may be concerned that a prominent journal is giving credence to scaremongering but we are talking about ...
After Pre-Diabetes, Will CDC Call Pre-Hypertension A Pandemic Next?
A new paper says that before your blood pressure rose, hypertension was already damaging blood vessels and brain matter.How is that even possible? It won't matter, if history is any indication, career bureaucrats at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are already scheduling a briefing ...
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 ...
And Since You Mention SNAP,
Among others oozing angst about “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani’s election were two refugees from the USSR (one was Garry Kasparov) speaking on an anti-semitism panel Tuesday. Socialism, they declared, leads to communism! Even democratic socialism does! Just wait ‘til Mamdani shows ...
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 ...
Baby Steps In The Reinforcement Learning World
I am moving some baby steps in the direction of Reinforcement Learning (RL) these days. In machine learning, RL is a well-established and very promising avenue for the development of artificial intelligence, and the field is in rapid development. Unfortunately I have been left behind, as I never ...
The Immortal Life Of Beef Cells
Ranchers and vegans don't agree on much but they agree that lab-grown meat is a bad idea. Not for science ones, for economic and psychological ones.Still, activists are in a war of extinction against the modern world, so they are confident they will eventually win, either with allied progressive ...
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 ...
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 »
