I've been writing Doomsday Debunking articles for a couple of years now. The amount of fake news about the end of the world on the web is incredible. What makes it worse is that stories that say the world is about to end get widely shared, linked to, read over and over, and rise right to the top of Google and Apple news. If you are intrigued by a news story about the search for "planet X" by astronomers, say, and go to Google News, the top result is usually one or other article from the Daily Express who regularly publish fake news saying that an extra planet is about to hit Earth or fly past Earth in the next week or month.This is followed by pages and pages of search results consisting almost entirely of "news" in a similar vein.

It may not seem to make sense but most of the universe - mass - can really only account for about 6 percent of what is going on. The rest of it can be under just about any umbrella at this point. Some call it the God of the Gaps, scientists call the unknown mass Dark Matter.

What is it? No one knows, when it comes to the very large and the very small, physics does not have all the answers, but something has made the universe at least 100 billion light years in size even though it's only 13 billion years old. As you know, a light year is the distance light will travel in that time. Since nothing can go faster than the speed of light, it's long been time to think about what Nothing is.

That's dark matter. And whatever is propelling it can be called Dark Energy.

My activity as a chessplayer has seen a steady decline in the past three years, due to overwhelming work obligations. To play in chess tournaments at a decent level, you not only need to be physically fit and well trained for the occasion, but also have your mind free from other thoughts. Alas, I have been failing miserably in the second and third of the above requirements. So I have essentially retired from competitive chess, and my only connection to the chess world is through the occasional 5-minute blitz game over the internet.

The activist army in the war on common pesticides like glyphosate (and adjacently GMOs, they don't know enough science to know they are different) is having a Gettysburg moment.(1) They are out of options so they are making a desperate charge but they are in an open field a long way off and opposing them on the other side is every legitimate science and regulatory body in the world.

If scientists and journalists want the politicization of science to stop, they have to be part of the solution, even if a guy they didn't vote for is in power. But now that he is, all the talk about "depoliticizing science" has been exposed as the farce that we always knew it was.

Thor: Ragnarok is the latest Marvel movie (out in Australia today) that sees Australian Chris Hemsworth back as Thor, but he’s not on friendly home turf.

Instead he finds himself imprisoned on the opposite side of the universe from his beloved Asgard, and out of his depth in a gladiatorial contest with the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

But Hulk isn’t his only problem. Ragnarok (the end of his homeland of Asgard) is looming and Thor has new villains to deal with, including the warlike Hela, played by Australian Cate Blanchett.

There is a different kind of 1 percent, and it isn't people who can afford to buy organic food. It's Americans who carry a handgun on a daily basis. 

It's not a surprise, given American history and horrific events like a psychopath in Las Vegas wounding or killing 500 people while police waited 70 minutes to attack him. A nearby hotel guest with a gun could have ended that more quickly. 

Short summary: A scrap book of nonsense. Theologically, morally, astronomically and politically abysmal. The author would not be accepted for admission to a course on astronomy at a university, never mind actually pass such a course. And it’s a similar position for theology. Most of the book, 75%, is not even written by him but just copy / pasted from the internet. It is appalling to think that this book reached the #1 position for astronomy books in Kindle on Amazon, and #5 for paperback. I’ve asked them to take it down for breach of copyright.

Yesterday, October 20, was the international day of Statistics. I took inspiration from it to select a clip from chapter 7 of my book "Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab" which attempts to explain how physicists use the concept of statistical significance to give a quantitative meaning to their measurements of new effects. I hope you will enjoy it....

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In 2017 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) published a report that it developed for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate the evidence that chemicals are capable of causing health effects at low-doses.