Up-to-date With The Big Bang, Mass, And Protons
First Nation Shell Middens And True Oysters
What Will It Take For Real Farming In Space?
The Analogy: A Powerful Instrument For Physics...
Blood samples of pregnant women have detectable levels of chemicals and that... Read >
Climate has always shifted but concerns about faster changes brought on by... Read >
If you read almost any science blog other than mine, you're probably aware... Read >
The Biden administration recently issued a new report showing causal links... Read >
In British Iron Age society, land was inherited through the female line and... Read >
During Christmas holidays I tend to indulge in online chess playing a bit too... Read >
Homeopathic Effects Of Pesticides? And Climate Change Will Make It Worse
A recent paper claims that even at low doses pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides are changing the behavior of insects.Though they are not able to show how it is happening, the authors use 'needs more testing' rhetoric to call on governments to ban chemicals until it is certain there is no unintended ...
Why Measure The Top Quark Production Cross Section?
As part of my self-celebrations for XX years of blogging activities, I am reposting here (very) old articles I wrote over the years on topics ranging from Physics to Chess to anything in between. The post I am recycling today is one that describes for laymen a reason why it is interesting to continue ...
The Buried Lottery
As part of my self-celebrations for having survived 20 years of blogging (the anniversary was a few days ago, see my previous post), I am re-posting a few representative, old articles I wrote in my column over the years. The selection will not be representative of the material I covered over all ...
For Christmas, 600,000 Kids Should Get A Biopesticide Against Mosquitoes That Kill
GMOs had quietly been in use for decades when they became controversial - for saving a fruit in Hawaii that legacy techniques like breeding and chemicals had not.The Rainbow Papaya became a home run for genetic engineering, the first genetically rescued organism, and that made it a target for environmental ...
Epidemiologists Can Link Weedkillers To Your Prostate Cancer Even If You Were Never Exposed
A recent epidemiology paper links common weedkillers to prostate cancer and further claims four of them cause death. Obviously they can't show that, there is no plausible biological mechanism, no increase in prostate cancers, and no evidence any of the people who got prostate cancer had contact ...
Environmentalists Should Embrace 'eDNA' Technology
Once upon a time, environmentalists embraced biotechnology as key way to reduce pesticide use. Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring", was a fan of genetic engineering. That was before we all learned that environmental groups are only 'for' something if it means they can raise money being against ...
Knee Point Prediction And Battery Capacity Degradation
Electric cars and solar and wind energy alternative schemes have a few crippling limitations; low energy densities and unavailability when people need energy most. Batteries could help with that second one except current batteries are legacy technology that are held back by subsidies and mandates ...
Bathynomus Vaderi: The Sea Bug Of Your New 'Star Wars' Nightmare
If a giant bọ biển (“sea bug”) in Vietnam hasn't been 'named' by an academic in a journal, does it really exist?Yes, because they are impossible to miss. Isopods of the genus Bathynomus are 10 inches long so they are hard to miss, but discovery is a lucrative business in academia so ...
Optimizing Nature: Biological Mechanism Could Lower Nitrogen Use
Production of most major foods involve nitrate and phosphate fertilizers, but excessive fertilizer use is bad for the environment. That is why scientists came up with modern technologies that use less fertilizer and, on the other end, fewer pesticides. But some countries or processes like ...
Honeybees Are Boutique Agriculture: Here's What Keepers Want Almond Farmers To Do
Despite nearly two decades of marketing campaigns insisting bees are in decline and science is to blame, the data show otherwise. Bees are not entirely irrelevant in the food supply, and do valuable pollination work in nature, but there are 25,000 other species of bees that are important also, ...
MicroRNA And The Microprocessor Inside You
Since being discovered in 1993, microRNAs have gone on to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, thanks to private sector uptake with the COVID-19 vaccines that saved the world during the pandemic that emerged from Wuhan, China in early 2020. Errors in the manufacture of over 1,000 ...
