Up-to-date With The Big Bang, Mass, And Protons
What Will It Take For Real Farming In Space?
First Nation Shell Middens And True Oysters
A Million-Year-Old Mammoth May Hold The Key...
By Irena Šoljić
Physicists have for the first time stopped and extinguished a light pulse... Read >
In politics, one way to make your belief in alternative energy seem feasible... Read >
If you read almost any science blog other than mine, you're probably aware... Read >
In ancient Egypt, the heart was the key to a happy afterlife. It lived on after... Read >
While I'm safely removed from the dating pool, Stephanie Street is not... Read >
Once upon a time, wealthy white women virtue signaled to other wealthy white... Read >
Understanding Expected Limits, Observed Limits, Exclusion Regions In Particle Physics Graphs
I recently got engaged in a conversation with a famous retired mathematician / cosmologist about the phenomenology of Higgs bosons in the Standard Model of particle physics, and very soon we ended up discussing a graph produced by the CMS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which details ...
Establishing Benchmarks For Use Of AI In Fundamental Science: Two Proposals To Move Forward
These days I am in the middle of a collaborative effort to write a roadmap for the organization of infrastructures and methods for applications of Artificial Intelligence in fundamental science research. In so doing I wrote a paragraph concerning benchmarks and standards. I thought this could be ...
Thanks To 2024 PT5, Earth Now Has Two Moons
Starting tonight, and lasting until Thanksgiving, Earth has a second moon.Our Mini Me is named 2024 PT5, an Arjuna asteroid discovered on August 7th of this year by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. Arjuna asteroids are defined as small objects "moving in orbits with low eccentricity ...
Optimization In Valencia
Last week I was in Valencia, to attend the fourth MODE Workshop on Differentiable Programming for Experiment Design. It was a great meeting, with 80 participants eager to discuss their latest results in application of complex deep neural network models and similar concoctions to problems in fundamental ...
Mercury Emissions Are In Decline Yet Doomsday Prophets Claim They Are Up
If you read environmental groups, we are closer to our doom than ever. Bees are nearly extinct, cell phones are causing cancer, and hydroelectric power is devastating the land.None of those are true yet they all have claims found in journals and in media. So it has been with mercury emissions, ...
Simulation Predicts 50% Of Recurring El Niño Events Could Be Extreme In 25 Years
The recurring El Niño phenomenon was in full force from mid-2023 to mid-2024 and as predicted it brought higher temperatures. In this case, it brought the highest temperatures since accurate records have been kept, for 12 straight months.A team of climate scientists created a numerical simulation ...
Lithium-Ion Batteries Need Help To Enter The 21st Century, Manganese May Be It
With a 4th generation nuclear plant finally getting built in the U.S., 30 years after the federal government blocked all advanced energy research, there are so few old environmentalists still in power that alternative energy wishful thinking can make way for science. They aren't going without a ...
Does Air Quality Cause Postpartum Depression?
New mothers are under a lot of pressure. They are told they have to breastfeed and if they don't, the formula they use may cause their child to have worse grades in school. And if the government shuts down formula factories for no coherent reason and imports aren't allowed because the identical ...
Smarter Soybeans Mean Affordable Food In Poorer Regions
It is easy for wealthy countries to spend $135 billion on an organic food process that uses higher quantities of older, more toxic pesticides at greater environmental strain, because it is a niche luxury item.In countries that are poor, which often means outside natural breadbasket climates ...
Bacterial Genes Can Be Genetic Shapeshifters
Prokaryotes, single-cell organisms such as bacteria, undergo inversions which cause a physical flip of a segment of DNA and change an organism’s genetic identity the way you might change a wig. They can occur within a single gene, in defiance of the more common 'one gene codes for one protein' ...
Wuhan Seafood Market: Evidence Of COVID-19 Origins Revealed
When COVID-19 broke out, it was a US election year and that meant a lot of common sense gave way to politics. Democrats charged that then-President Trump was putting lives at risk by telling FDA to fast-track a vaccine, after insisting that closing airports to China was racist and xenophobic because ...
Normal Sleep Duration 50% Less Common After A Stroke
Getting enough sleep is correlated to brain and heart health and after a stroke that is even more important. A new survey finds that is when people who need it are least likely to get it. A cohort of 39,559 people were asked every two years how much sleep they usually get at night on weekdays ...
