I suppose the recent Egypt-centric focus on food consumption had to end eventually.  The 'food pyramid' you have seen for decades, craftily negotiated by food lobbyists, is being replaced by...a pie.   First Lady Michelle Obama is on a war against obesity and she will fight over food. Pres. Obama warned us, "You do not want to be between Michelle and a tamale" and the new dietary guideline shape is the latest weapon.

Firstly, I guess an apology is in order. Its been a hell of a long time since number 4 went out; I got rather caught up with other things and this series then languished on my list of half-written articles. So, apologies for that!

But before we get cracking with the final 3, I thought I'd pick up on an episode of fakery that just wasn't. This is the tale of Archaeopteryx, who has weathered the storm and has retained its place as perhaps the greatest example of a transitional fossil that we have.

Most of us seek out like-minded individuals who will reinforce our worldview. As I remind my students, we hold no beliefs we think are incorrect. After all, if we thought we were wrong, we wouldn't believe it. There's a reason that it can be hard for us to agree to disagree or live and let live, too. If I am certain I am right, and you disagree with me, then you must be wrong. 

The fact that I am swamped by the too many activities I am involved in these days can be gauged by things like the following: I get to know about important new physics results coming from an experiment I am part of by... private communications from amateurs! Knowledgeable and informed ones, of course -but that's not the point.

The video “Why Quantum Mechanics is Weird” (25k views) won the 2005 Berkeley Video&Film Festival Best of Festival Award in Education. That is second place, behind a Grand Festival Award which went to a film on polar bears (much cuter than me talking for 27 minutes). In this blog, I will go through the math behind the video which provides a novel, entirely mathematical explanation for why causality is different between classical and quantum mechanics. Calculus done correctly in spacetime may turn out to provide the correct answer, completely philosophy-free, as it must be.

Why does local realism being wrong imply that non-local reality is true? Such is widely opined to be the only sober solution because it conserves good old reality, the scientists’ fort that is to be defended against the onslaught of magic.

However, reality with “spooky actions at a distance” is not non-magical either. Nevertheless, the issue is known as “non-locality in quantum physics”, never as “non-reality in quantum physics”. How about keeping localism and instead accepting that realism is a god of the gaps in retreat? Don’t like it? Well, how about at least not being so sure about it for starters?

A new study finds that stress does not appear to increase a person's risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS). 

Researchers studied two groups of women nurses from the Nurses' Health Study. The first group of 121,700 nurses between the ages of 30 and 55 were followed starting in 1976. The second group of 116,671 nurses between the ages of 25 and 42 were followed from 1989. Participants were asked to report general stress at home and at work, including physical and sexual abuse in childhood and as teenagers. Of the first group, 77 people developed MS by 2005.

There is water inside the moon.  A lot, it turns out, according to the first measurements of water in lunar melt inclusions, which show that some parts of the lunar mantle have as much water as the Earth’s upper mantle.

Lunar melt inclusions are tiny globules of molten rock trapped within crystals that are found in volcanic glass deposits formed during explosive eruptions. The new findings show lunar magma water contents are 100 times higher than previous studies have suggested.

Contrary to what you might think by the name, Greenland is rather frigid and Iceland is often quite nice.    Nice for Vikings, anyway.  But for a time Greenland became so miserable even Scandinavians had enough.