Getting To The Heart Of The Coronavirus Pandemic
By W. Glen Pyle
Formaldehyde: The Carcinogen That Wasn’t
Drugs For Different Bodies: The Female Side...
What It Means To Be Anti-Science
Have you ever looked at the moon through a telescope, or even a pair of binoculars... Read >
In 2007, Arctic summer sea ice reached its lowest extent on record - nearly... Read >
There is a saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like... Read >
Bill Gates doesn't make vaccines. There are now 176 vaccines from many different... Read >
“For those of us who believe in science,you simply cannot ignore what the... Read >
Tab, the Coca-Cola company’s original diet soda brand, is headed to the soda... Read >
Is A Z' Signal Hiding In ATLAS TtH Data?
I was blissfully unaware until today of a slightly anomalous effect, which was found by the ATLAS Collaboration when performing a search for top pairs plus Higgs bosons in their Run 2 data. The anomaly I am talking about is an apparent excess of events which could be explained, as ATLAS did in ...
New Paper Claims Your Living Room Causes Diabetes
In the modern world of chemistry, where we can detect parts per billion, trillion, and even quadrillion, we can detect anything we want in anything else. In the modern world of epidemiology, we can also link anything to anything we want, as Harvard School of Public Health does often with its claims ...
Follow A Workshop On Artificial Intelligence - Sunday, November 8th, 8AM - 10AM GMT
Tomorrow - that is, November 8th, at 8AM GMT - I am chairing a session titled "Artificial Intelligence for Physics Research, and Physics Research for Artificial Intelligence" at the Vth USERN Congress. The event takes place in Tehran, and is broadcast via zoom. If you are interested in the talks ...
It's The Greatest Pumpkin In The Universe, Charlie Brown
In a classic "Charlie Brown" Halloween tale, one character believes in the pumpkin equivalent of an Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy, but NGC 2292 and NGC 2293 are real. At 109,000 light-years across, the diameter of our Milky Way, they don't just form a Great Pumpkin, they form the greatest pumpkin ...
The Naturalistic Fallacy That Holds Back Some In The West From Progress Keeps India From Lowering Emissions Too
A billion people still use wood for cooking and heating - and western countries are to blame. In the last decade, centralized energy production for developing countries was derailed unless they used solar or wind - neither of which are viable on their own.That leave families cutting and burning ...
More Plant Diversity Means Less Pesticides - But Lower Yields
Everyone recognizes that less less food means fewer pests but when you have to grow food to keep billions from starving, yields matter. Farming has gotten more efficient, thanks to big data tools leading to targeted pesticide use and modern pesticides that are less toxic to the environment while ...
How Dinosaurs Crossed The Oceans
The first fossils of a duckbilled dinosaur have been discovered in Africa, which means dinosaurs must have crossed miles of open water to get there.
Ajnabia odysseus was found in Morocco
and dates to the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. Ajnabia was a member of the duckbill dinosaurs ...
Fossil Fuel Divestment Has Been An Environmental Placebo - Low Carbon Investment Could Take Its Place
Since 2012, there have been increased calls for fossil fuel "divestment" - getting money out of fossil fuel companies. Despite an effort that peaked in 2015, spurred on by paid protesters from groups run by activists like Bill McKibben, they haven't made much difference.Some schools and companies ...
Why Dolphins Don't Get "The Bends"?
In humans, if we spend time beneath the ocean and then travel to the surface, we can suffer decompression sickness, known as "the bends" - when the nitrogen in compressed air that dissolved into our blood during a dive does not have time to clear and forms bubbles in tissues. Why don't sea ...
The Next Plague: VEEV?
While the world recovers from the third coronavirus pandemic of the last 17 years, it's important to be mindful that nature is always evolving new ways to kill. It's why scientists need to create a new influenza vaccine each year.The Next Plague is always just around the corner and researchers ...
Does Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) Vaccine Provide Protection Against COVID-19?
Mumps IgG titers, levels of IgG antibody, have been correlated to lowered severity in recovered COVID-19 patients who had the Merck MMR II vaccine, and that has led a group to speculate that the MMR vaccine may protect against COVID-19.That sounds great but the problem with correlation is that ...
