Formaldehyde: The Carcinogen That Wasn’t
Getting To The Heart Of The Coronavirus Pandemic
By W. Glen Pyle
What It Means To Be Anti-Science
Drugs For Different Bodies: The Female Side...
Humans may have the most complex breast milk of all mammals. Milk from a human... Read >
If you were following actual science during the alternative energy debate of... Read >
Squid Drop is an iPhone game* based on the premise that squid are negatively... Read >
If someone elderly with blood clots and cancer treatment dies from respiratory... Read >
In 11 multi-method experiments involving more than 4,000 total participants... Read >
Computers are well-known for being able to recover information quickly - a... Read >
Playing With Radioactivity
Broadly speaking, radioactivity is not something one should mess with just as a pastime. Indeed, ionizing radiation has the potential of causing carcinogenic mutations in your cells DNA, as well as produce damage to cell tissue. Indeed, it makes me chuckle that until 50 years ago or so kids could ...
2020 Review, 2021 Agenda
Everybody would agree that 2020 was a difficult time for all of us - the pandemic forced on us dramatic changes in our way of living, working, and interacting with one another; and let's leave alone the horrible, avoidable death toll that came with it. Notwithstanding, for some reason it was a ...
Galactic Bromance: This Heavenly Duo Travel The Universe Together, Unbound By Any Star
An international research team has discovered an exotic binary system composed of two young planet-like objects, orbiting each other - and not a star. They are planet-like because they look like giant exoplanets but they formed in the same way as stars, proving that the mechanisms driving star ...
Jupiter And Saturn Put Up Quite A Show
In what is a once-in-a-few-lifetimes experience, I witnessed today the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the evening sky (with a crescent moon thrown in to boot). While every sixteen years or so the two planets end up angularly close because of their different orbital period (Jupiter revolves ...
The Tsunami At Ancient Tel Dor
Along the coast of Tel Dor, a maritime city
in northwest Israel
occupied from the Middle Bronze II period, 2000 BC, through the Crusader period, there is a marine shell and sand layer from nearly 10,000 years ago, but it's in the middle of a large ancient wetland layer spanning as far ...
E-Waste Is Declining, Government Needs To Change Laws To Keep Up - And Get Out Of The Recycling Business
When your Xbox is a gaming console and a 4K Blu-Ray player, you don't need two devices, and when your phone is a camera and a video recorder, there are two fewer things to buy - and eventually throw away.As smart devices have become more integrated, and more commodities like a dishwasher than technology ...
The Dinosaurs Of Ireland
Most of Ireland’s rocks are the wrong age for dinosaur fossils, either too old or too young. That doesn't mean dinosaurs weren't there, it means fossilization is a true anomaly and finding fossils makes it even more challenging to have hard evidence.That has now been achieved. Two fossil bones ...
Cooking With Wood Increases Pollution: Real Pollution, Not The PM2.5 Virtual Kind
In 2013, the U.S. government told the World Bank they would not help fund centralized energy in developing nations unless it used their pet projects, wind and solar. Which developing nations could not use much less afford.We set back sanitation and hygiene in places that need it most and forced ...
Why Haven't Crocodiles Evolved Much Since The Age Of The Dinosaurs?
A lot has changed since the age of dinosaurs hundreds of millions of years ago. Humans didn't exist and dinosaurs are gone. Yet crocodiles are still here and, unlike humans, have not evolved much by comparison.They even look similar to ones from the Jurassic period some 200 million years ago. ...
Bitter Or Sweet? It's Not Just Preference, Tongues Have Evolved In Different Areas
An American might ask if the mayonnaise is spicy while an Asian will warn them they only think they want the hot sauce on Asian food. A woman is more likely to be better at detecting bitter tastes than men.The difference is not cultural, that some people are timid when it comes to food, is it anatomical ...
R0 And Why We'll Need 70 Percent Vaccination To Stop COVID-19
It has been clear for a while that, at least in the U.S., the only way out of the coronavirus pandemic will be through vaccination. The rapid deployment of coronavirus vaccines is underway, but how many people need to be vaccinated in order to control this pandemic?I am a computational biologist ...
Vitamin D Linked To Autism Spectrum Disorder
A deficiency in Vitamin D on the mother's side could explain why Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnoses are three times more common in boys, but don't start buying supplements. This was in rats and rats are not little people, there is a lot of ground to cover before this has human relevance.Low vitamin ...
