A Million-Year-Old Mammoth May Hold The Key...
By Irena Šoljić
First Nation Shell Middens And True Oysters
Up-to-date With The Big Bang, Mass, And Protons
What Will It Take For Real Farming In Space?
Nowadays we study the Universe using a number of probes and techniques. Over... Read >
With a 4th generation nuclear plant finally getting built in the U.S., 30 years... Read >
When Senator Elizabeth Warren had her claims of native ancestry debunked by... Read >
Cigarettes are the top lifestyle risk factor for getting cancer, though alcohol... Read >
Get-out-the-vote campaigns matter, which is why U.S. political parties encourage... Read >
In 2008, fresh off a decisive victory over Democratic establishment candidate... Read >
The Nobel Prize And The Role Of AI In Scientific Advancement
The 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, who many have called “the godfather of AI”. The award seems apt for the time we are in. In the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’s press release, they explained their decision to award the prize to the pair ...
Some Notes On The Utility Function Of Fundamental Science Experiments
Earlier this year I mentioned here that I would be writing an article on how the utility function of experiments in fundamental science could be specified, as an enabling step toward the formalization of a co-design optimization problem. Now, as the deadline for submission approaches and the clock ...
Understanding Expected Limits, Observed Limits, Exclusion Regions In Particle Physics Graphs
I recently got engaged in a conversation with a famous retired mathematician / cosmologist about the phenomenology of Higgs bosons in the Standard Model of particle physics, and very soon we ended up discussing a graph produced by the CMS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which details ...
Establishing Benchmarks For Use Of AI In Fundamental Science: Two Proposals To Move Forward
These days I am in the middle of a collaborative effort to write a roadmap for the organization of infrastructures and methods for applications of Artificial Intelligence in fundamental science research. In so doing I wrote a paragraph concerning benchmarks and standards. I thought this could be ...
American CO2 Is Below War War II Levels But We Keep Emissions High In Poor Countries
In politics, one way to make your belief in alternative energy seem feasible is to make its competitors expensive. President Obama did that when he began to subsidize the domestic solar energy industry at unprecedented levels.(1) He brought in Dr. Stephen Chu, who had advocated $9-a-gallon gasoline ...
Mercury Emissions Are In Decline Yet Doomsday Prophets Claim They Are Up
If you read environmental groups, we are closer to our doom than ever. Bees are nearly extinct, cell phones are causing cancer, and hydroelectric power is devastating the land.None of those are true yet they all have claims found in journals and in media. So it has been with mercury emissions, ...
Simulation Predicts 50% Of Recurring El Niño Events Could Be Extreme In 25 Years
The recurring El Niño phenomenon was in full force from mid-2023 to mid-2024 and as predicted it brought higher temperatures. In this case, it brought the highest temperatures since accurate records have been kept, for 12 straight months.A team of climate scientists created a numerical simulation ...
Does Air Quality Cause Postpartum Depression?
New mothers are under a lot of pressure. They are told they have to breastfeed and if they don't, the formula they use may cause their child to have worse grades in school. And if the government shuts down formula factories for no coherent reason and imports aren't allowed because the identical ...
Smarter Soybeans Mean Affordable Food In Poorer Regions
It is easy for wealthy countries to spend $135 billion on an organic food process that uses higher quantities of older, more toxic pesticides at greater environmental strain, because it is a niche luxury item.In countries that are poor, which often means outside natural breadbasket climates ...
Bacterial Genes Can Be Genetic Shapeshifters
Prokaryotes, single-cell organisms such as bacteria, undergo inversions which cause a physical flip of a segment of DNA and change an organism’s genetic identity the way you might change a wig. They can occur within a single gene, in defiance of the more common 'one gene codes for one protein' ...
Wuhan Seafood Market: Evidence Of COVID-19 Origins Revealed
When COVID-19 broke out, it was a US election year and that meant a lot of common sense gave way to politics. Democrats charged that then-President Trump was putting lives at risk by telling FDA to fast-track a vaccine, after insisting that closing airports to China was racist and xenophobic because ...