The GMOs That Fixed Global Warming
A lot of environmentalists raise money talking about climate change, but their energy recommendations - mitigation, rationing, high cost - are regressive. Scientists are interested in progress, and nothing has exemplified that like genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which optimize nature in ...
Thanks Science: New Cancer Drugs Led To A Reduction In Mortality Of 24% In The US Since 2000
The COVID-19 pandemic has sent both political parties rushing to wrap themselves in the flag of science - even those voters who were historically more inclined to oppose vaccines and medicine and purchase organic food.They should have been on Team Science all along, and a new analysis shows why ...
Death Rates For Hospitalized COVID–19 Patients Fall 18%
Two large recent studies show that people hospitalized for COVID-19 in March were more than three times as likely to die as people hospitalized for COVID–19 in August.The first study used data from three hospitals in New York City. The chance of death for someone hospitalized for the coronavirus ...
The Ethical Reasons For Staying Home, And The Need To Explain Exponential Growth
The sanitary emergency presently affecting most countries across the World is highlighting the duties that each of us, as a member of a collectivity of individuals who share commodities, services and infrastructure, is called at times to attend to. In a well-functioning society paying taxes should ...
Remdesivir Gets FDA Approval As First COVID-19 Treatment
After clinical trials showed the safety and efficacy of Veklury (remdesivir) in adult and pediatric patients 12 years of age and older, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the antiviral drug for the treatment of severe COVID-19 - requiring hospitalization.Veklury is the first treatment ...
10 Tips To Manage Your Election Aftermath Stress
Well-meaning advice for people freaking out about current events often includes encouragement to be patient, stay calm and keep the faith… but how on Earth are you supposed to do that amid the insanity of 2020?As a practicing clinical psychologist and professor who studies how to manage anxiety ...
Activists Hope The Biden Administration Will Eliminate A Science Requirement For Endangered Species Act Rulings
In its 47 year history, the Endangered Species Act went from an essential law to protect actual endangered species to a hammer with which to pummel companies and landowners. What started with an American bald eagle became holding housing development projects hostage by getting an obscure endangered ...
Grades, And Artificial Intelligence
Dear students,
If you ask about your grade, I’ll gladly tell you that you’re doing well in the course, or that you really need to do better, as the case may be. More specifically than that I will not say.
The main reason for this is that if I were a hiring manager at a company ...
Swiss Fatalism Is So Endemic They're Not Feeling Worse About The World During The Pandemic
The Swiss are famously negative about everything. The anti-science attack site Swiss Public Eye, for example, routinely undermines the science community and claim the world is doomed unless people switch to products made by their funding sources.It's a pretty bleak existence but they've bee surrounded ...
World Will NOT 'End' Days Before Christmas 2020 - NOT Mayan Calendar - More Baloney From Perennial False Prophet
This is yet another baloney false prophecy from Paul Begley. This is scaring people I help to the point of being suicidal and having serious impacts on their lives. If any of you are journalists for the Sun or the Daily Express or the other papers who are running this story - you know that it ...
Consumers Like Pretty Food In Advertising, But Why Do People Think It's Healthier?
That gooey cheese you see in pizza advertising is actually glue. That's probably not a surprise. Consumers understand that with choices, marketing matters. With over 20 food ads seen per day, educated people recognize that though organic food contains toxic pesticides their advertising will have ...
It's Time To Stop Pretending Polls Are Scientific
If there is one lesson that political experts may have finally gotten in 2020, it's that polls are shockingly inaccurate.Trust in polls was already shaky after the 2016 prediction debacle and 2020 hurt their standing even more. Democrats who went into Tuesday expecting a clear rebuke of President ...
Get Rich Quick By Going On A Nature Hike
Finance and nature have an interesting mathematical connection.
Legend has it that Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking work
on the laws of motion was inspired by an apple falling on his head.[1] The
story sounds apocryphal, but the great man’s contemporary biographer dutifully
recorded questions ...
Arecibo while no longer unique in design since China built a similar and larger telescope was special... 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 »
