At 10:00 AM this morning, my smartphone alerted me that in two months I will have to deliver a thorough review on the physics of boson pairs - a 50 page thing which does not yet even exist in the world of ideas. So I have better start planning carefully my time in the next 60 days, to find at least ...

Three detectors tracking gravitational waves emitted by a merger of two black holes have brought science a little closer to locating a gravitational wave's birthplace in space. Gravitational waves are ripples in space and time created when two massive, compact objects such as black holes merge ...

The top quark is the heaviest known matter corpuscle we consider elementary. Elementary is an overloaded word in English, so I need to explain what it means in the context of subatomic particles. If we grab a dictionary we get several possibilities, like e.g.- elementary: pertanining to or ...

Another chapter in the saga of the search for the elusive, but dominant, decay mode of the Higgs boson has been reported by the CMS collaboration last month. This is one of those specific sub-fields of research where a hard competition arises on the answer to a relatively minor scientific question ...

There are many stories about Yellowstone today by journalists saying it will erupt as a super volcano soon and that the effects will be devastating. No that is not what the study was about.First, there is no sign of it erupting.Then what about the study? The  scientists looked at when it last ...

The realization that livestock like cows are ruminants - and produce a lot of methane while chewing - was a real boon to vegetarian activists because they got to say curbing meat would mean less global warming.Methane has 23X the warming power of the more popular CO2 in climate change estimates ...

Two recent studies on the health of bumblebees and links to neonicotinoids were published simultaneously last month in sister publications of the prestigious science journal empire Nature.Both examined closely similar scientific questions, with somewhat different experimental methodologies. They ...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General recently did an audit of the National Organic Program, which is part of its Agricultural Marketing Services group.Marketing? Yes, that is the only real thing that the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 set out to accomplish. The AMS ...

In recent years the citrus industry has suffered a dramatic decrease in production. The iconic Florida citrus industry is in a disease-induced decline, ravaged by a pathogen that has cut the production to half of what it was only a decade or so ago.Why is This Happening? This devastating decline ...

In determining the gender of offspring, fathers may be getting shortchanged. Because mothers can influence their offspring in a number of ways, from copulation to birth, while fathers have control over sperm only, it has long been assumed mothers are more important. In mammals, it is also ...

Brain-computer interfaces can replace bodily functions to a certain degree and now they can even compose music. At least in a sense.Derived from an established brain-computer interface method which mainly serves to spell - more accurately - write, a team writing in PLOS One has shown how they developed ...

Should we ban cars because of their potential to crash? Or stop selling painkillers in case someone takes too many? If we take the logic the EU applies to regulating pesticides, then the answer should be a resounding “yes”. Thankfully, EU lawmakers have looked at the weight of evidence and ...

Fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma, a form of liver cancer mainly found among children and young people, currently has surgery as the only treatment available. But even then less than 40 percent of patients will survive beyond five years.It might help to discover what causes it.In a study published ...

Expectant moms get a lot of advice from the Internet, friends, and even strangers. It's a lot of judgment, given that this miracle of birth has already happened 13 billion times without anyone telling mothers to eat purple vegetables or their child won't get into Stanford.The digital age, where ...

Although 29 states and the District of Columbia allow marijuana use for medical purposes, there is no evidence it is medicine. Obviously some of the reason for that is because it's illegal and therefore hard to study, but regardless of the past it seems odd that scholars at Washington University ...

A recent analysis of published data on human exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) revealed more than 140 studies with over 85,000 data points from 30 countries.  Taken together the data show that exposure to BPA around the world is hundreds to thousands of times below the science-based safe ...

A new paper claims that guns are only involved in 5 percent of suicide attempts but are 50 percent of suicide deaths. Despite everyone claiming to want to be data-driven about gun deaths, few are and this is no exception.  The activist group Americans for Responsible Solutions, founded by ...

The dominant Australian community would very much like to keep Indigenous communities from alcohol, but indigenous communities aren't having it. A giant black market has sprung up and such non-government alcohol sells for up to 1100 percent of the retail price.To learn about these "sly grog traders" ...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention seem more scared than elated by United States smoking rates. They have migrated from a war on the world's top killer, smoking, to being in a war on a chemical, nicotine.They needn't be concerned. Science and health have won, and it wasn't because of ...

Nomophobia, defined as smartphone separation anxiety,  is when people perceive smartphones as part of their extended selves.Counselors, lawyers and therapists are aggressively pushing it as the fad diagnosis of 2017, but what behaviors and descriptors can help identify people with high ...

Admittedly, I hold a rather dismal view of my fellow human beings. The average person just isn't all that bright or informed. Google "Jay Leno Jaywalking," "Lie Witness News," or "Florida Man," and you'll see what I mean.That's why I don't understand why pollsters ask Americans what they think ...

This will seem utterly bonkers to most of you. But while reading this please bear in mind that very young children, many as young as 14 and younger, have been driven to the edge of suicide by these prophesies. More on this later but I want to open out by showing to them how bonkers his ideas are ...

Trevor Hastie, the Stanford University guru on Statistical Learning (he coined the term together with his colleagues Tibshirani and Friedman) is in Padova this week, where he is giving a short course on his pet topic and a seminar. I am happy to report this as this was partly made possible by the ...

When corporate media revealed during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election campaign that Donald Trump had expressed anti-vaccine sentiments, Democrats in "blue states breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, journalists could claim anti-vaccine sentiment was bipartisan.Until then, it was solidly embraced ...