In 2022, the United States surpassed one million COVID-19 related deaths. Many of them had co-morbidities that are risk factors for many diseases, like old age, cancer, or respiratory issues.

Added into those risk factors were lifestyle diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and smoking, all of which are linked to poorer outcomes from COVID-19 infections. Those have all long been linked to negative health outcomes, which is why we have advocated for exercise, sensible diets, and giving up cigarettes as first lines of defense against many future problems.

A new paper describes the perfect combination of genetic alterations that tumors use to promote explosive growth and prevent their own demise, a development that could change the way oncologists understand and treat melanoma.

Telomeres, protective caps at the of the end of the chromosome, are required to prevent DNA from degrading. In healthy cells, telomeres become shorter with each cycle of replication until they become so short that the cell can no longer divide. Disruptions in maintenance of the length of the telomeres can lead to severe disease. Short telomere syndromes lead to premature aging and death, but extra-long telomeres are associated with cancer.

If you have ever visited or Florida or any place with rainfall extremes at sub-hourly timescales - short storms - residents joke that if you don't like their weather, wait five minutes and it will change.

A new analysis says those changes may be happening quickly, and are intensifying much faster than those on longer hourly or daily timescales. Which means greater chance for damaging environmental hazards like flash flooding. If these intense short-duration precipitation events are being affected by our changing climate. understanding them is crucial for effective climate adaptation and mitigation. 

My nice Plaxo online address book disappeared when the host company was sold and the buyer discontinued the service. My contacts, up in smoke.

Dropbox (cloud storage and data synch) and TunnelBear (VPN) both decided not to support my OS any more, as did Google Chrome. I face expensive upgrades.

Our eyes see only a tiny band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Matter is mostly empty space, but we see and feel it as continuous solid. Why don't we comprehend the world as it really is? It is because evolution has prepared us to survive and reproduce. Evolution has no interest in preparing us to see the world as it is. There is no reproductive value in seeing the whole truth.

With a tiny fraction of the world population, the United States dominates science output. America dominates in Nobel prizes, and adult science literacy.

Yet leading the world in science literacy needs under 30% of its people, so it isn't that America is great, it is more that other countries are terrible. Anyone looking at the science policies of Europe - 'anything but science' is the default - when it comes to food, energy, and medicine knows they're regressing into the Dark Ages. Asia never stopped being the home of supplements and mysticism, it is why they lead the world in endangered-species-killed-for-folk-medicine occurrences.

Heart inflammation after a COVID-19 vaccine is very rare but epidemiology exists to vreate exploratory between products and outcomes and a recent analysis showed incidence of myocarditis, pericarditis or myopericarditis is two- to threefold higher after a second dose of the Moderna Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine compared to the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

That's not a reason to avoid a vaccine, any more than you should stop eating salad if it has a regular pesticide rather than an organic one, but it may mean that it's beneficial to choose specific vaccines for certain populations.

A faint white dwarf star as well as the remains of its orbiting planetary system are over ten billion years old, according to a new estimate.

WDJ2147-4035 is the oldest dead star with an evolved planetary system found to-date.

A white dwarf is a star that has burnt up all of its fuel and shed its outer layers and is now undergoing a process of shrinking and cooling. During this process, any orbiting planets will be disrupted and in some cases destroyed, with their debris left to accrete onto the surface of the white dwarf.

Virtual Reality devices are advertised everywhere but have as much uptake as USDA nutrition guidelines or 3-D televisions. One reason is that it's a lot of money for something you can use for 20 minutes without fatigue. Another is VR sickness, a type of motion sickness which comes from users seeing “motion” through their headsets without actually moving. The symptoms include headaches, nausea, and sometimes vomiting. 

At about this time of the year I find myself teaching my students about the construction of V-A theory, which is a milestone in the construction of the Standard Model of particle physics. And in so doing I rejoice about having a chance to tell them the details of one of the most brilliant experiments of the twentieth century, one performed in 1957 by Maurice Goldhaber with his colleagues Grodzins and Sunjar, and which has become a cornerstone of the physics of weak interactions and of particle physics in general.