A Million-Year-Old Mammoth May Hold The Key...
By Irena Šoljić
Up-to-date With The Big Bang, Mass, And Protons
Six-muon Events Probe Proton Collision Dynamics
Does Learning A Foreign Language Stimulate...
So the kids fell asleep late last night after finally crashing from their Halloween... Read >
A week ago, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered... Read >
Since the dawn of civilization, people have searched for the secret to long... Read >
A common weedkiller in the U.S., atrazine, already suspected of causing sexual... Read >
It used to be common for physicians to give common-sense advice to patients... Read >
Do you believe the telegraph was giving telegraph operators cancer? If not... Read >
K-Capture Muon Tomography: A Proof Of Principle
In a recent post in this blog I discussed the idea of exploiting the properties of negative muons for a new kind of imaging technique of unknown volumes of material. The idea is based on the fact that negative muons stopped inside matter have a lifetime that is modified by nuclear interactions ...
In The Quantum World, You Can Get Something From Nothing
Creativity occurs whenever novel connections are made, and often, this occurs by accident. Scientists from the University of Manchester, who were working on the flow of “low valence” electrons, ended up discovering that the old adage, “You can't get something from nothing”, isn’t strictly ...
Detecting Seafood Fraud Using Chemical Maps
Food fraud is common. Probably 25 percent of imported food with an "organic" label is just conventional food and even in America some organic farmers are just selling regular food. In Europe, everyone knew that Russia was not magically producing all of the organic food they were selling to France ...
20 Post-Doctoral Research Positions Open At INFN
Are you a recently (<8 years) appointed Ph.D. graduate in fundamental physics, who wants to work in Italy? This post is for you. The INFN is opening 20 positions for foreigners who would like to join a group of research in one of the INFN sections (there are 25 across Italy). The positions are ...
Lightning, Not Utilities, Are Major Cause Of California Fires
California is primarily a desert and with no way to generate enough of its own electricity, the state must run power lines from other states through dry areas to keep a growing population in air conditioning. When wildfires occur the state routinely blames utilities and since utilities are created ...
The Best Book Of The 21st Century
The book’s reviewers offer no clue that Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is the most important book published in this century. And it is that. Its fictional form makes climate science and climate remediation readable. It’s scary (pulling no punches about current perils and ...
Environmental Governance
Lately I’ve been thinking and writing about environmental governance. Here’s a summary. It has to do with the consequences of not thinking systemically; combining top-down and bottom-up policies; technology forcing; fairness and the SDGs; and prospects of violence.First, as we know, some people ...
The Incredibly Soft Material In Earth’s Mantle
The theory of plate tectonics explains how major landforms and phenomena such as mountains, volcanoes, and earthquakes, are formed by the subterranean movement of geologic plates. Plate tectonics are also responsible for driving old crust sitting on the margins of oceans down to the earth’s mantle ...
Marin County, An Anti-Vax Nexus Of California, Has Flipped To Team Science
In "Science Left Behind", Dr. Alex Berezow and I recounted the numerous ways that science denial and acceptance solidly came down along political lines. With minor exceptions, if you found someone who denied climate change, you were going to find a Republican. If you found an anti-vaccine type ...
COVID-19 Vaccination Reduced Odds Of SARS-CoV-2 Infection, As Did Staying In A Separate Room From Infected People
Data from 513 households and 2,053 people participating in the Coronavirus Household Evaluation and Respiratory Testing (C-HEaRT) study from August 2020 to August 2021 in Utah and from September 2020 to August 2021 in New York City, plus data from the SARS-CoV-2 Epidemiology And Response in Children ...
Pulses, And Why Whales Don't Get Sick Swimming
Land mammals such as horses experience ‘pulses’ in their blood when galloping, where blood pressures inside the body go up and down on every stride. In all mammals, average blood pressure is higher in arteries, or the blood exiting the heart, than in veins. This difference in pressure drives ...
Being A Great Drummer May Be Genetic
'Keeping time' is easy for humans, but not all can keep time equally. Some great drummers, and even more guitarists, use a device like a metronome to keep them on a precise beat, while others seem to do it effortlessly.A new study finds human capacity to move in synchrony with a musical beat may ...
