Does Learning A Foreign Language Stimulate...
Six-muon Events Probe Proton Collision Dynamics
A Million-Year-Old Mammoth May Hold The Key...
By Irena Šoljić
Up-to-date With The Big Bang, Mass, And Protons
These days I am in Paris, for a short vacation - for once, I am following my... Read >
Today, elites like Robert Downey Jr. virtue signal their wealth by taking pristine... Read >
White environmentalists in rich European countries still maintain a kind of... Read >
In the future, people in need of an organ transplant will have one grown using... Read >
At the Hilazon Tachtit cave site, before it was Israel, before King David even... Read >
What if nearly everything that’s been written about this month’s Intergenerational... Read >
Epidemiology Bogus Attacks: Now Diet Coke Causes Autism?
If you have been in science media for any period of time, you have seen a predictable pattern; epidemiologists look through columns and rows of foods people claim they eat and diseases or lack thereof and if they get enough to declare "statistical significance" they write a paper noting down at ...
Mesmerizing Shapes - Symmetries According To An AI
Having spent the past 12 months coding up an end-to-end model of an astrophysics experiment, with the sole aim of searching for an optimal solution for its design by use of stochastic gradient descent, I am the least qualified person to judge the aesthetic value of the results I am finally getting ...
The Mystery Of Glassy Liquid Transitions
Light is the most famous thing that is two distinct entities at once - a wave and a particle - but glass is nearly as mysterious. And not well understood.We think of glass as being transparent and rigid, is a complex and intriguing material but that is only when cooled and its dynamics slow down ...
We Know Very Little About Black Holes
Astronomers have speculated that black holes eat slowly. A recent paper argues that their computer simulation shows just the opposite. Don't get too excited, this is still a computer simulation about theoretical physics, which isn't out there with science-fiction but is limited by the fact ...
Without Climate Lockdowns, US Property Values May Plummet?
Prior to the Olympics in Beijing, China solved a pollution problem they previously claimed they never had by banning all cars except those for communist party elites. It did little for CO2, Beijing had a PM10 (smog) problem, but it showed drastic interventions could help the air.A new paper argues ...
Insecticides For Malaria Control Aren't Perfect - But It Beats Having Dead Children In Poor Countries
Malaria infects 250,000,000 each year and kills nearly 700,000. It is so rare in America that academics and activists can lament chemicals that kill mosquitoes which transmit it to humans, and even block mosquitoes engineered to prohibit reproduction, but the damage is too great to risk on tinkering ...
Kenyan Government Needs To Listen To Farmers - That Will Make Pesticide Usage Safer
In wealthy western breadbaskets like France and the United States, environmental groups who get donations from the $130 billion organic food industry claim it is viable everywhere else too. It's not just that they don't understand agriculture or science, though that is most of it. It is that they ...
With No Evidence Of Harm, Taxpayers Will End Up Paying Environmental Lawyers For PFAS Litigation
With allied epidemiologists placed inside the US Environmental Protection Agency, and scientists pushed to the side, environmentalists feel like they are about to get a win when it comes to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that have been common for 80 years.And it will be a win - for ...
Chewing Gum For Nausea: Science Or Hype?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, chewing gum had a bit of a resurgence. Though gum companies disavow any health benefits - they like being in the candy aisle - people have always used it off-label for various benefits and did so to generate a response against possible virus exposures. People ...
Women And Chronic Lyme Disease
Chronic lyme disease does not exist, but if you say it does long enough, a scholar will begin to study it, and then others will cite 'emerging evidence', and journalists will 'teach the controversy', and soon enough doctors who don't want to get sued will sign off, no differently than California ...
Hypothalamus Differences In Obese People
Obesity is closing in on smoking and alcohol as the top killer among lifestyle diseases. Over 25 percent of the world is overweight and in countries like the UK and US, that number is approaching 70 percent. It is correlated to things like heart disease.Is it a genetic issue, and therefore ...
Strawberries: Two Science Reasons They're Bigger And Better This Year
Environmental Working Group, the Extinction Rebellion of affordable produce, is always in a war on strawberries - unless they only contain pesticides their organic industry corporate donors use or sell.For the scientifically literate, those with at least the intellect of 17th century peasants who ...
