While deforestation has declined rapidly in the last 60 years, clearing trees to make room for farmland was once essential. 

Even an island like England had farming going back thousands of years. Hundreds of dead tree trunks in the low-lying Fens of eastern England, caught in the machinery of Fenland farmers while plowing their fields, were from yew trees that populated the area between four and five thousand years ago. Yet farmers did not cut them down, Fen yew woodlands died rapidly about 4,200 years ago due to climate change, when peat expanded the trees fell and were preserved until today. It is likely that a rapid sea level rise in the North Sea flooded the area with salt water.

If you visit Japan, you may be surprised that Japanese traffic lights have blue on go rather than the green in the U.S. Actually, green is the standard there, just as red is, they just have a different definition of green.

It is rather common that things which should be basically the same for everyone, like a color, have not only different words but different meanings. A new study of basic color terms found that in cultures that have remained isolated, there are a lot fewer words for the tens of millions of colors we see.

Data tools like ChatGPT, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence (if you think a fancy autocomplete is actual AI), have the promise to do a lot of good. There are some concerns about human content 'creators' being replaced but we don't miss the 150,000 fewer bank tellers we had before the rise of ATMs and a lot of writing done by humans is pretty generic.

It's that time of year when activists, academics, and social media mavens hoping for media coverage begin to promote worry about Thanksgiving. 

Some risks are real, even if relatively slight; a lot more people driving mean more accidents and if you have a family member who is an International Agency for Research on Cancer epidemiologist, they will ignore the greater amount of driving and just tell you that Thanksgiving is deadly.(1) Food safety matters. Turkey should be 165 degrees Fahrenheit and ham 145, but anyone telling you that in a press release might as well be taking the bold stand of endorsing clean water.

Microplastics are a kernel of biological concern that gets magnified by hype, like endocrine "disrupting" chemicals or weedkillers detectable in breast milk. In modern times, we can detect anything in anything, so the 'zero' levels of the 1960s no longer exist, because testing is 1,000,000 times more sensitive than it was in the past.

Did you recently finish a Master in a scientific discipline, and wish to do some research before deciding whether to embark in a Ph.D.? Do you fancy coming to Padova and work with me and a team of physicists, computer scientists, and astrophysicists on detector optimization? Do you like the idea of traveling to Kaiserslautern for significant periods during the internship, to work under guidance of Prof. Nicolas Gauger at RPTU? Or do you know somebody to which the above might apply? Then please read on.

Government forces automobile companies to sell electric cars - and then forces all taxpayers to subsidize the purchases. With mandates and subsidies, there is no free market and that means companies primarily want to make the cars that will generate the most profit, which means the most expensive. The opposite of capitalism.

Hugh Gray was taking his usual post-church walk around Loch Ness in Scotland on a November Sunday in 1933. His amble was disrupted when he saw something bobbing above the water two or three feet from him. 

He quickly snapped several pictures of what he described to the Scottish Daily Record as “an object of considerable dimensions”.

The 8th Congress of the USERN Organization took place during the past three days (November 8-10, 2023) at the RAU University in Yerevan, Armenia, and it was a complete success, which has left me overwhelmed by the amount of great interdisciplinary science, fantastic art in multiple forms, and the intensity and rate of positive feelings I received throughout the event. I offer below a short report of the event and my impressions, which may of course be biased by being the President of this fantastic network, but does feel a rather trustworthy report now that I read it again.

Global warming is not new to the history of our planet, and so, by studying previous periods of global warming, scientists hope to uncover secrets that can be used to combat global warming today. The Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum, which occurred some 40 million years ago, has attracted particular scrutiny because of its unique properties.