Flash floods like the one that swept down the Guadalupe River in Texas on July 4, 2025, can be highly unpredictable. While there are sophisticated flood prediction models and different types of warning systems in some places, effective flood protection requires extensive preparedness and awareness.

A new paper from Ohio State University can be considered a giant endorsement for yogurt that makes you poop - but unfortunately for giddy food corporations hoping to gain some scientific credibility it is only in mice, and therefore EXPLORATORY.

Because mice are not little people.

You just wouldn't know that from the school's press release, which alleges pesticides are ruining your microbiome and probiotics may save us, a leap so far beyond the scope of the study we have to wonder if the academics involved are about to launch a new line of supplements.

In the modern era we can detect anything in anything. Being able to detect in parts per billion, trillion and even quadrillion means that if an epidemiologist can "correlate" a chemical to harm in a spreadsheet, someone raising money opposing science can weaponize the result.

A new paper finding that they can detect chemicals linked to harm in rats with the urine of 201 preschool kids is a new battle in the War on Moms that activists continually wage, but there is no reason for parental concern. Unless you believe in homeopathy.

After a month of intense travel, which among other things included attendance to the MODE Workshop in Crete and the EUCAIF conference in Sardinia, I am back to northern Sweden. Besides significantly improving my well-being, given the horrible heat wave that hit Southern and Central Europe in the past few weeks, the move north allows me to finally give a relaxed look back at the most relevant information I gathered at those events, and other relevant things.

My June 28 column on the Middle East drew a comment concerning Palestinians ejected from their homes by the post-WWII influx of European Jewish refugees to what’s now Israel. Eighty years after the fact, descendants of those displaced still feel much anger.

If you need any new evidence that science is just another arm of politics, look to the switch in the Republican party once President Donald Trump embraced former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer, friend of Obama, and anti-science zealot Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.(1)

Colleges and universities are struggling to stay afloat.

The reasons are numerous: declining numbers of college-age students in much of the country, rising tuition at public institutions as state funding shrinks, and a growing skepticism about the value of a college degree.

More than 60% of traffic collisions at intersections involve left turns. Some U.S. cities – including San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Birmingham, Alabama – are restricting left turns.

Dr. Vikash Gayah, a professor of civil engineering at Penn State University and the interim director of the Larson Transportation Institute, discusses how left turns at intersections cause accidents, make traffic worse and use more gas.

How dangerous are left turns at intersections?

The year is 2028. After Congress voted that he need not heed Supreme Court decisions, Donald J. Trump declared himself king.

People dedicated to the art of grilling often choose lump charcoal – actual pieces of wood that have been turned into charcoal – over briquettes, which are compressed charcoal dust with other ingredients to keep the dust together and help it burn better.

The kinds of wood used to make lump charcoal affect how it burns and how the food tastes when grilled. Dedicated grillers are often willing to pay a premium for higher heat, no additives, particular flavors and the cleaner burn they get from particular wood species in lump charcoal.

Buyers probably expect the label to accurately report how much charcoal they are getting, what kind of wood it is, and where the wood was grown.