A while back I wrote my article "Can Giant Airships Slowly Accelerate to Orbit Over Several Days" . It lead to a lot of discussion and as usual whenever you discuss John Powell's ideas, there were physicists and aeroengineers saying it is impossible. So anyway as part of this I had an especially ...

The IAU famously decided that Pluto is not a planet any more, calling it a "dwarf planet" instead, along with Ceres. However, their definition works as well as it does only because of a historical accident of our solar system and the bodies we have discovered in it so far. There are good reasons ...

This is an article by the space engineer and Mars colonization enthusiast Robert Zubrin, The Planetary Protection Racket claiming that we don’t need to protect Earth from Mars microbes or Mars from Earth microbes. This is not the first time he has said controversial things like this, and they ...

If I am alive, I probably owe it to my current very good physical shape.That does not mean I narrowly escaped a certain death; rather, it means that if I had been slower there are good chances I would have got hit by lightning, under arduous conditions, at 4300 meters of altitude.After this dramatic ...

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 ...

The President has declared he is against the Estate tax, and he is not alone. For decades it has seemed punitive to levy a special tax on wealth people already paid taxes on just because the person who paid the taxes died. In North Dakota, President Trump said he would "protect small businesses ...

A pervasive myth in Australia is that hot weather is the greatest danger to our health. In reality, it’s more likely cold weather will kill you. For all our concern about the dangers of heatwaves, simple analysis of mortality data suggests the cold months present a much greater health risk. Almost ...

Satellite data have detected widespread water within ancient explosive volcanic deposits on the Moon. That means its interior may contain more indigenous water than previously believed. The ancient deposits are believed to consist of glass beads formed by the explosive eruption of magma coming ...

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 ...

Researchers looked at frequency magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) images to compare neural responses to food cues in overweight and normal weight adolescents. They noted that food stimuli activated regions of the brain associated with reward and emotion in all groups but overweight adolescents ...

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 ...

Even small tumors can be aggressive, according to a study in patients with early stage breast cancer presented at the ESMO 2017 Congress in Madrid.  They found that nearly one in four small tumors were aggressive and patients benefited from chemotherapy. Aggressive tumors could be identified ...

Center for Science in the Public Interest, a litigation group that sues food companies, may be dusting off some of its old materials after new report which finds "good" cholesterol, also known as HDL, might not be as good as we think.The new paper contradicts findings from the last 25 years that ...

Licorice roots have a diverse history, having been used throughout history as a flavoring agent and as an ingredient in some licorice candies, while in ancient Egyptian times it was a tea and the Chinese used it for medicinal purposes. One trend in the alternative medicine movement, which seeks ...

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 ...

I'm getting numerous pm's from very scared and sometimes suicidal people who think the world will end tomorrow. To those who are scared and suicidal - what do you do if you are scared like this? I've written this article to help you. If you are feeling suicidal right now, of course contact any ...

In the wake of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, many claims have been made that science denial, particularly as it relates to climate change, is primarily a problem of the political right.But what happens when scientific conclusions challenge liberals’ attitudes on public policy issues, such as gun ...

Though every politician and both U.S. parties claim to be pro-science, that isn't reflected in corporate media coverage. The New York Times will publish conspiracy theories drafted by US Right To Know, a corporate front group created by Organic Consumers Association. Washington Post will host a ...

In 1952 my uncle Antonio, then 18 years old, left his family home in Venice, Italy to never return, running away from the humiliation of a failure at school. With a friend he reached the border with France and crossed it during the night, chased by border patrols and wolves. Caught by the French ...