Stop Worrying About A 'Dark Matter Hurricane'
Handshake Chain Through History
Machine Learning For Jet Physics
Gender Ideology In Science
Does the world need another sweetener? With debates raging over cane sugar... Read >
This may be a welcome change from the climate change discussion which got... Read >
Oprah Winfrey introduced the so-called "first pregnant man" to viewers... Read >
Infertility affects about 10 percent of couples and among them are one in 500... Read >
As many as three million Americans, an alarming one percent of the U.S. population... Read >
It's been a while since I last discussed something personal in this column... Read >
We Can Now Hear Sound On Mars
NASA's InSight experiment landed on Mars November 26th after traveling 300 million miles over seven months. Though it is there to analyze seismic activity. its seismometer and air pressure sensor and picked up different vibrations on Dec. 1st. The slight hum turned out to be 10-15 mph winds ...
No Need To Be Scared Of Asteroids - Far Less Scary Than Lightning
Short
summary - the risk from larger asteroids of 1 km upwards, large enough
to have some global effects is more or less retired as a result of
astronomical searches for the last few decades. There is still a risk
from smaller asteroids, but in most cases we’d be able to deflect them ...
HAT-P-11b: An Exoplanet Inflated Like A Helium Balloon
A distant planet has an abundance of helium in its atmosphere so great that it has swollen to resemble an inflated balloon.The helium of HAT-P-11b, 124 light years from Earth and in the Cygnus constellation, is blown away from the day side of the planet to its night side at over 10,000 km ...
Firenado: How A Bad Luck Combination Led To California's Fire-Generated Vortex 17,000 Feet In The Air
The Carr Fire in Shasta and Trinity Counties began July 23rd, 2018 after a tire blew out on a trailer and the rim made sparks on the pavement. setting dry vegetation in an area historically dry ablaze.That's simple bad luck but it caused 359 square miles to burn, estimated to be the seventh largest ...
Fact Or Fiction? Rollback Of Obama WOTUS Regulations Will Endanger Our Water Supply
If you are reading media claims about President Trump and the Waters of the United States, they are using terms like "unprecedented" and "sabotage" regarding rollback of some 2015 Obama restrictions that environmentalists had lobbied for and won. Yet these new regulations never took effect ...
Jurassic Ichthyosaur Fossil So Well-preserved The Skin Is Still Soft
The ichthyosaur (literally ‘fish-lizard’) lived in what is today southern Germany during the Jurassic Period some 180 million years ago. The two-meter long reptile swam in the vast ocean that is now, after climate and geological changes, Europe.Researchers have analyzed the remains of an ichthyosaur ...
No Need To Worry About ‘Great Dying’ - About Permian Extinction 262 Million Years Ago
This is running as a scary story in the news today. I’m asked if it means we are all going to die. No, it does not. That was a 10 °C rise and we are headed towards 3.6 °C at maximum with the Paris pledges already. With the Paris agreement if they continue to ramp up the pledges they ...
Plastic Is Here To Stay – An Environmentalist And An Archaeologist Discuss What Happens Next
This is an article from Head to Head, a series in which academics from different disciplines chew over current debates. Let us know what else you’d like covered – all questions are welcome..Sharon George: Plastics are ingrained in our everyday lives. Since 1950, it’s estimated that we have ...
Science 2.0 Explains: What Is RNAi?
In 8,000 B.C., when there were only about 10 million people on the entire planet, the boom and bust of famine and feast and wondering when the next meal would be was already a cultural concern. And so agriculture was created. Mankind set out to do genetic engineering, doing RNA Interference ...
Fruit Flies Have The Cognitive Ability To Learn Sexual Preferences - And Perhaps Transmit Them Culturally
Do Drosophila, commonly called fruit flies, have culture?Culture, lasting changes in a group that cannot be ascribed to genetic or ecological variation, is obviously a human quality, and it may be found in other vertebrates like some other primates and birds. A new computer simulation says it may ...
With CRISPR, Let's Not Make The Cultural Mistakes Of Stem Cells All Over Again
When Dr. He Jiankui
announced that he had used CRISPR to prevent future HIV infection in twin girls, there was outrage across the United States, but most of it had nothing to do with science. It was instead concern that a mad scientist with suspect ethics had used a new technology to edit ...
Oxygen-Producing Photosynthesis Could Have Been Happening A Billion Years Earlier
Oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere is necessary for complex forms of life, which use it during aerobic respiration to make energy. The levels of oxygen dramatically rose in the atmosphere around 2.4 billion years ago, and speculation is that is when organisms called cyanobacteria, which perform ...
