At a distance of a mind-blowing 750 million light years from Earth, astronomers using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a system made up of 10 radio telescopes across the U.S., say they've been able to observe and measure the orbital motion between two supermassive black holes.They did it by ...

Glyphosate, a component of the popular herbicide commonly known as Roundup in the United States, has been placed on California's Proposition 65 list, which requires a cancer warning label on it, despite the fact no regulatory body can find evidence it harms anyone or anything other than what it ...

The clip below, together with the following few which will be published every few days in the coming weeks, is extracted from the third chapter of my book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab". It recounts the pioneering measurement of the Z mass by the CDF detector ...

Do you remember the infamous "g-2" measurement ? The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon has been for over a decade in the agenda of HEP physicists, both as a puzzle and as a hope for good things to come. Ever since the Brookhaven laboratories estimated the quantity at a value over 3 standard ...

Stephen Hawking celebrated his seventy fifth birthday on the 2nd July. We can all be delighted that he lived so long, and continues in robust health, after he was diagnosed to survive only three years. May he continue to "live long and prosper" as the fictional Vulcans say in Star Trek (a UK man ...

Tablet and phone marketing executives can sleep well tonight. While those devices are commonly blamed for recent sleep problems, beams of pure digital energy shot straight into the eyeballs will do that, a new paper seeks to shore up the failing claim that tiny particulate matter, PM 2.5 (2.5 microns ...

Though the trend has been to listen to environmental claims about the benefits of trees in cities, in science they have a well-established dark side: in urban cities, they produce a lot of ground-level ozone, the very thing environmentalists spent decades lobbying against.During hot days,  ...

A paper has linked Monarch butterfly populations to glyphosate - but only when it was first used, and not when it was most heavily used. It also linked the populations to seasonal variation. That is to be expected, except since it's 2017, they try to claim that's climate change rather than wetter ...

In early times, a raven could be a bad omen, and a new study finds that ancient people were not wrong in thinking the raven might be planning on using a negative event to full advantage. It turns out, according to the paper, they plan ahead, just like humans, and can even forgo an immediate reward ...

It won't matter if all the ice melts and seas rise 100 feet, even if frogs rain from the skies and dogs and cats are living together, one species will be around until the sun explodes.That species is the eight-legged micro-animal tardigrade, the world's most indestructible species.The water bear ...

Men who worry that women may not make the right decisions during a menstrual cycle, and women who claim biology is a valid excuse for being a jerk, you're both out of luck.An examination of three aspects of cognition across two menstrual cycles found that the levels of estrogen, progesterone and ...

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is best known for use in bleach and hair treatments and is often invoked as a scary chemical by environmental groups promoting concern about food and products, but it is produced naturally in our bodies. A new study shows it is a useful chemical across nature; plants use ...

Everyone has heard about bisphenol A (BPA).  It’s primarily used as a raw material to make polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins, both of which are high performance materials used in many consumer products that help to make our lives better and safer.  But that’s probably ...

A randomized controlled trial of the use of acupuncture in emergency departments has found the treatment is a safe and effective alternative to pain-relieving drugs for some patients who visit looking for relief from things like a self-reported ankle sprain, a headache (invariably called a migraine) ...

A new study from the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine has found a connection between common household chemicals, quaternary ammonium compounds or "quats,", and birth defects, despite the fact that experts have never found evidence of harm.Quats are often used as disinfectants and preservatives ...

Though well-known cancers like breast and prostate cancer are still the most common, America has gotten really good at diagnosing rare cancers, according to a new study. This is a significant achievement, because rare cancers can be challenging to diagnose, often resulting in numerous physician ...

A theory is a very precise thing in science - yet some scientists can't resist using the term to lend intellectual weight to what may be a hypothesis and is likely just reasonable speculation. It's a large part of the reason why the term has become colloquialized, and 'wellness' is equivalent to ...

What will cost $400 billion, a giant leap over California’s total health care budget for 2018 of $179.5 billion, yet is not mentioned by California lawmakers? California's free "single-payer" healthcare proposal.Clearly providing greater health care access to American poor people, at giant cost ...

No, this post is not about some exotic new physics model predicting dark photons or other useless concoctions which physicists sometimes entertain with, in their frustration for the lack of guidance from experimental data of what really is it  that the Standard Model is an effective theory ...

Kids are stimulated by new experiences. So are pigs. If you watched the 2014 video where a camera falls out of a plane and crashes into a pig sty you saw how intrigued they were by it, even though it clearly was not food.A new study says that such "consumerism", a preference for shiny new stuff ...

It's been shown that there is no hiring deficit for women in science; women have been hired far more than men for new jobs. Yet women's groups have continued to point to total numbers as the problem, as if to say older men who have been supportive of more diversity and are making it happen on hiring ...

Use of performance enhancing drugs is a major problem in many competitive sports and the 2017 prohibited list includes over 300 substances. However, the scientific evidence around these substances is scarce, partly because it is impossible to do trials with professional cyclists who are subject ...

Tormented water masses with distant horizons in flames. Multicoloured reflexions over living oceans. Moving images with an astounding visual impact. These are the first words that come to my mind if I try to describe Paola Nicoletti's paintings. Needless to say, I like them a lot - but judge for ...

The "Art&Science" project is coming to the final phase as far as the activities in Venice are concerned. About 100 15 to 17-year-old students from high schools in Venice have assisted to lessons on particle physics and the Higgs boson in the past months, and have been challenged to produce, alone ...