In what is a once-in-a-few-lifetimes experience, I witnessed today the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the evening sky (with a crescent moon thrown in to boot). While every sixteen years or so the two planets end up angularly close because of their different orbital period (Jupiter revolves around our Sun in 11.9 years, Saturn takes 29.4 years), small differences in their orbital planes make the smallest distance they reach usually of the order a degree. 

A new paper finds that mass extinction of land-dwelling animals - amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds- occur in a cycle of about 27 million years.

A pattern in nature or just coincidence?

Probably coincidence, since 27 million years give or take is a fantastic range of time but journalists and professional doomsday prophets are making something of it the way they do Mayan calendars and Biblical numerology. When it comes to real concepts of time, 66 million, 26 million, and 27.5 million don't have much in common.

Yet the paper does link them as non-random events, using the bane of informed food and chemical acceptance of science - statistical analyses.

Can Christmas be about gender? Apparently so, if the paucity of female Santas is anything to go by. There have, in fact, been cases of Australian women donning the secular red and white Santa attire as far back as 1930 — and there is no reason why we couldn’t have more female Santas today.

In 1935, Queensland’s Daily Mercury reported on aviator Nancy Bird Walton, “The Angel of the Outback”, piloting a female Santa Claus into the north-western corner of New South Wales.

A recent computer model finds that it doesn't hurt a product to negative reviews and it may even help.

A flawless product does not exist, people are suspicious if they see no bad reviews, and using game theory, the researchers analyzed how negative reviews affect sales. The model had two sets of participants: sellers, who know the true quality of the products they are selling and can selectively publish reviews about it, and buyers, who do not know a product's quality and can be categorized as either 'naïve' or 'rational'.

A meta-analysis of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the 2019 form of coronavirus that led to the COVID-19 pandemic, found that the chance an infected person showing symptoms was infecting someone else even in their home was only 18%, while it plummeted to 0.7% if they are not symptomatic.

The pool was not small, it was data from over 77,000 participants. That's actually good news, and it may mean a return to normalcy, because if even being trapped in a home with someone has only a minor risk for those not at respiratory distress risk from flu or anything else, casual public contact means nearly none.

Meteor showers are a spectacular phenomenon that takes place when the Earth intersects the path along which periodic comets (or less frequently, asteroidal bodies) orbit the Sun. Comets lose debris when they get close to perihelion, but the debris does not get lost in all directions - it continues to follow the comet's path in the solar system. 

There is no question that masks prevent transmission of airbone viruses that cause diseases flu and COVID-19 but a new paper shows what will maximize their effectiveness.

Masks are primarily intended to keep us from spreading germs - a surgeon does not wear a mask because she is worried about her patient giving her a disease, she is wearing it to make the other person safer.

This winter solstice, Dec. 21st, you'll be able to see something no one has seen since the Middle Ages; Jupiter and Saturn will appear so close together in Earth’s night sky they will look like a double planet.

While we orbit the sun each year, Jupiter needs 12 and Saturn 30, which means every 20 years or so Jupiter laps Saturn, and on December 21st, 2020, the two planets will be just a tenth of a degree apart, less than the diameter of the moon. The two largest planets in our solar system will look to some like a double planet from science fiction. 

A new meta-analysis finds what scientists outside the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health have long known - alternatives to medicine, now called Integrative Medicine after failing as Complementary and Alternative Medicine after failing as Traditional Medicine after failing as Folk Medicine, are not just useless, they are ecologically reckless.

Charles Darwin and many others knew about the wing loss habit of island insects and debated famed botanist Joseph Hooker as to why. Darwin's position was simple that an insect on an island that flies is at more risk of being blown out to sea. Those left on land to produce the next generation are those most reluctant to fly, and eventually evolution follows behavior.