When most people think of rubber, they usually just think of tires but natural rubber is an incredibly important yet under-appreciated bioresource used to make at least 50,000 different products. 

Approximately 13 million tons are collected every year from tapping 39 billion liters of latex (by hand!) from rubber trees, mostly in southeast Asia - enough to fill over 5,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. After collection, 11% of the latex is centrifuged to remove half of the water, and the rest is converted to solid rubber. The concentrated latex is shipped to manufacturers of articles, such as gloves and condoms, while the bulk of the solid rubber is made into tires.

What if something went wrong with that supply?

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC is promoting a doomsday shortage where America is without 47-122,000 physicians, over a third of them being general practitioners, by 2032 and say it is due to the “graying” of America, both among providers and the public.

Just over a year ago I testified before a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel in support of the iQOS device, a smoking replacement tool that heats tobacco but doesn't ignite it.

There is a big difference between a trial lawyer convincing a jury in one of America's most anti-science regions that an herbicide that only acts on plants might be able to cause human cancer, and scientists with knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology who know better.

Advertised as the “greatest thing you’ve never seen,” the 2019 U.S. Air Guitar Championships will take place this summer.

Competitors from around the country will don elaborate costumes, construct fantastical personas and perform comedic pantomimes of famous rock solos. Impaling themselves with their air guitars, swallowing them and smashing them to smithereens, they’ll elevate guitar playing to heights only imagined by real guitarists.

The winner will go on to represent the U.S. in the Air Guitar World Championships, which will take place in Oulu, Finland, in late August.

Cows and chickens will never go extinct because they are food, and some useless critters like Aedes aegypti have managed to tough it all despite being just disease vectors. For everything else, it can be a crap shoot. Nature is out to kill us all.

Yes we are getting extinctions at a far higher rate than normal. But it is nowhere near a mass extinction yet. Just the start of a slide towards one that may play out towards the end of this century and in the 22nd century. Also we are not risking a major mass extinction like the Permian / Triassic one. The word “mass extinction” does not have a well defined threshold but I think many who read these stories think it means that there would be almost no animals, fish, trees, plants or insects left or hardly any. No it doesn’t mean that. It means fewer species of each but not a world without them.

My aim here is not to dispute the many scholarly articles about us being at the start of a new mass extinction, but rather, to clarify what they mean.

Biogen recently announced that it was abandoning its late stage drug for Alzheimer’s, aducanumab, causing investors to lose billions of dollars.

They should not have been surprised.

Using ancient fire remains from 11 well-preserved and overlapping open-air hearth structures, scholars have inferred Neanderthal group mobility and settlement patterns which indicate specific occupation episodes, perhaps according to season

At the very large and very small levels, gravity does not really work the way it should. At the very large level, instead of contracting, the universe has both expanded and accelerated despite detectable forces that could cause it. 

Measurements to determine how fast the Universe is expanding over time are known as the Hubble constant. It has been determined by a cosmic distance ladder, calculated by observing pulsating stars called Cepheid variables in a neighboring satellite galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud, 162,000 light-years away.

When defining the distances to galaxies that are further and further away, these Cepheid variables are used as milepost markers.