Learning Through Student Feedback
By Mark Pierce
First Nation Shell Middens And True Oysters
Epidemiologists Blame 15th Century Science...
Something Happened In Silicon Valley
The other day I finally emerged from a very stressful push to submit two grant... Read >
In wealthy countries, the richest and the aspirational well-off can afford... Read >
The human race has made huge progress in the past few thousand years, gradually... Read >
More and more people over the age of 50 are taking up physical exercise. Medical... Read >
Chicago Sun-Times writer Marco Buscaglia used the popular LLM ChatGPT... Read >
NFL Biosciences is has a Marketing Authorization Application for a smoking... Read >
Instead Of Genetically Engineering Bedbugs, EPA Should Re-Evaluate DDT
In the 1950s, the global infestation of bed bugs was nearly eradicated, thanks to the pesticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, popularly known as DDT. Due to outcry from environmentalists and concern about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring(1), and over the objections of scientists, the attorney ...
The 53-Year Odyssey Of Kosmos 482 And The Push For Sustainable Space
A Fallen Spacefarer Returns to EarthIn the early hours of May 10, 2025, skywatchers witnessed a long-lost Soviet space probe finally come home. After 53 years circling Earth, the Venus lander known as Kosmos 482 streaked through the atmosphere and disappeared somewhere over the Indian Ocean. This ...
Black Holes: Now With No Singularity
Albert Einstein has been proven right many times but some things his equations predicted have yet to be shown to be science and yet remain part of the popular consciousness about science.Like a "singularity", where the laws of physics cease to apply, at the heart of black holes. Though ...
The Night Sky From Atacama
For the third time in 9 years I am visiting San Pedro de Atacama, a jewel in the middle of nowhere in northern Chile. The Atacama desert is a stretch of extremely dry land at high altitude, which makes it exceptionally attractive for astronomical activities. In its whereabouts, e.g., are some of ...
Pesticides: Environmental Threat Or Anti-Science Populism?
With former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dictating a lot of science policy for the Trump administration, anti-science activists have been quietly cheering even though they uniformly voted for his opposition.They need a win. Claims that bees are dying off have been ...
PM2.5 Is Killing You, Claim Ecologists, Except There Are No Deaths
A new simulation claims small-micron particulate matter, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, is killing 250,000 people each year. PM10, 10 microns in size, is a well-known killer. That is wildfires and smog but after smog was drastically reduced in the 1990s, the target went down ...
'Public Trust Doctrine' - How Lawyers Use Children To File Climate Change Lawsuits
An ancient legal principle has become a key strategy of American children seeking to reduce the effects of climate change in the 21st century. A defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2025 has not stopped the effort, which has several legal actions continuing in the courts.The legal basis for ...
Cover Plants Can Remove Toxic Pesticides Like Copper Sulfate From Soil
For farmers, land is their most valuable asset so they protect it in ways environmentalists do not understand. By using science whenever possible, to reduce water, energy, and environmental strain.Even organic farmers use toxic pesticides but because they are older and less effective they must ...
The 'Still Explosions' Of Lichens On Stone
Lichens on stone, those “still explosions” as the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop named them, remain unseen to most, which is remarkable when you consider how commonplace they are. It seems these ecologically and culturally significant whatever-they-ares unfairly fall victim to something ...
Raman Spectroscopy Makes Saliva A Good Way To Detect Cancer
A few drops of saliva can now reveal what used to require a scalpel, a syringe or a scan.Scientists have developed ways to analyze spit for the tiniest traces of illness – from mouth cancer to diabetes, and even brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. Unlike blood tests or biopsies, saliva is easy ...
Toward A Unified Theory Of How Language Evolved
Humans are the only species on earth that uses language, combining sounds into words and words into sentence with infinite meanings. We do this using linguistic rules for calls and sentence structure. "A dog eats" tells us one thing while "a big dog" means another while "you're such a dog" from ...
Becoming The Music: How Our Brains Sync With Sound To Create Emotion
Some psychologists believe our brains and bodies don’t just understand music, we become it. We physically resonate with it. They call their belief Neural Resonance Theory (NRT). They use Theory is in the name, but it is not a theory like gravity or evolution, the proper name means it is ...