More Brown Fat May Be A Solution For The Obesity Crisis
Obesity is a disease where people accumulate more and more fat. When they reach a certain point, their fat stops working and they develop disease, such as type 2 diabetes. But not all fat is bad. The fat that accumulates in obesity is called white fat, but a second form of fat (brown fat) could ...
Ropadoxuridine-A New Cancer Prodrug To Safely Boost The Efficacy Of Radiation
Radiation is one of the most common treatments used in fighting cancer with roughly 60% of cancer patients benefiting from it alone or in combination with chemotherapy. Radiation is used to either destroy tumors completely or to shrink them prior to surgical removal. Previous research had led to ...
Compounds From Coffee Offer Hope For Alzheimer's And Parkinson's Diseases.
An exciting new class of potential inhibitors of both Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease has been isolated from coffee. Dr. Donald Weaver, co-director of the Kembril Brain Institute in Toronto, Canada explains: “The consumption of coffee seems to have a correlation to a decreased ...
You, 50 Years Later - New Study Says Your Personality Does Change
Is your personality set in stone at a young age? If you were a jerk in high school will you still be a jerk at 60? Not necessarily. And what changes there are may not be defining. The only time you might see a big disparity could be when comparing yourself to others.Social psychologists consider ...
700 US Women Still Die Each Year From Causes Related To Pregnancy - Congress Wants To Know Why
Over 700 women in the US die per year from (sometimes unknown) causes that involve pregnancy or childbirth and the same Republican Congress we are often told doesn't care about pregnant women just devoted $60 million to finding out why it's happening. Good for them. The bill defines a "pregnancy ...
15th Century Fishing Fashion: Thigh-High Leather Boots?
A new sewage treatment project in London discovered something in the mud of the Thames; the remains of a human, leg bones still covered by thigh-high leather boots.When you say thigh-high leather boots it sounds much sexier than fishing waders, which are not made of leather any more because, let's ...
Gone With The Wind Is The Most Successful Movie Of All Time, But The Wizard Of Oz Is Most 'Influential'
There's no question "Gone With The Wind" is the most successful movie of all time, when you count tickets sold, but it's not the most influential. Nor is "Star Wars." A network analysis instead shows that title goes to "The Wizard Oz", the definitive Judy Garland film. released in the same year ...
NAFTA 2.0 - A Win For Farmers And The Environment
The North American Free Trade Agreement won't see its 25th birthday. The United States, Canada, and Mexico have signed on the dotted line for its replacement, The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement. The debate fell outside usual positions. Free trade is the hallmark of Republicans, they ...
Superhero Science: Ant-Man And The Wasp Shouldn't Be Able To Breathe At Insect Size, Here's Why They Can
At insect size, miniature superheroes Ant-Man and The Wasp should be dead in minutes. Since they did not train on the top of Mt. Everest, they would be unable to overcome the atmospheric density they would have to face at tiny size, and that's without getting into the metabolism issues.Ant-Man ...
Like Vaccines? Thank The Military
Like that your child's modern baby seat can't erupt in flame? Thank the Roman military of almost 2,000 years ago. Like heating up your recyclable pouch of avocado toast points in the microwave? Thank the American military of World War II,(1) when Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer discovered their ...
The Guardian Lets Legal Clerk Erin Brockovich Trump Biology, Toxicology, And Chemistry
The Guardian, official newspaper of those in the anti-science left who still like to pretend they love science, knows what pays the bills...and it ain't science.Yes, some real scientists write there, because it's mainstream media and scientists who do outreach want to be in as many publications ...
Sir David Attenborough Tells The UN Global Warming Is Causing The 'Collapse Of Civilization'
In 2006, former Vice-President and global warming clarion Al Gore said we only had 10 years to stop CO2 emissions or it would be too late. More cynical people noted that he came up with that 10-year figure because it was two years from his rematch contest for U.S. President plus eight he expected ...
The Titanic, the famed cruise liner that sunk to the North Atlantic Ocean floor in 1912, was discovered... more »
Colorectal cancer (CRC) represents an important cause of death, in both developed and developing... more »
Neil deGrasse Tyson PhD invoked the
fact he had a PhD and Tchiya Amet El Maat did not have a... more »
According to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI), nearly 2.5% of all... more »
When I took Hwy 88-E toward Fermilab, shortly after landing at the Chicago O' Hare Airport... more »
