What It Means To Be Anti-Science
The Virus That Turns Physicists Into Crackpots
Getting To The Heart Of The Coronavirus Pandemic
By W. Glen Pyle
Formaldehyde: The Carcinogen That Wasn’t
The Italian "Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei" is an old institution, founded... Read >
COVID-19 has been worse than the coronavirus pandemics of 2012 and 2003 yet... Read >
Though modern humans and our closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes... Read >
Micronutrient deficiencies pose health problems for a third of the world's... Read >
Liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently... Read >
At the height of his career, the pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla... Read >
Looking For A Ph.D. In Physics Or Computer Science? Look No Further
Today the University of Padova has issued a call for Ph. D. positions to start in October 2021, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy has 23 new openings. The English version of the call page is here.This year, besides being as always available to be a supervisor for Ph.D. students interested ...
Standard Model Rethink: Does Measurement Of Muon Magnetics Mean New Physics Are Coming?
Muons are leptons(1), fundamental particles formed in the atmosphere by cosmic rays that are a heavier cousin of electrons. The Standard Model has three generations of leptons; electrons, muons, and tau plus their three neutrinos. The Standard Model is in line with "the big bang" and measurements ...
New Muon G-2 Results!
Note: this is an updated version of the article. For the original discussion of the muon anomaly, published before the release of results, please scroll down.The Fermilab g-2 experiment has released today (April 7th, 5PM CET) its results on the measurement of the muon anomalous magnetic moment ...
Spent Grain From Beer Making As Human Food
Beer has been important throughout human history. Given how dangerous water was in the past, it is arguably true that civilization would not exist without beer.Yet if you make your own, you have to think about waste. Spent grain, the malt and adjuncts left over from the mash, is 85 percent of brewing ...
EU Says It Will Recycle 70% Of Electric Car Batteries - Here's Why That's Actually Worse For The Environment
Electric cars are popular, thanks to government mandates and subsidies, but they have a problem in the distance; massive amounts of battery waste.The EU, for example, wants to have 30 million electric cars by 2030 and while politicians can ignore the fossil fuel demands and strain on the grid, ...
What Are Noeggerathiales? Read This And Find Out
In Mongolia, plants preserved in a volcanic ash fall deposit as part of a so-called "vegetational Pompeii," may have resolved the mystery of the Noeggerathiales.What are Noeggerathiales? Paleontologists have wanted to really know since they first learned of them.Scientists know they were peat-forming ...
Sulfate Aerosols Implicated In Climate Change
It's become increasingly hypocritical for wealthy countries to declare a hard stop on CO2 emissions before poor countries even have centralized energy for cooking and water, but a new simulation finds that Draconian caps on quality of life in developing nations may not be needed.The greenhouse ...
Singlet Fission May Solve The Solar Efficiency Problem
In lab tests, solar often seems to work great, yet in actual use its efficiency drops sharply. A phenomenon known as singlet fission can help but it is hindered by unexplained energy losses during the reaction.Basic research is needed because solar energy could grow to be one of the most important ...
Genetically Rescued Organism: Eucalyptus That Can't Be An Invasive Species
Eucalyptus trees are a pest-resistant evergreen that produce good lumber and oil that wealthy elites in the "wellness" marketplace buy - they are also an invasive species. A new paper shows how scientists used CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out LEAFY, the master gene behind flower formation, so the trees ...
CRISPR-Cas9: Now Knocking Out 12 Genes At Once
Just a few short years ago, CRISPR-Cas9 technology took the world of molecular biology by storm because it allowed a cost-effective way to shut off or turn on traits in organisms without any side effects.CRISPR is an acronym of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, a bacterial ...
Latest Data Show Bees Are Still Thriving At An Alarming Rate
The latest numbers on honeybee colonies have been released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and they show that the Beepocalypse we keep being warned about has been postponed for another year.Instead of going extinct, as activist fundraising campaigns assured us would happen unless efficient ...
Neural Thrombosis, The Covid Vaccine, And Politicians Who Kill
Last Monday at 10.30AM I eagerly queued up at the International Red Cross site of Padova, the town where I live and work, to receive a first vaccination shot against Covid-19. I duly received my dose and went back home with some relief. Little did I know that my relief would turn to anger very ...
