Pattern recognition is an altisonant name to a rather common, if complex, activity we perform countless times in our daily lives. Our brain is capable of interpreting successions of sounds, written symbols, or images almost infallibly - so much so that people like me, who have sometimes trouble to recognize a face that should be familiar, get their own disfunctionality term - in this case, prosopagnosia.

So many people want to move to the United States of America because virtually anyone who arrives legally can start a business with little problem and get rich.

A lot of people born in the US would rather be born in a place where they can never get rich but more things are free for the poor. They're not wrong, normal human psychological variation means most people would rather not compete if given a choice. That is seen all across the animal kingdom.

The Zagros Mountains are nestled in Iran, northern Iraq, and southeastern Turkey, and are the scene of an unfolding geological story deep beneath it.

A new analysis claims that crown volume of stream-side shrubs is a key metric for evaluating trophic cascade strength and they attribute the 1,500% increase in a small number of sites to increased numbers of wolves.

The data they used were collected from 20 streams during the years 2001 to 2020 and they note the aboveground biomass increase is due to a lot fewer elk, which was caused by a lot more wolves. "Balance of nature" wins.

Hims Inc., rebranded as Hims  &  Hers Health, Inc. after they went public in 2020, began as a telehealth company for erectile dysfunction and hair loss products.

No real issue there, the products are well-established and a phone call or website consultation is more convenient and far faster than visiting a doctor's office in the modern Obamacare milieu. It's entering the compounded glucagon-like peptide 1 agonists (GLP-1) injections market that got them new scrutiny.

As artificial intelligence tools continue to evolve and improve their performance on more and more general tasks, scientists struggle to make the best use of them. 
The problem is not incompetence - in fact, at least in my field of study (high-energy physics) most of us have grown rather well educated on the use and development of tailored machine learning algorithms. The problem is rather that our problems are enormously complex. Long gone are the years when we started to apply with success deep neural networks to classification and regression problems of data analysis: those were easy tasks. The bar now is set much higher - optimize the design of instruments we use for our scientific research. 

In 2023, I bit the bullet by signing a book contract with Springer to work on a difficult compilation of scientific misconduct and problematic science publishing practice. It was planned as an edited book that required expert contributors of the field to write chapters on the various topics.

A new Artificial Intelligence analysis of data of ovarian cancer patients links birth control pills to a 26% reduced risk for those had ever used it, and 43% for those who had used the it after the age of 45.

That does not mean you should take it as a way to prevent cancer, it is an endocrine disruptor that binds to estrogen with 20,000X the effect of compounds like BPA that environmentalists tried to claim are too risky in food containers, and this study is EXPLORATORY. With enough data, Australians could link voting for the Liberal Party to lower risk of diseases. Epidemiology can link anything to anything.

While talking to farmers in Illinois on September 25th, 1956 who were concerned about increased government encroachment and regulations brought on by the descendants of eugenicists who had founded "environmental" groups like Sierra Club to promote their beliefs(1), President Dwight D. Eisenhower told them,  “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field”

 Scientific information has never been more widely accessible than it is today. While this increased availability fosters awareness and collaboration, it has also contributed to a concerning surge in misinformation and disinformation, especially in the United States.

Recent Pew Research data indicates a decline in public trust in science, withonly 57% of people believing science has had a mostly positive impact on society, down from 73% in 2019. Additionally, 34% of adults now view science’s impact as equally positive and negative.