Saturn’s rings are one of the jewels of the solar system, but it seems that their time is short and their existence fleeting.

A new study suggests the rings are between 400 million and 100 million years old – a fraction of the age of the solar system. This means we are just lucky to be living in an age when the giant planet has its magnificent rings. Research also reveals that they could be gone in another 100 million years.

The rings were first observed in 1610 by the astronomer Galileo Galilei who, owing to the resolution limits of his telescope, initially described them as two smaller planets on each side of Saturn’s main orb, apparently in physical contact with it.

The call for applications to Ph.D. positions at the University of Padova opened yesterday, and it will remain active for less than one month (deadline is June 7th at 1PM CEST). 

The USERN organization (Universal Scientific Education and Research Network) will soon issue its next bulletin, to which I contribute with an opening message in the function of the president of the organization. I thought the contents of the message would be of some interest to some of my readers here, so I decided to attach below my original text. Before we go there, though, I would invite all of you to learn about USERN by visiting its web site, and consider becoming a member (it is free!) - or even better, if you share our views, support us!

A message from the USERN President

In the past two decades, children have become more obese and have developed obesity at a younger age. A 2020 report found that 14.7 million children and adolescents in the U.S. live with obesity.

Because obesity is a known risk factor for serious health problems, its rapid increase during the COVID-19 pandemic raised alarms.

Few authors dare to say aloud things about physics or the history of physics that may go against the status quo. Alexander Unzicker is one of them. In his last work, Make Physics Great Again. America has Failed (2023; translated into English from the original in German: 2022, Einsteins Albtraum – Der Aufstieg Amerikas und der Niedergang der Physik, Westend Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt), like in his previous works, he dares to touch a raw nerve that is usually avoided in politically correct environments. This book is certainly polemical.

A new paper in Canadian Medical Association Journal has linked irregular heartbeats in 322 Chinese cities to small-micron particulate matter, invisible pollution that needs an electron microscope to visualize. Given its minute size, PM_2.5 is one-fourth the size of real pollution, PM10, there is four times as much of it, so the paper could have used PM₁₀ and achieved the same statistical significance. It just would have been less dramatic

Screening is underway to find a patient for the world's first bladder transplant in humans. 

A revolution is taking place, but we seem to not yet realize it. 
Paradigm shifting technologies often produce an abrupt transition when they get adopted. However, that transition is not easy to recognize early on: the effects of an exponential trend appear linear at the begninning, so the explosive force of the transition that occurs a little later takes many by surprise.

Prior to natural gas hydraulic fracturing making played out gas wells viable again, America was in a real climate emissions pickle. In 1994, Democrats finally won their war of extinction on nuclear energy, they cheered as President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry(1) created regulations that act as bans and eventually forced through a series of anti-nuclear activists at the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

For years, many have feared that artificial intelligence (AI) will take over national security mechanisms, leading to human slavery, domination of human society and perhaps the annihilation of humans. One way of killing humans is medical misdiagnosis, so it seems reasonable to examine the performance of ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that is taking the world by storm. This is timely in light of ChatGPT’s recent remarkable performance in passing the US medical licensing exam.