Antidepressants May Also Improve Memory
A new study finds that while antidepressants reduce negative memories in individuals suffering from depression they may also be improving overall memory function.But don't go all Ozempic and rush to find a boutique physician willing to prescribe them for you, no one knows how antidepressants work ...
21%: Marijuana Addiction In Washington State, The First State To Make It Legal For Recreation
A recent analys if of primary care patients at Kaiser in Washington state, where recreational cannabis use is legal, found that addiction was common among patients who used it. Moderate and severe cases were more prevalent among patients who reported recreational use. The cross-sectional study ...
#MedEd: How Well Doctors Use Social Media To Combat Misinformation
If you go to social media, you can see a lot of suspect claims about fad diets, unapproved medical devices, therapies, and conspiracy theories. Many of them have names with "Dr." attached.How is the public to know a "Dr." may be a PhD or an EdD or an osteropath or someone else who didn't go to ...
Epidemiology Fallout: Heart Attack Survivors Ignore LDL Cholesterol Risk Because Of Correlation Disrepute
The American Heart Association is concerned that stroke and heart attack survivors don't think enough about 'risk' of LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, now colloquially termed 'bad' cholesterol. The public are not wrong to be jaded by epidemiology,(1) the EPA is overrun with it and now ...
How Did Neanderthals Come Up With The Idea For Birch Tar? New Paper Reveals Cognition Clues
Both Neanderthal and early modern humans used birch tar - the first time in known history that a new material came into use.Coming up with it is one thing, but finding a way to scale it is more challenging.To get answers, scholars used Petri net models to try and infer what kinds of cognition were ...
COVID-19 Lockdown Fallout: We May Have Failed School Kids
When a pandemic is happening in real time, it's only possible to know in hindsight what was a successful mitigation strategy, what was hype to help a presidential candidate, or even what was suppressed for geopolitical interests.There is no question mitigation was good, but political and corporate ...
'Urine' Group HHRA - 7 People, No Revenue, But Claims They Are Above Scrutiny
In the past, you may have seen various 'we detected X in urine' papers endorsed by suspect names like homeopathy believer Phil Landrigan and endorsed by organic industry apologist Chuck Benbrook.What do such claims even mean? In science, nothing. We can detect anything in anything now, but groups ...
Subsidized Housing Makes Inequality Worse
With rampant inflation, an economy whose only baffling bragging right is that it gained back 80 percent of the jobs lost since the Biden administration began, and mortgage rates increasing the most since Jimmy Carter was president, calls are on to subsidize more housing for the poor.It is an equity ...
The Best Way To Boost Affordable Housing Is Not Penalzing AirBnB - It's Less Government
The Victorian government, like many governments around the world, has announced new regulations on short-stay accommodation. The government says Victoria has more than 36,000 short-stay places, which are reducing the number of homes available for long-term rental. Other states have capped the number ...
Aspartame Doesn't Cause Cancer - IARC Simply Went From Bad To Worse
Half a decade ago, France's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) tried to fight for its credibility in the face of a scientific onslaught against their latest epidemiology findings by actually lowering the "risk" of something.Like everyone else, when it was announced they were 'studying' ...
Canadians Should Fund Transgender Surgery
In the field of gender-affirming care for the LBGTQ+ community, there are drastic solutions - controversial if it involves those unable to grant real informed consent - but there are also therapeutic benefits to minimally invasive procedures, write a group in Canadian Medical Association Journal ...
In 2023, Coming Out Is Still Complicated, And Not Just Because Of Straight Family Members
With historically high levels of LGBTQ2+ visibility, hardly a TV show exists where no matter how small the character list, someone isn't a sexual minority, a new paper says that coming out can still mean drama - even from those inside the LGBTQ2+ community if you don't match the style and tone ...
How can you as a person who is not a scientist know if a given claim of having found alien life... more »
There has been a lot of talk recently of Betelgeuse possibly going supernova this century or not... more »
A long time ago, this column used to report a lot of detail of my personal life and of daily news... more »
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