Humans Age In Two Bursts, At 44 And 60
Aging is not a smooth and gradual process. For instance, around 6.5% of people aged between 40 and 59 have coronary artery disease, a prevalence which jumps to 19.8% for people aged 60 to 79. Research inspired by such observations and published in the journal Nature Aging, has found that aging ...
Shorter Course Of Post-Mastectomy Radiation With Breast Reconstruction Is Safe And Effective
A multi-institutional study has found that a shorter course of post-mastectomy radiation, combined with breast reconstruction can time from 25 to 16 treatment sessions while remaining safe and effective.Breast cancer is the second most frequently diagnosed cancer for American women and nearly 40% ...
Laughter Exercise Could Be Treatment For Dry Eye Disease
Dry eye disease is a chronic condition estimated to affect around 360 million people. Common symptoms include uncomfortable, red, scratchy or irritated eyes.Anecdotal claims are that laughter therapy alleviates depression, anxiety, stress, and chronic pain, while strengthening immune function but ...
Mpox Vaccine Effective In Preventing Infection
A health data simulation has concluded that a single dose of the Modified vaccinia Ankara-Bavarian Nordic (MVA-BN) was 58% effective in protecting again mpox infection, a disease caused by infection with the Monkeypox virus, which is most likely in men who have sex with men and which ...
Independent Voters Decide Elections, But Undecided Voters Least Likely To Vote
Get-out-the-vote campaigns matter, which is why U.S. political parties encourage those in their tribe to vote by mail long before any controversies can change their mind. Voting is so predictable that about six percent of voters actually decide the election.Passion motivates, and that is shown ...
Astrologers Deduce Personalities As Poorly As Anyone Else
Astrology is one of those things that makes no sense to literate people. The position of stars a billion light-years away determined your personality, but if you are in the eastern world that personality could be completely different than if you were born 2000 miles west? See: I was a Virgo this ...
Did Ancient Turks Beat The Greeks To Precession By 10,000 Years?
If you ever get the chance to visit Turkey, I encourage you to do so. Like Civil War battlefields in the southern US, you can trip and stumble across something old - except in the case of Turkey it could be 2,000 years old.Some sites are archaeological research and you can't just wander around ...
When Did Humans Migrate To Australia?
Every country has people claiming to be native now, whereas in previous generations if you were born there, you were native. In reality, outside the cradle in Africa, no one is native.Everyone was an immigrant, and over time everyone calling themselves native to an area now stole land from someone ...
Slaves Of Satan: A Diabolical Subjugation Theory Of Everything
Do you think the 2008 financial meltdown was caused by religious evil? I don't, I think it was caused by populism in Congress that made it a potential prison sentence to deny anyone a mortgage and guaranteed mortgages for unqualified people.(1)If you instead think it was evil, "Slaves of Satan" ...
Choosing Between Inquiry-Based Learning And Direct Learning
Inquiry-based learning is at the heart of the controversial California Math Framework. Rather than teaching students through rote learning, which instructors believe gives a false sense of virtuosity that comes undone when students have to think for themselves and do difficult problems, students ...
Fit Fat: Exercise Helps Even If You Aren't Thin
Influences buoyed by epidemiological claims about gimmick diets can make fitness intimidating but ignore them. Even if you don't lose weight, if you exercise your belly fat is still going to be healthier than someone who does nothing.It just takes some consistency. Exercising burns calories ...
Robotic Leg With Artificial Muscles Can Walk And Jump Across Unstable Terrain
Robots have a 200-year-old problem: motors. Even walking robots feature arms and legs that are powered by motors and that is a barrier to helping the living but a new muscle-powered robotic leg can jump and move and fast while detecting and reacting to obstacles. As in humans and animals, ...
The answers to the title questions are, No, Yes, and why not. What I have been doing instead... more »
Sheer beauty — a beautiful Euhoplites ammonite from Folkstone, UK. These lovelies have a pleasing... more »
March is here, and with it begins a season of intense travel for me - something which for some... more »
This plant above is what is regarded as a typical fern. However, a quite different looking type... more »
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