You may have read that Asian cultures respect the elderly more than Europe but Asian senior citizens may not agree. However, it may not be that young people have gotten less respectful, it could be that young people are wealthier than in the past. And that makes them lonelier.

Over the last 40 years, the wealth of countries like the United States and Japan have increased substantially. Poor people now have a life that the poor even two generations ago could not imagine would be possible. Yet a new cross-temporal meta-analysis says that despite the changes in wealth which make socializing more possible, young people report more loneliness.

[For the first part of this two-part post, see here]

A new tool drawing on billions of uses of more than 20,000 words and diverse real-world texts claims to have found that human language is systematically biased, but not against things. It is instead biased toward safety and that has impacted everything from psychology claims to how Large Language Models (LLMs, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence and AI).

I was reached this evening by the news of the passing of a dear friend, Enrico Stomeo. Enrico was an architect by profession, but for me he was rather defined by his activity as an amateur astronomer - in fact, if I had to define what a serious amateur astronomer is, I would more or less consciously be describing him. 


[Above, a recent picture of Enrico]

The Associazione Astrofili Veneziani

Californis is the largest dairy producer in the United States. It is also the most anti-science state, distrustful of the modern world. That is why coastal cities had measles parties until the COVID-19 pandemic happened; they believed the MMR vaccine caused autism in children. They love raw milk because they believed pasteurization eliminates magical nutrition that scientists can't detect.

There are concerns about projected warming on the Earth’s surface and in the lower atmosphere even while the planet’s upper atmosphere has cooled.

It's not a paradox, it's a pattern and a recent paper described the mechanics of how it works. The short answer is that carbon dioxide (CO2) reacts differently to wavelengths of light. Closer to earth, CO2 traps it but it makes the stratosphere better at radiating, which cools it—but because it becomes colder, the Earth system ends up losing less heat to space overall, strengthening warming below.

Nobody likes to wait in line. Whether you are sitting in your car waiting to reach the toll booths, on a plane waiting to disembark along with the other passengers, or in a queue at the ticket office, you may experience a range of feelings ranging from perplexity (“What am I doing here?”) to impatience (“Why is this not moving forward?”), to annoyance (“What is that idiot in the front chatting about with the operator?”). 

The Supreme Court recently issued another ruling that seeks to end racial discrimination. most recently in specially-created political districts. What has not been an issue, because it was not obvious like universities and Louisiana politics, is how grants get chosen.

A new study says that there was a component of racial favoritism in science funding as well, and it's only been revealed in the wake of NIH grant cuts.

We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology laughs at that notion. The next time you go on vacation, a new tool can show you how many places your vacation destination has been. 

Paleolatitude.org can do that, right down to the movements of small tectonic and ‘lost continents’ now called Greater Adria, the Tethys Himalayas or Argoland, which we know as  folded rocks in the mountain ranges of the Mediterranean, the Himalayas, and Indonesia. 

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than rolls of dice suggest. A new study of the mimicry of several distantly-related South American rainforest butterfly and moth species with similar wing color patterns that may warn away predators (it's not a costumed bluff, the moths and butterflies are actually toxic to birds) found that they reused the same two genes - ivory and optix - to evolve near identical color patterns.