Learning Through Student Feedback
By Mark Pierce
Quantum Leap Or Quantum Mirage? What Happens...
Something Happened In Silicon Valley
Life Sciences Can’t Afford Fragmented Data...
I recently listened again to Richard Feynman explaining why the flowing of... Read >
In older countries it has become common for young people to live with their... Read >
Colorectal cancer, cancer of the colon and rectum, is the third most common... Read >
Vaccines are getting American media attention now that Republicans are engaging... Read >
Today is, in Christian observance, Twelfth Night, the end of The 12 Days of... Read >
Culture wars are as eternal as shooting wars, and that means there will always... Read >
RIP - Hans Jensen
Today I was saddened to hear of the passing of Hans Jensen, a physicist and former colleague in the CDF experiment at Fermilab. There is an obituary page here with nice pics and a bio if you want detail on his interesting, accomplished life. Here I thought I would remember him by pasting an excerpt ...
2026 Plans
This year opened in slow motion for me, at least work-wise. I have been on parental leave since December 16, when my third and fourth sons were born within one minute from one another, but of course a workaholic can never stand completely still. In fact, even as we speak I am sitting and typing ...
Letter To A Demanding PhD Supervisor
A fundamental component of my research work is the close collaboration with a large number of scientists from all around the world. This is the result of the very large scale of the experiments that are necessary to investigate the structure of matter at the smallest distance scales: building and ...
A Great Year For Experiment Design
While 2025 will arguably not be remembered as a very positive year for humankind, for many reasons - first and foremost, raging wars and raising inequalities -, as we near its end some have tried to find good things to say about this particular revolution of our planet around the Sun. And ...
The Hemp Industry Has A Placebo For Your PFAS Chemophobia
Environmental activists have claimed for decades that PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are "forever" chemicals that have been causing disease. Once former Natural Resources Defense Council environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. joined the Republican team, their belief in homeopathic ...
A 900-Meter Clue Beneath The Granite: China’s Jinlin Crater Reshapes Our Understanding Of Holocene Impacts
For decades, scientists have assumed that the Holocene—the relatively quiet geological epoch spanning the last ~11,700 years—was marked by only a handful of small meteorite impacts, most of them modest in size. But a newly confirmed structure in southern China is now challenging that narrative ...
At 2 Months, Babies Can Categorize Objects
At two months of age, infants lack language and fine motor control but their minds may be understanding how things look and figuring out to which category they belong, which would push back earlier beliefs about the foundations of visual cognition.A new study recruited 130 two-month-old infants ...
Environmental Activists Hate CRISPR - And They're Dooming People With HIV
Existing treatments control HIV but the immune system does not revert to normal. They is why people living with HIV remain susceptible to infections and it underscores the need for immunotherapies.That requires modern tools like CRISPR-Cas9 and others. Tools that environmentalists oppose, insisting ...
E. Coli Linked To Diabetic Foot Infections Gets Worldwide Analysis
Diabetic foot infections are a serious complications of diabetes and a leading cause of lower-limb amputation but little is known about the specific pathogens involved in these chronic foot infections, particularly E. coli, despite its frequent detection in clinical samples.A new genomic characterization ...
Males Are Genetically Wired To Beg Females For Food
Bees have the reputation of being incredibly organized and spending their days making sure our food ecosystem is functioning. Neither is accurate. Unless you are an almond farmer in California and rented bees that were delivered in giant trucks, they have no impact on your food, and they are also ...
Opportunistic Salpingectomy Reduces Ovarian Cancer Risk By 78%
Opportunistic salpingectomy, proactively removing a person’s fallopian tubes when they are already undergoing a gyecological surgery such as hysterectomy or tubal ligation, may be a way to reduce ovarian cancer risk. Most ovarian cancers originate in the fallopian tubes rather than the ovaries ...
Gestational Diabetes Up 36% In The Last Decade - But Black Women Are Healthiest
Gestational diabetes, a form of glucose intolerance during pregnancy, occurs primarily in women who already had obesity and added more weight. It not only carries immediate pregnancy risks but increases the chance of future heart disease for both the mother and the child. And it has gone ...
Object-Based Processing: Numbers Confuse How We Perceive Spaces
Researchers recently studied the relationship between numerical information in our vision, and how it affects our perception of space - and discovered subtle asymmetries that color our view on the world. They wanted to see if numbers in our vision create “attentional biases” so volunteers ...
Not Just The Holidays: The Hormonal Shift Of Perimenopause Could Be Causing Weight Gain
You’re in your mid-40s, eating healthy and exercising regularly. It’s the same routine that has worked for years. Yet lately, the number on the scale is creeping up. Clothes fit differently. A bit of belly fat appears, seemingly overnight. You remember your mother’s frustration with the endless ...
Scholars Who Got Sold On The Academic Life Feel The Pressure
Professor Peter Mitchell got a Nobel Prize in 1978 for a chemiosmotic hypothesis of how ATP is made. Basically, how mitochondria turn fat, protein, and sugar into energy. Like most science, his breakthrough was built on 70 years of work by people before him, including Professor Fred Crane, who ...
I Earned It, You're Privileged - The Paradox In How We View Achievement
The concept of “hard work v privilege”, and what either one says about someone’s social status, is an important one. Politicians regularly draw dividing lines between “hardworking families” and those receiving “handouts”. Others distinguish between those whose wealth increases while ...
Blood Pressure Medication Adherence May Not Be Cost, It May Be Annoyance At Defensive Medicine
High blood pressure is an important risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease and premature death. Medication can reduce those risks so it makes sense that if someone is prescribed an angiotensin receptor blocker like Losartan continue to take it.Yet people don't. A new cohort from Sweden ...
Anxiety For Christmas: How To Cope
Christmas can be hard. For some people, it increases loneliness, grief, hopelessness and family tension, and the festive season has a way of turning ordinary concerns into urgent ones. Not because something terrible is guaranteed to happen, but because more is often at stake: money, time, family ...
Turning 60
Strange how time goes by. And strange I would say that, since I know time does not flow, it is just our perception of one of the spacetime coordinates of our block universe... The thing is, on February 5 I will turn 60. An important date for anybody - I could say a milestone. First of all ...
RIP To Dr. William Foege, The Man Whose Math Eliminated Smallpox
In the modern world, it is easy to be newly concerned about the World Health Organisation. They were the last to declare COVID-19 a pandemic, they said not to blame China, and stood by while China bullied them into staying silence while the communist dictatorship tried to blame COVID-19 on American ...
College Predators: Half Of Nurses Leave The Health Care Field Due To High Student Loan Debt
Survey results conducted among registered nurses and advanced practice nurses in Michigan shows that the reason a third of them left the health care field is student loan debt. The Michigan Nurses' Study is a survey of 13,687 license holders that began during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022.In the ...
Healthcare In Space - The First Medical Evacuation From The ISS
For the first time in 25 years of continuous crewed operations, an astronaut has been medically evacuated from the International Space Station (ISS). The Crew-11 mission ended when a SpaceX Dragon capsule brought the four astronauts of Crew 11 home following a medical incident in early January ...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the charlatans now shaping policy at the highest levels of HHS represent... more »
Air India Flight 171 - Flawed EE Bay Water Ingress TheoryRichard Godfrey, in many videos on the... more »
In the past few years my activities on this site - but I would say more in general, as the same... 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 »