Normal Sleep Duration 50% Less Common After A Stroke
Getting enough sleep is correlated to brain and heart health and after a stroke that is even more important. A new survey finds that is when people who need it are least likely to get it. A cohort of 39,559 people were asked every two years how much sleep they usually get at night on weekdays ...
Testicular Cancer Treatment: What Is The Gold Standard?
Testicular cancer is the most common solid tumor in young men, with approximately 10,000 diagnoses in the U.S. each year.New treatments are always in development, often with the goal of less open surgery, but a new analysis of 165 patients with clinical stage I or II testicular cancer and no prior ...
Taking The Book Of The Dead To Heart
In ancient Egypt, the heart was the key to a happy afterlife. It lived on after death, they believed, and in the Duat, the Netherworld, it revealed a truth man's words could not hide.The 42 gathered gods would measure the heart and if it weighed more than the Feather of Truth which adorned the ...
Humans Age In Two Bursts, At 44 And 60
Aging is not a smooth and gradual process. For instance, around 6.5% of people aged between 40 and 59 have coronary artery disease, a prevalence which jumps to 19.8% for people aged 60 to 79. Research inspired by such observations and published in the journal Nature Aging, has found that aging ...
Shorter Course Of Post-Mastectomy Radiation With Breast Reconstruction Is Safe And Effective
A multi-institutional study has found that a shorter course of post-mastectomy radiation, combined with breast reconstruction can time from 25 to 16 treatment sessions while remaining safe and effective.Breast cancer is the second most frequently diagnosed cancer for American women and nearly 40% ...
Thanksgiving Science: Did COVID-19 Revive Family Dinners?
If cultural pundits can invent an Anthropocene Epoch then a Digital Epoch makes even more sense. In 2000, only in Japan did you see people on trains four inches from other humans chatting other humans on other trains, most of whom they'd never meet. Now that is everyone in the developed world.COVID ...
Halloween Horror Science: Are Chickens That Learn A Bigger Threat To Us Than AI?
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) vegetarian advocacy group has a paper out arguing that common broiler chickens not only learn more than the obvious, like which bowl has food, they get happier learning. Their marketing of the paper suggests they ...
How Social Media Affects Young People
Last year, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued a health advisory on the use of social media by adolescents. This was based on mounting scientific evidence that social media has both benefits and risks for teens, and that parents and guardians needed better advice on how to balance ...
Astrologers Deduce Personalities As Poorly As Anyone Else
Astrology is one of those things that makes no sense to literate people. The position of stars a billion light-years away determined your personality, but if you are in the eastern world that personality could be completely different than if you were born 2000 miles west? See: I was a Virgo this ...
Ignore Critics, Gen Z, We Weren't Smarter In 1984
It's commonplace for older generations to criticize the young. In my early career, an older fellow told me he wouldn't hire anyone who didn't know how to use a slide rule. Another only a decade older than me said he only wanted to work with people who had built their own crystal radio or some equivalent ...
Not Just Wealthy White People, Expensive Snacks Are All The Rage For Gen Z Too
Once upon a time, wealthy white women virtue signaled to other wealthy white women when they spent $500 on snacks at stores they're paid to promote, like "upscale" grocery chain Erewhon, where its overpriced nonsense supposedly leads to a "radiant" lifestyle.That time is still now. This one is ...
Slaves Of Satan: A Diabolical Subjugation Theory Of Everything
Do you think the 2008 financial meltdown was caused by religious evil? I don't, I think it was caused by populism in Congress that made it a potential prison sentence to deny anyone a mortgage and guaranteed mortgages for unqualified people.(1)If you instead think it was evil, "Slaves of Satan" ...
Choosing Between Inquiry-Based Learning And Direct Learning
Inquiry-based learning is at the heart of the controversial California Math Framework. Rather than teaching students through rote learning, which instructors believe gives a false sense of virtuosity that comes undone when students have to think for themselves and do difficult problems, students ...
This came up on 2nd November 2024 (give or take a day), a broadcaster objecting to a carbon capture... more »
The answers to the title questions are, No, Yes, and why not. What I have been doing instead... more »
Sheer beauty — a beautiful Euhoplites ammonite from Folkstone, UK. These lovelies have a pleasing... more »
March is here, and with it begins a season of intense travel for me - something which for some... more »
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