Organic Believer Poisons Herself With A Copper Sulfate Rectal Enema
A whole lot of classic liberals have discovered how goofy their progressive cousins have been for 25 years. All it took for this sudden embrace of critical thinking was for a Republican to say 'maybe he is right on food and medicine' about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.It's not new. When Dr. Alex Berezow ...
Free Health Care Is Not Enough: High Food Inflation Leads To Fewer Cancer Screenings
Over 50,000,000 Americans get subsidized or free health under the Affordable Care Act but that doesn't mean usage of preventive care increased across the board. Instead, a new analysis found that the inflationary spike which led to much higher costs for housing, food, and utilities are barriers ...
The End Of Alcohol Is Nigh
Two Presidents ago, political appointees engaged in behavior that didn't make much sense(1) and had no benefit for public health. For example, they declared there was an epidemic of something they invented called "pre-diabetes" and insisted that smoking cessation tools that were twice as effective ...
Alcohol Increases Your Pain Threshold - And Your Threshold For Inflicting It
"I feel your pain" is a common empathy cliché but we know the opposite is true in some, and it changes how they interact with the world. After Dutch film director Theo van Gogh put out "Submission: Part 1" , which criticized the treatment of women in Islam, he was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri ...
Gift-Giving Is In Our Nature
In ancient civilizations, rulers and nobles exchanged gifts as acts of prestige. Only when Assyria came into existence, and it had a need for manpower and resources to feed its conquering empire, did gifts turn into taxes and government become overlord of its people, who were moved from place to ...
Red Alert Fatigue - Why Americans Are Getting Immune To Political Hysteria
“I am definitely not following the news anymore,” one patient told me when I asked about her political news consumption in the weeks before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. This conversation happened around the time I talked with a local TV channel about why we saw fewer political yard ...
She's Not Going To Propose This Holiday And Here's Why
The Christmas period isn’t just for presents, sparkling lights and too much festive food – it’s also prime time for couples to get engaged. And for heterosexual couples, this is likely to happen in a specific way. The man will do the asking. Traditional views around marriage are changing ...
Rutgers Study - Forcing DEI Programs On People Increases Hostility
If you have done nothing wrong, do you want to be treated like a criminal? That was always the failure of Social Justice Social Science efforts like the Implicit Bias test; you're a racist, the test will show you how racist you are. You may not hate anyone so it would be perfectly understandable ...
Ants Are Like Philadelphia Eagles Fans: They Hold Grudges Forever
I'm a Steelers guy now but I was a late fan. Where I was young in Pennsylvania, three teams in New York and two in Pennsylvania were the same distance to drive - and we did not drive to any of them. So I remained a Cowboys fan.(1) My brother, though, was an Eagles fan of early on. And he's ...
Of Momshells And Snowmanning: How Holidays Change Popular Language
I rarely win when it comes to cultural language stuff. Before 1999, an attractive older woman, for example, was to me a "Momshell" and no woman had any objection to a portmanteau of mom and bombshell (if they heard it - but a woman should not hear it, or your charm goes way down) yet after 1999's ...
Nanopesticides May Be In Our Organic Farming Future
Friends of the Earth and other litigation groups opposed to science are cheering the closure of AquaBounty's AquAdvantage salmon - the poster-child (decades of regulatory roadblocks) for how the US regulatory system is manipulated by lawyers to hold back technology and medicine - but progress marches ...
AI And The Poetry Problem
Artificial Intelligence is artificial, but it is not intelligence. That could change some day but it isn't happening soon, Large Language Models are fine for a few things but limited in most. That is why Ben Affleck can talk in a hurry and assure fellow film creatives that their jobs are safe. ...
The "drone panic" of 2024 easily claims the title of the most absurd astronomy and physics-related... more »
This came up on 2nd November 2024 (give or take a day), a broadcaster objecting to a carbon capture... 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 »
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