USA Can Easily Release 10 Million Unused Astrazeneca Doses To Protect Health Care Workers In Africa - Many Trained By Them
There are billions of vaccine doses coming along later this year. Biden says he will give excess doses to other countries, so the US is expected to be a huge donor later this year. Even if the US fully vaccinates everyone, adults and children, twice over, now and in the fall, the US has secured ...
WHO Call For Rapid Transfer Of COVID Vaccine Technology To Weaker Economies To Solve Bottlenecks & Vaccinate World Ultrafast
We have major bottlenecks with producing the vaccines, but the WHO say that it doesn't have to be like this. We already have millions of extra doses of COVID today because of the early technology transfer by AstraZenecs at the end of last year. This empowers the rest of the world to make the ...
US Urged To Loan From AstraZeneca Hoard As Health Workers Die In Africa & Assist Technology Transfer To Stop Pandemic Fast
The US has enough doses to vaccinate its entire population twice over and have enough left to fully vaccinate 1.3 billion people outside the USA by the end of 2021. It's not going to run out of doses. As most of you will know, Biden has committed now to roll out 200 million doses to the USA in ...
WHO Say We Can Vaccinate Entire World Fast If Wealthier Countries Permit Transfer Of Technology To Weaker Economies
We have major bottlenecks with producing the vaccines, but the WHO say that it doesn't have to be like this. There are many companies that could have produced them if they had been authorized to do so. There are things we can do to ease the bottlenecks right now and we could hugely increase vaccine ...
Being A New Mom Can Make You 'A Little' OCD
A new survey estimates that 8% of pregnant women reported symptoms that meet criteria for a clinical diagnosis of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and in the 38 weeks after having a child that jumped to 17% - a huge increase over other surveys.It's no surprise expecting moms get a little control ...
A Gesture Is Worth A Thousand Words?
What sets human communication apart from lower animals is its compositionality, which means that units of meaning can be combined and new meanings can be constructed. The words "blue" and "car" have their own meanings but combined there is a new content, i.e., a car that is blue. This kind of ability ...
#MeToo May Have Caused Women To Lose Out On Mentors
Even previously considerate and helpful male managers have become less likely to mentor female employees, according to a new study. They've become less likely to even talk one-on-one with women.This unintended consequence of the #MeToo movement could deny female employees critical development and ...
Do You Pay Less For Art If It's Done By A Woman?
A few years ago, a study claimed that in gender blind symphony auditions, women scored 30 percent better. Harvard gender studies authors concluded that there was gender bias in hiring and that was the reason for a gender gap in symphony orchestra compositions.Implicit bias claims had reached their ...
Just Correlation: Meat And 'Higher Risk' Of Death
Your risk of death is 100 percent. Yet your risk of early demise can be mitigated if you avoid things like ingesting alcohol and cigarettes and mustard gas.Those are clear killers. What about salt, sugar, and meat? Those have not been established as science at all, they are instead examples ...
Imaginarity: New Paper Says The Imaginary Part Of Quantum Mechanics Can Be Observed
Mathematics is a language and languages can be used to create stories. It just takes imagination to create time travel or wormholes or theories of strings or lots of nice things theoretical physicists throw into arXiv.Sometimes math has to create a story because real numbers don't work, even if ...
Churches Increase COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake Among African-Americans
Pilot results from San Bernardino County, California, where crime is prevalent and distrust in government high, found that religion may be key to COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Focused education efforts and an on-site mobile clinic in Black church parking lots resulted in the vaccinations of 417 ...
End Of The Uncanny Valley? The COVID-19 Pandemic Made Us Love Machines More
Whatever Uncanny Valley when it comes to machines still existed in 2019 got a lot smaller in 2020. We're even being nicer to them since 2020.People mostly dispense with social norms of human interaction and treat machines differently. The behavior holds true even as machines became more "human" ...
Humanity has not found a fifth force of nature. This is a warning to the media at large. Please... more »
The CDC has bad news for Purell.“It is possible for people to be infected through contact with... more »
The current pandemic has changed the way we live our lives. Every aspect of human interaction has... 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 »
