Today while I was having a shower I happened to think at how cool it is that we can actually measure the rate of production, in single hadron-hadron collisions, of multiple elementary particles. A graph like the one below, now routinely produced by ATLAS and CMS whenever they collect more data or switch to a higher center-of-mass energy, looks "natural" to produce, but it is actually surprising that we indeed can pull it off - it requred careful design choices in a number of ways. I wish to discuss one of these here.

In any physicists' new-year wish list there is a mandatory item: the finding of some unexpected, bolt-from-the-blue new physics result - possibly leading to highly-cited publications, press interviews and invitations, and ultimately career advancements or other similar ego boosts. Because we do it for the progress of mankind and the furthering of human knowledge, but we also do it for ourselves- we are human beings too.

If I wanted to create a fake news story – I would lead with a sensational headline. Something that would incense and shock the readers and be extra “clickbaity”. Perhaps a hook about a teenager getting raped to death. That should get some serious traffic.

Ineffective drugs are generally a bad idea - natural medicine, osteopathy and homeopathy are not considered medicine because they can't demonstrate efficacy, and chemotherapy drugs are expensive so the standard is higher.

But when it comes to the devastating brain tumor called glioblastoma multiforme, some patients have benefited from treatment with a class of chemotherapy drugs that two previous large clinical trials indicated was ineffective against the disease. The chemotherapy drugs block the growth of new blood vessels in the tumor and the patients lived an average of about one year longer than those who were given other classes of chemotherapy drugs.

Modern diet fads, like paleo, farm-to-fork, the weird Food Babe's if-she-can't-spell-it-you-shouldn't-eat-it beliefs, harken back to a simpler time when people lived off the land, and nothing had  preservatives and it was all Whole Grain.

In reality, ancient people could not work hard enough or fast enough to create food science that would prevent booms and busts of starvation and rationing. They wanted their food processed, to turn unpalatable or even toxic foodstuffs into something that could be consumed, and they even made progress doing it 10,000 year ago. First was the use of fires or pits and the invention of ceramic cooking vessels, and those led to an expansion of food preparation techniques.

A paper in Sexually Transmitted Infections details a cheap way to kill off gonorrhea in the mouth - alcohol-containing mouthwash. 

Gonorrhea is caused by bacteria and  curb the growth of the bacteria responsible.  Gonorrhea of the mouth has become more common among primarily gay men as fear of AIDS has declined. That disease is quite treatable today and so fear of it has declined, meaning a decline in condom use.

Gonorrhea is also treatable, with antibiotics, but those heighten the risk of the emergence of antibiotic resistant strains of Neisseria gonnorheae, the bacteria responsible for the infection, so concern is high.

If gay men won't use condoms, maybe they'll use mouthwash

Nibiru easily ranks as the pseudoscience doomsday scenario I get most questions about. Many people, including teenagers, are terrified that we are all about to be killed by a planet called Nibiru which they think is going to hit Earth or do a close flyby in the very near future, for instance many of them have come to believe that it is going to hit us some time before Christmas, or shortly afterwards.

A new analysis has found that if you are on Medicare, it's better to get a female internist than a male. Female internists have lower rates of 30-day mortality and hospital readmission than those patients treated by men.

Obviously it could be a variety of other factors - modern medicine, and its government control, has created a "teach to the protocol environment", and women are more likely to adhere to guidelines -but the authors postulate that female physicians more likely to adhere to clinical guidelines and provide preventive care more often, meaning that even if their careers are interrupted by child-bearing they should be paid more than men.

We've had fake news world ending prophecies for centuries. But now we have exaggerated scientific scenarios to add to the list, so that we can get scared by asteroid impacts, nuclear war, runaway warming and so on. These are mixed with pseudoscience, and hoaxes, to the extent that it's often hard to figure out what is fake doomsday news, what is exaggerated, and what is the sober truth. It's easy to get a feeling of a doomsday helplessness. Yet we are far from helpless. These fake scenarios distract us from many real issues that we can do something about. Some vulnerable people, including teenagers, get so terrified by this fake doomsday news that they become suicidal. I've written many doomsday debunking articles, and have now published a new kindle book Doomsday Debunked.

There remain a lack of safeguards built into the health-care system for fitness trackers.

Personal health wearable devices that are used to monitor heart rates, sleep patterns, calories, and even stress levels have led to new privacy and security risks. Though watches, fitness bands, and so-called "smart" clothing are part of a growing "connected-health" system in the U.S., promising to provide people with more efficient ways to manage their own health, it isn't a Utopia if you aren't a fan of weak and fragmented health-privacy regulatory system.