Popular imagery is that dinosaurs were a bland color, but most birds are have bland color palates as well. Then you have parrots or peacocks. In between the extremes of bland and flamboyant, there are pink pigeon feet, red rooster combs and yellow pelican pouches.
That may have been the case for dinosaurs as well. There’s a good chance that extinct dinosaurs rocked pops of color on similar body parts and may have flashed their colors to entice mates, just as birds do today, according to a study
in the journal Evolution led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.
A new study finds that what once were just alcohol-related car crashes have now involved marijuana as the former illegal drug has been legalized and normalized in the last 20 years.
Fatal car accidents involving alcohol have remained relatively constant over the last two decades, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with 2019 reaching the lowest levels since 1982.
It's that time of the year, a few days until Christmas and you bought everything on that Amazon wishlist but it doesn't feel all that creative. If you are like me, masks everywhere can be a bit of a downer, so you want things you can order. These are not what I like to call "aspirational" gifts, the kinds of things parents want their children to want in order to feel like better parents. They are all good, I have watched, read, or used them all this year, so they aren't yet another 'how to make a piece of paper turn using flame' experiment science, they are actually enjoyable science. And technology. And science-fiction.
It is common in a polarized political climate to try and blame the other political party when missteps happen but most government employees are not political appointees, they are career bureaucrats, and sometimes care more about protecting their fiefdoms than in helping the public.
The Little Ice Age, lasting from early 15th to mid-19th centuries, was one of the coldest periods of the past 10,000 years - since the last real Ice Age ended.
Why it happened is one of the persistent questions in historical climatology.
The cold spell set in around 600 years ago and was responsible for crop failures, famines and pandemics throughout Europe, resulting in misery and death. A sudden change from very warm conditions in the late 1300s switched to unprecedented cold conditions only 20 years later.
Interference is a fascinating effect, and one which can be observed in a wide variety of physical systems - any system that involves the propagation of waves from different sources. We can observe interference between waves in the sea or in a lake, or even in our bathtub; we can hear the effect of interference between sound waves; or we can observe the fascinating patterns created by interference effects in light propagation. In addition to all that, we observe interference between the amplitudes of quantum phenomena by studying particle physics processes.
There is a saying that goes 'lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice' but it was never wise to bet your life on it. What it means is that getting hit at all is rare, for a human well over a 1 in 1,000,000 chance, but even if only 300 people are hit and under die, it still happens a lot to other things. The Empire State building in New York City gets hit 25 times each year.
There was a time when politicians worried about a "slippery slope" when it came to political actions. While dirty politics by individuals was always assumed - President Lyndon Johnson set the modern standard for that - overt actions by parties were more thoughtful. The reason was simple; once there was a precedent, the other party could do the same thing when they got into power.
That all changed this century.
A bit over a half into my course of particle physics for Masters students in Statistical Sciences I usually find myself describing the CMS detector in some detail, and that is what happened last week.
The course
My course has a duration of 64 hours, and is structured in four parts. In the first part, which usually takes about 24 hours to complete, I go over the most relevant part of 20th Century physics. We start from the old quantum theory and then we look at special relativity, the fundaments of quantum mechanics, the theory of scattering, the study of hadrons and the symmetries that lead to the quark model, to finish with the Higgs mechanism and the Standard Model.
A new study hopes to link long-term exposure to ambient air pollution and metabolic-associated fatty liver disease, a name change from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease because it is associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes.
