Learning Through Student Feedback
By Mark Pierce
The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown
Halloween Science: Your Ancestors May Have...
Something Happened In Silicon Valley
If a politician who used to be a Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer hasn’t... Read >
America uses less energy per capita than we did in World War II, and even World... Read >
Having interacted for a few months with ChatGPT 5 now, both for work-related... Read >
A survey asked 185 practicing transplant hepatologists across the U.S. who... Read >
A recent analysis of Neanderthal bones from the Troisième caverne of Goyet... Read >
Today is November 1st, the day dedicated to the dead, and I am in northern... 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 ...
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 ...
How Synthetic Pumpkin Spice Took Fall Away From Organic Apples
In 2003, the Human Genome Project was completed and both Tesla and LinkedIn were founded. Those were all interesting but not revolutionary; cars and job sites already existed, and we knew a lot about DNA, we just didn't have a complete "map" of a genome.The biggest shift in culture was the introduction ...
A 900-Meter Clue Beneath The Granite: China’s Jinlin Crater Reshapes Our Understanding Of Holocene Impacts
For decades, scientists have assumed that the Holocene—the relatively quiet geological epoch spanning the last ~11,700 years—was marked by only a handful of small meteorite impacts, most of them modest in size. But a newly confirmed structure in southern China is now challenging that narrative ...
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 ...
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 ...
What's Happening In The Brains Of Protesters?
From Los Angeles to Portland to New York City, political protests have become common. That provides data for what may be happening in brains and how engaged people can avoid becoming a Tyler Robinson or Luigi Mangione or Antifa in Oregon.The US is not special when it comes to protests, the Carnegie ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 »
