Living in Padova has its merits. I moved here since January 1st and am enjoying every bit of it. I used to live in Venice, my home town, and commute with Padova during weekdays, but a number of factors led me to decide on this move (not last the fact that I could afford to buy a spacious place ...

A paper by B. Fornal and B. Grinstein published last week in Physical Review Letters is drawing a lot of interest to one of the most well-known pieces of subnuclear physics since the days of Enrico Fermi: beta decay.The mechanism by means of which a neutron transmutes into a proton has been studied ...

What started as a technology development project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in August 2013, has become The Mars Helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft which will travel with the agency’s Mars 2020 rover mission, currently scheduled to launch in July 2020 and be the first ...

Like sex, Stephen Hawking was and is mainly a cheap way to obtain publicity. They still publish posthumously now to keep it going. The media feast on the occasion of his parting was not enough, sadly also here at Science2.0 by the usual suspects. I refused participation, because there is just nothing ...

Across the North Atlantic, shipwrecks scatter the seabed like the carcasses of prehistoric creatures. Bygone relics of sea exploration, trade, migration and conflict, these historical monuments are important sites of cultural interest. But they also form the basis of a burgeoning recreational dive ...

If you offer a wealthy elite any fish that is not gathered by depleting the oceans, they will recoil in horror. It is unclear why they recognize that farms are essential for growing vegetables but think farmed fish should only be for the poor. The science says otherwise. Aquatic farming - ...

The South Atlantic Anomaly has people concerned, but if Earth's magnetic field of the past is any indication, and it is, the anomaly is not a precursor of a switching of the poles.What is the South Atlantic Anomaly?Earth's magnetic field serves as a shield against hazardous radiation from space ...

A week after the Science March, environmental groups have turned up the heat on politicians, hoping to use the famous DDT strategy (ignore scientists, get a politician to do the work) to get a ban on a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids (neonics), which are sprayed on seeds so that there ...

There is no existing cure for the common cold. The reason is simple: it is caused by a family of viruses with hundreds of variants, making it nearly impossible to become immune to or vaccinate against all of them. On top of that, the viruses evolve rapidly, meaning they can quickly gain resistance ...

American government-funded science likes to declare wars. War on cancer, war on obesity, during the Obama administration there were seven different "Manhattan Projects" related to science and health. It connotes action, it makes the public feel like something important is happening with taxpayer ...

It sounds gross to humans - unless you read those "Twilight" books in which case maybe it's sexy - but a lot of animals consume blood.  That's right, even your cat familiar. The question is why? Blood is actually a poor source of energy. It consists of 78 percent liquid and what is left ...

A small study published in Hypertension resurrects the notion that oral antioxidants, broadly dismissed as ineffective, could reap measurable health benefits if they are bioavailable. And it was in older people.The study consisted of 20 healthy men and women age 60 to 79 from the Boulder area. ...

Diagnoses of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) skyrocketed in the 1990s, leading to concern that teachers wanted all kids to be automatons in classrooms and too many older parents were concerned about kids just being kids.Since then Poison Control ...

To the relief of the real science community everywhere, the era of Chris Wild is almost over at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). That means maybe they can get back to finding carcinogens rather than manufacturing them.Or not. The concern about Dr. Elisabete Weider pass, recently ...

Pharmaceutical industry marketing of opioid products to physicians through non-research payments, which can include speaking fees and meals, was associated with greater opioid prescribing in a recent JAMA Internal Medicine article.Many opioid-related overdose deaths involve prescription opioids ...

There are many different types of human papilloma virus (HPV). Some are associated with the development of cervical lesions that can become cancerous and are considered as high-risk HPV types. Two of these high-risk types (HPV16 and HPV18) account for about 70% all cases of cervical cancer worldwide ...

Don’t be fooled by those who say the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) sets the gold standard for chemical risk assessments. In addition to a long history of sloppy research, lack of transparency, and low productivity ...

The litigation group Earthjustice, the sue-and-settle arm of Sierra Club, has joined other controversial environmental trial lawyer groups, such as Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Union of Concerned Scientists, in a lawsuit to ...

In 2015, 4,528 "children" - the mean age was 18, pediatricians presenting at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2018 annual meeting today counted children as anyone under age 21 - died from firearm-related injuries. Eighty-seven percent were male and 44 percent were black.  And the pediatricians ...

What is your sexual fetish, your kinkiest perversion? Are you a pedophile for enjoying blondes rather than feet? Analyzing where a system, such as a brain, “fails”, say after removing a subsystem by injury, can reveal how the system normally functions, what the system can no longer do. Separated ...

If you are a scientist who received their PhD/MD within the past 10 years you can apply for the 2018 Sartorius&Science Prize in Regenerative Medicine and Cell Therapy by October 1, 2018. The Sartorius Group is a pharmaceutical and laboratory equipment provider. The grand prize is $25,000 and a ...

It probably happens every minute of the day: A little girl demands to see the photo her parent has just taken of her. Today, thanks to smartphones and other digital cameras, we can see snapshots immediately, whether we want to or not. But in 1944 when 3-year-old Jennifer Land asked to see the family ...

If you want to spread fake news, and rarely have it corrected, Twitter is the best way to go, according to a new analysis. Experience does not help. Instead, the social media platform’s most active users are complicit in detecting and spreading falsehoods, even during public emergencies.  ...

This is another of those sensationalist doomsday stories in the red top tabloids scaring people. The stories say that we are 100% certain to be hit by an asteroid. Well, yes, for small asteroids, but we are 100% certain to be hit by lightning too, many times a year. Your chance of dying of an asteroid ...