Halloween Science: Your Ancestors May Have...
Learning Through Student Feedback
By Mark Pierce
Something Happened In Silicon Valley
Epidemiologists Blame 15th Century Science...
Untitled Document
You may have heard that the Moon is hopeless... Read >
A new cross-sectional analysis estimates that asthma inhalers contribute the... Read >
The process by which the nervous system continuously receives and interprets... Read >
Skin cancer is a common and growing problem, accounting for one in every three... Read >
A commenter contested my statement that gang murders are a much greater menace... Read >
When I wrote Halloween Science 2.0, I wanted to get it down to a brisk 150... 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 ...
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 ...
How European Forests May Look By The Year 2100
A new computer simulation says that climate change may may ruin the tall beech trees common in Europe. Unfortunately, many other simulations already said it was too late to curb runaway emissions by India and China as of 2016.For the last 2,000 years, the area from southern Sweden to central France ...
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 ...
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 ...
Genetic Mutations In Brain Tumors Can Now Be Detected During Surgery
Conventional genetic analysis methods for genotyping of brain tumors usually require one or two days to obtain results but a new method can determine optimal resection margins during surgery in just a few minutes.The ability to accurately detect genetic mutations in a brain tumor was demonstrated ...
Sperm MicroRNAs May Make Your Unwillingness To Exercise Inherited
A recent study found the first evidence that sperm microRNAs act as carriers of epigenetic information, enabling the intergenerational transmission of paternal exercise capacity and metabolic health, thereby exerting profound effects on offspring development.The bad news if you want an excuse for ...
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 ...
The Next Plague: Did We Learn Anything From COVID-19?
In early 2018, colleagues and I released The Next Plague and How Science Will Stop It and coronavirus was in there, because there had already been two coronavirus pandemics, SARS and MERS, this century.No one anticipated that SARS-CoV-2 would erupt in Wuhan, China, and be the worst pandemic since ...
Hepatologists Ironically Over-Represented In Alcoholism
A survey asked 185 practicing transplant hepatologists across the U.S. who are among the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases members across the U.S. about "unhealthy" alcohol use - alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen, so unless you eat healthy amounts of plutonium or smoke healthy ...
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 ...
The Birth Paradox
Surely you’ve noticed that many countries are subsidizing births – and others are banning abortions – even as tech lords lament the number of “useless people” in the world. You’ve noted the contradiction, and you’ve asked yourself, “What’s going on here?” Cool Hand Luke might ...
Doctors Urged To Proactively Address Cancer Myths - Groups Like American Cancer Society Won't
Information freedom is a good thing but there is no question it has been weaponized. Many scientists have been ruined by activists and their trade groups who use Freedom of Information Act rules to find a sentence in correspondence with corporations or trade groups, remove it from context, and ...
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 ...
AI Helps Doctors Look At Lots Of Data Fast For Diagnostic Clues
Actors, artists, and musicians are rightly worried about the impact of AI on their incomes but doctors and scientists welcome the help. They know typewriters didn't make literature worse than writing in longhand and "AI" - LLMs - likewise removes the 'how' of information access so thinkers can ...
Altmetric Will Now Include Your Podcast
In the early days of Science 2.0, blogging did not get a lot of institutional respect. Public outreach was a waste of time, academics were often told, leave that to science journalists and the PIOs at schools who write press releases.It seemed archaic. Anyone who knows how much of science is government ...
How Will Humans And Machines Live Together?
Everybody wonders what will happen with artificial intelligence (AI). Truly, it could go in any of several ways. This column lays out possible scenarios.Scenario-building is usually a group activity, however. So I invite your views on the driving forces and possible additional scenarios.(This is ...
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 »