Food Jihad: Terrorists Use Hunger As A Weapon
Over the last decade, there has been growing international focus on the role of food in conflict, particularly in Africa. The continent has seen an increase in jihadist terrorism in several regions. Violence, like that exercised by terrorist organisations, is linked with food security conditions ...
Side Effects Update: Lecanemab To Slow Alzheimer's
In 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration an Alzheimer’s therapy shown in clinical trials to modestly slow disease progression but side effects, brain swelling and bleeding, occurred in some.Though clinical trials have taken twice as long and cost twice as much due to government regulations ...
The Ideal Amount Of Sleep You Need Is Cultural Not Fixed For All People
You've heard that you should get eight hours of sleep per night, a whole industry has built up trying to help people who can't do that, but like BMI, organic food, and 'alcohol in moderation is okay', there is no science to it.A healthy amount of sleep is instead cultural, which may mean it is ...
Fisetin To Prevent Artery Hardening
In a new study, researchers found that the polyphenol fisetin helps protect blood vessels from hardening, which is a common problem in older adults and people with kidney disease. If eventually validated in human trials, it might mean it could prevent vascular calcification and reduce cardiovascular ...
Does Ecology Have A Cultural Cancer?
A new paper argues that academic ecology is culturally corroded. 'Stay in your lane', 'do you want to die on that hill?' and other territorial and undermining behavior were reported by 44% of predominantly ecologists who responded to a survey. They say it was most common as graduate students ...
Who Paid For Prostitutes First, The Human Or The Monkey? The Chen Paper Turns 20
It is often joked that 'prostitution was the first profession' and, that it is not a profession aside, the sentiment may be true. Someone with a lot of food and the ability to prevent it being taken may have worked out a deal with someone who had no food but willingness to satisfy a different basic ...
Does Global Warming Cause War?
A new paper suggests that the world's largest polluters remain safe from the environmental damage they help create and the countries least to blame face the greatest threats because of, oddly, violent conflict.This is counter-intuitive but it is the same argument we used to read about "virtual ...
Here's Your Chance To Buy Gems Buried With Buddha 2000 Years Ago
Almost 2,000 years ago in modern-day Uttar Pradesh, India, someone deposited a cache of gems inside a reliquary (a container for holy relics), along with some bone fragments and ash. The gems were precious, but the bones and ash even more so, for according to an inscription on the reliquary, they ...
Legal American Owners Don't Create Gun Epidemics, Smuggling By Mexican Drug Cartels Does
Illegal firearm trafficking is inseparable from the illegal drug trade: Weapons are often bought with drug money, can strengthen cartels and can be traded for drugs.In the spring of 2021, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, known as ATF, started a gun-trafficking investigation ...
RIP Richard Garwin, 'The Only True Genius' Fermi Ever Met
Richard Garwin, who died on May 13, 2025, at the age of 97, was sometimes called “the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of.” He got his Ph.D. in physics at 21 under Enrico Fermi – a Nobel Prize winner and friend of Einstein’s – who called Garwin “the only true genius” ...
Drones Work For Pesticide Applications
Though organic™ farmers sell bucolic imagery of hoeing by hand and sunsets over fields of corn, it is just marketing to the gullible. All farmers who make more than enough money to pay their real estate taxes(1) are high-tech gurus. They use real-time data on the health of their land and their ...
If You Buy Magic Rocks, You're The Target Market For HoLDI-MS To Detect Nanoplastic
Homeopathic levels of plastic are the latest environmental scaremongering fad (Nanoplastics! Microplastics!) dominating partisan corporate media when they are not suddenly simping for Trickle Down Economics, Vaccines, and Capitalism they distrusted just a short while ago.Naturally, companies are ...
According to observations made by NASA using the James Webb Space Telescope, there is a three point... more »
In the past few years my activities on this site - but I would say more in general, as the same... more »
This came up on 2nd November 2024 (give or take a day), a broadcaster objecting to a carbon capture... more »
Sheer beauty — a beautiful Euhoplites ammonite from Folkstone, UK. These lovelies have a pleasing... more »
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