Up-to-date With The Big Bang, Mass, And Protons
A Million-Year-Old Mammoth May Hold The Key...
Inflaming The Myths Of COVID-19 Vaccines
Six-muon Events Probe Proton Collision Dynamics
Five Exciting Projects - No, Six
A number of Master courses in the STEM area mandate students to find a research project abroad to which they participate for 3-6 months. Many of the students find projects that arise their interest through internet searches- at least this is the way I got to know a few of them: as I regularly put ...
By Tommaso Dorigo
One Year Internship In Padova For Master Graduates In Sciences
Did you recently finish a Master in a scientific discipline, and wish to do some research before deciding whether to embark in a Ph.D.? Do you fancy coming to Padova and work with me and a team of physicists, computer scientists, and astrophysicists on detector optimization? Do you like the idea ...
By Tommaso Dorigo
The Proton, A Bag Of Garbage
Since most of the building blocks of our own body are protons, the above title might disturb sensitive readers. On the other hand, describing a proton as a bag of garbage has several merits, as it is a fruitful analogy that may be carried forward when we wish to examine experiments that studied ...
By Tommaso Dorigo
Dating A Vampire Hunter? Here Is How To Get Rid Of That Garlic Breath
Halloween is the time of year when you are most likely to find out your significant other is a vampire - or vampire hunter. Sure, vampires can't be real and never have been, there can't really be hunters for those any more than there are ghost hunters, but History Channel is stuffed with people ...
By Hank Campbell
Sugarcane For Biofuels Will Need GMOs
Though there are science and engineering hurdles to overcome, governments are keen on using food for fuel. Corn is most common right now but sugar is also a target for legislators who want to pivot away from conventional energy.Brazil is understandably interested in getting out in front of the ...
By News Staff
Yew Knew This: The Fens Of England Once Held Vast Woodlands
While deforestation has declined rapidly in the last 60 years, clearing trees to make room for farmland was once essential. Even an island like England had farming going back thousands of years. Hundreds of dead tree trunks in the low-lying Fens of eastern England, caught in the machinery ...
By News Staff
Why Does Anyone Still Search For The Loch Ness Monster?
Hugh Gray was taking his usual post-church walk around Loch Ness in Scotland on a November Sunday in 1933. His amble was disrupted when he saw something bobbing above the water two or three feet from him. He quickly snapped several pictures of what he described to the Scottish Daily Record ...
By The Conversation
Enhanced Weathering And Protecting The Climate
Global warming is not new to the history of our planet, and so, by studying previous periods of global warming, scientists hope to uncover secrets that can be used to combat global warming today. The Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum, which occurred some 40 million years ago, has attracted particular ...
By Mark Pierce
Beekeepers Are Wrong About Overwinter Hive Behavior
Honeybees in man-made hives may have been suffering the cold unnecessarily for over a century because commercial hive designs are based on erroneous science, my new research shows.For 119 years, a belief that the way honeybees cluster together gives them a kind of evolutionary insulation has been ...
By The Conversation
Concern About Microplastics From Sex Toys Overblown
Microplastics are a kernel of biological concern that gets magnified by hype, like endocrine "disrupting" chemicals or weedkillers detectable in breast milk. In modern times, we can detect anything in anything, so the 'zero' levels of the 1960s no longer exist, because testing is 1,000,000 times ...
By Hank Campbell
Excess Fluoride In African Wells Linked To Cognitive Impairment In Kids
The benefits of fluoridated water are well-established but when nature rather than science is in charge it can be harmful. The dose makes the poison and over 200 million people worldwide are estimated to be exposed to high fluoride levels in their drinking water. A new study finds that long-term ...
By News Staff
Thanks To Ancient Evolution, Your Body Makes Its Own Anti-Viral Drugs
Antiviral drugs are generally considered to be a 20th century invention. But recent research has uncovered an unexpected facet to your immune system: It can synthesize its own antiviral molecules in response to viral infections. My laboratory studies a protein that makes these natural antiviral ...
By The Conversation
What Does ChatGPT Say About Holiday Eating Health?