Ivermectin Is No Longer Banned For Reducing Mild COVID-19 And A Small Pilot Study Gives It Some Hope For Approval
The NIH Treatment Guidelines Panel recently changed ivermectin from firmly “against” to the neutral “neither for nor against” when it comes to mild COVID-19 treatment. Ivermectin, developed in 1975, led to the eradication of numerous parasitic diseases and earned the 2015 Nobel Prize for ...
Judge Issues Decree Against Valley Processing, Inc. For Contamination Of Juice Sent To Schools, Safeway, And More
In 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration went after Valley Processing, Inc. of Sunnyside, Washington, along with the company’s owner and president, Mary Ann Bliesner, due to inorganic arsenic and patulin toxins at levels that can pose health risks to consumers. Arsenic can be found ...
Vaping Flavor Chemicals In Huge Quantities Can Damage Heart Cells In A Dish, But Where Is The Human Relevance?
A new paper claims that people vaping instead of smoking are putting their hearts at risk but their study does not show that. Instead, they mixed chemicals in Petri dishes with heart cells and used mice. Both of those are fine exploratory experiments but they are scientifically invalid to make ...
Longitudinal Study Shows Vaping Is Not As Harmful As Smoking
Smoking is on the decline, and that's a good thing. The evidence is clear that smoking kills. But what about tobacco? A few years ago groups like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control began to suggest nicotine was as harmful as smoking; meaning it was not the smoke at all. There was no evidence ...
Which Type Of Digital Hoarder Are You?
How many emails are in your inbox? If the answer is thousands, or if you often struggle to find a file on your computer among its cluttered hard drive, then you might be classed as a digital hoarder. In the physical world, hoarding disorder has been recognized as a distinct psychiatric condition ...
Using Science To Make Informed Decisions About Risk
Every day we are inundated
with various social media posts and news sources telling us about what does or
does not work, that some things may be harmful, or that a product is not safe
because it contains a chemical that causes cancer or other adverse health
effects in animals. You may ...
13 Ways To Get Better COVID-19 Restriction Uptake
It's well-known that infectious disease mitigation worksl if people voluntarily follow the rules and guidelines of experts but what has happened instead is resentment of what some perceive as social authoritarian decision-makers calling the shots.What would be better for everyone at risk of ...
Is The Dunning - Kruger Effect An Artifact ?
Ever had a nervous breakdown by reading Facebook threads where absolutely incompetent people entertain similar ignoramuses by providing explanations of everything from quantum physics to the way vaccines work? Or did you ever have to apply yoga techniques to avoid jumping into a bar conversation ...
Model That Claimed Only Lockdown Works To Prevent Coronavirus Spread Was Flawed, Shows New Look
If you believe the Chinese government, they've had basically no meaningful COVID-19 deaths since March. I'd also like to sell you a wet market in Wuhan. Believing a dictatorship that has routinely lied has been disastrous. It was disastrous for the reputation of the World Health Organisation, who ...
Either Negative Reviews Boost Sales Or They Won't Stop Good Products
A recent computer model finds that it doesn't hurt a product to negative reviews and it may even help.A flawless product does not exist, people are suspicious if they see no bad reviews, and using game theory, the researchers analyzed how negative reviews affect sales. The model had two sets of ...
COVID-19 - Things Are Starting To Get Better
A meta-analysis of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the 2019 form of coronavirus that led to the COVID-19 pandemic, found that the chance an infected person showing symptoms was infecting someone else even in their home was only 18%, while it plummeted to 0.7% if they ...
COVID-19: Mask Protections And Modifications Ranked - And 3M Wins
There is no question that masks prevent transmission of airbone viruses that cause diseases flu and COVID-19 but a new paper shows what will maximize their effectiveness.Masks are primarily intended to keep us from spreading germs - a surgeon does not wear a mask because she is worried about her ...
A Theory of Everything has been the subject of many pages of journals and of much more ink spilled... more »
In 1996 (or thereabouts) the new Meteorology building was opened at the University of Reading.... more »
The Fossil Birds of the Jehol Biota have caused an international stir amongst palaeontologists... more »
It is not a secret that I love chess, and that whenever I have the chance to play some online blitz... more »
Hello! Years and years have gone by without a blog. For reasons I do not understand, I appear to... more »