Statins Rethink: LDL Cholesterol Alone Has Very Weak Association With Heart Attack, According To A New Paper
What correlation giveth, correlation can taketh away. Statins, taken by some 40 million Americans, may not be helping a lot of them.Statins are used to lower cholesterol levels and reduce their risk of heart disease and stroke. They are endorsed by medical groups and the American Heart Association ...
Disease Spillover Risk Was Oversimplified During The COVID-19 Pandemic - And It's A Chronic Problem In Science Journalism
SAR, R0, these are all terms that became part of the pop culture lexicon during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, because they were used in simplistic fashion they were more helpful for those engaged in wedge politics than the public.Part of the problem can be laid at the feet of social media ...
64% Of Women Report Premenstrual Syndrome - That Makes It A Public Health Issue
In 460 BC, Hippocrates described the earliest documented premenstrual syndrome, but it wasn't until 1931 that Dr. Robert Frank gave it a modern look with his paper on "premenstrual tension." In 1953 it was re-branded "premenstrual syndrome" because it covered so many symptoms. About 150.By the ...
Just Correlation: Sleep Apnea And Cancer Risk
Sleep apnea is a condition where people experience partial or complete obstruction of their airways during sleep and stop breathing several times a night. It can can manifest as loud snoring, gasping, choking and daytime sleepiness and is believed to affect at least 7 percent of the population ...
Why More Doctors Stopped Working During The COVID-19 Pandemic
If you are in a business where costs are both fixed and high, but your number of customers is slashed due to government regulations and public concern about leaving the house, it may not be worthwhile to continue. In more heavy-handed states like California, thousands of restaurants went out of ...
Supreme Court Got Some 'splainin To Do
The way Chief Justice Roberts tosses red herrings, he could get a job at Seattle’s Pike Market. The court may make unpopular decisions, he says, but that’s no reason to question the Supremes’ legitimacy. He’s right, but he’s right in a way that totally misses the point.Here are a half ...
Even Before The Pandemic, 20% Of Kids Reported Depression Symptoms
Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, from school closures to lockdowns, were important for health officials and implemented even after factoring in concerns about long-term psychological effects.If results from 2015-2020 surveys are an indication, depression cases may go up sharply in future data ...
Digital Self-Harm Is A Mental Health Cry For Help
The teen years are a challenging time for people transitioning from adolescence to adulthood, especially if they have mental health issues.The online posting, sending or sharing of hurtful content is like being trapped in a small town, except possibly the whole world sees it. So why would someone ...
Will You Pay More If You Like The Feel Of A Smartphone? Probably
A recent survey found that even if the cost was 10X as much (though still a small amount), users would pay more if they liked the feel of a smartphone cover. This means designers might benefit more factoring that into product design.The caveat; this was a small number of students and Hiroshima ...
Don't Be A Charles About Science: The New Prince Of Wales Should Divest From Mystical Organic Beliefs
England is in crisis. They lost a beloved figurehead this month but for decades prior were losing scientific ground. If you look for the home of the modern organic food and anti-vaccine movements, you find their nexus in 1990s England.The primary royal behind those beliefs is now King Charles III ...
Is The Art Community Sexist?
In the art world, there is a gaping gender imbalance when it comes to male and female artists.In the National Gallery of Australia, only 25% of the Australian art collection is work by women. This is far better than the international standard where roughly 90% of all artworks exhibited in major ...
Confidential Computing Has Made Data Sharing Safer
The internet creates and propagates data by default. Decades since its development, we now live in the Age of Big Data. From recommendation systems to drug discovery, big data has enabled unprecedented innovations. Yet, the downside of the growth of data, and the shift to digital, is that malware ...
The solution to the issue of dark matter and dark energy may be found by way of modifying Einstein's... more »
Now and then I find the time to write music for piano. It is a compelling, satisfying activity... more »
Veritasium has come in for quite a bit of stick recently over his videos on electricity. However... more »
One of the constant things that one encounters in the world of science is idealization. Nevis Laboratories... more »
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