Data tools like ChatGPT, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence (if you think a fancy autocomplete is actual AI), have the promise to do a lot of good. There are some concerns about human content 'creators' being replaced but we don't miss the 150,000 fewer bank tellers we had before the rise ...
By Hank Campbell
Murder, Chemicals In Organic Food - Two Ways Thanksgiving Is Hazardous To Your Health
It's that time of year when activists, academics, and social media mavens hoping for media coverage begin to promote worry about Thanksgiving. Some risks are real, even if relatively slight; a lot more people driving mean more accidents and if you have a family member who is an International ...
By Hank Campbell
Is Flossing A Waste Of Time?
Like the CDC manufacturing a prediabetes epidemic and pregnant women getting a scarlet letter if they have a glass of wine while pregnant, flossing seems to be a distinctly American phenomenon. Are we right? The British are famous for bad teeth, for example, and fiscal conservatives will say that's ...
By Hank Campbell
Red Meat Isn't Linked To Heart Inflammation
Some controversial claims by epidemiologists with links to anti-meat groups (Frank Hu, Walter Willett, et al.) suggest that a normal human diet containing meat causes inflammation, which they then link to increased risk of heart disease.A risk factor for a risk factor for a disease isn't very compelling ...
By News Staff
How Would You Interpret 'Blue' And 'Green' If Your Language Lacked Those Words
If you visit Japan, you may be surprised that Japanese traffic lights have blue on go rather than the green in the U.S. Actually, green is the standard there, just as red is, they just have a different definition of green.It is rather common that things which should be basically the same for everyone ...
By News Staff
Absolute Vs Relative Risk: Why Parents Shouldn't Worry About Kids Walking On Halloween
Common sense says that if you have a lot more people walking, often in dark costumes, and just as many people driving, plus more people drinking alcohol than would otherwise occur on a Tuesday, pedestrian fatalities will go up. Common sense is right. They will.But from a relative risk point ...
By Hank Campbell
Why Do Kids With Type 1 Diabetes Take More Psychotropic Medication?
A new analysis found an increasing trend in psychotropic medication dispensation for Swedish children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes. The results from from 2006 to 2019 showed consistent higher use than kids without type 1 diabetes. Epidemiologists will say it makes sense because young ...
By Hank Campbell
The COVID-19 Pandemic Led To 25% More Mental Health Spending On Youths
Spending on mental health for teens and younger rose by 26 percent from March 2020 to August 2022 - but it may be even higher because the analysis only saw families with employer-provided insurance from one group, Castlight Health, which managers employer-sponsored health insurance plans for ...
By News Staff
Most Baby Daddy's Show Positive Co-Parenting
In the United States, 40 percent of births are to unmarried women, and there are nearly 13.6 million single parents raising over 21 million children. In 84 percent of cases, the single-parent homes are women. They are often low income.That doesn't mean the fathers aren't involved. Over than half ...
By News Staff
A Torino Scale For Artificial Intelligence, And What To Do With It
In recent times, artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous. Besides powering our cellphones, directing what advertisements we get when we browse internet or read our emails, and creating content in the media, AI-powered hardware is more and more widespread, including self-driving vehicles, ...
By Tommaso Dorigo
Electric Cars Are The Espresso Machines Of Automobiles
Government forces automobile companies to sell electric cars - and then forces all taxpayers to subsidize the purchases. With mandates and subsidies, there is no free market and that means companies primarily want to make the cars that will generate the most profit, which means the most expensive ...
By Hank Campbell
Interdisciplinary Science, Art, And A Prize Festival At The 8th USERN Congress
The 8th Congress of the USERN Organization took place during the past three days (November 8-10, 2023) at the RAU University in Yerevan, Armenia, and it was a complete success, which has left me overwhelmed by the amount of great interdisciplinary science, fantastic art in multiple forms, ...
By Tommaso Dorigo
A brief personal update as to what I have been doing.  There has been much interesting science...  more »
This plant above is what is regarded as a typical fern. However, a quite different looking type...  more »
A long time ago, this column used to report a lot of detail of my personal life and of daily news...  more »
By Anonymous
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