The CMS Collaboration submitted for publication last week a nice new result, where proton-proton collisions data collected by the experiment during the past run of the Large Hadron Collider were scanned in search of very peculiar events featuring a weak boson (W or Z) along with two energetic photons. The rate of these rare processes was measured and found in good agreement with predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics.

The Swedish government might ban the sale of new combustion cars in 2030 - and a new paper wants to get even more Draconian. Their computer estimate suggests that banning all combustion cars, even older ones already in use, might be the only way they will meet their climate targets. The replacement: electric vehicles.

It could work.

LeRoche Benicoeur/ConceiveEasy; EU Natural Inc.; Fertility Nutraceuticals LLC; SAL NATURE LLC/FertilHerb; and NS Products, Inc. have received warning letters from the US FDA due to their selling fraudulent treatments that claim to help with infertility.

Though dietary supplements are mostly exempt from FDA scrutiny due to the Clinton administration giving them a free pass if they put a small disclaimer on the packaging, companies still can't do things like claim to treat cancer, or anything that legitimate medicine does. They can only use marketing to suggest they might make you feel better and other claims that allow naturopaths and homeopaths to make money.

In a recent study, scholars did a prospective review of charts of nearly 300 adult patients hospitalized for COVID-19 at Michigan Medicine during the pandemic's first wave between March and April 2020. They analyzed discharge locations, therapy needs at the time of release and if they needed durable medical equipment or other services..

The investigators found that 45 percent of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 experienced significant functional decline after being discharged.

An analysis of ancient fish bones from 30 archaeological sites in Israel and Sinai which date from the Late Bronze Age (1550-1130 BC) until the end of the Byzantine period (640 AD) finds that Judeans commonly ate non-kosher - lacking scales or fins - fish.

This finding sheds new light on the origin of Old Testament dietary laws that are still observed by many Jews today - and how well people adhered. Some things become part of culture because they are common. If people in Tennessee banned eating sharks it wouldn't be a huge loss. The ban on finless and scaleless fish deviated from longstanding Judean dietary habits, the authors note.

If you are still being paid and your job is so secure you can go on strike to demand that your employer not ask you to come into the office, you might think getting a vaccine is not only no big deal, but is a moral mandate more important than any other. You can dismiss people who are less enthusiastic(1) as vaccine deniers or something even worse for journalists and 94 percent of science academics; Republicans.

That's privilege talking. It's also untrue.

A recent report by the World Health Organisation on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and resulting disease COVID-19 glossed over China - the country is not even mentioned until page 15 - but the rest of the world is not so easily bullied.

The Mars Curiosity rover has been on the job since the summer of 2012, exploring Gale Crater on the red planet. It's slow going, it has driven only 25 kilometers to date.  

But it can be fun to watch, like its ascent of Mount Mercou, a broad outcrop of rocks on the northern flank of Mount Sharp near the center of the crater, on April 18th 2021.

Mt. Sharp is over 2 miles high and Curiosity is the size of a small car. In the picture, it is above a 20-foot-high cliff where it examined the exposed rocks.


Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Last year it was announced that the Chinese government was going to pay for a third season of the Russian TV show "Better Than Us", a drama about an advanced AI robot that has a neural network bordering on free will, no limitations on killing, and drops terminology about family so often it could be in a Vin Diesel movie.(1) It was an odd move for a totalitarian regime historically afraid of culture they don't control centrally.

When one thinks about chemistry, one doesn't usually consider quantum mechanics to play a part. Yet it does. When it boils down to it, all matter is a combination of a handful of subatomic particles and the forces holding them together. Chemistry, is in essence, applied physics. For decades, scientists have been trying to determine how to follow a chemical reaction from its initial state through all of its quantum states to its products. The hope was that, by doing so, researchers could understand the quantum dynamics that drive these reactions. Until now, it has mostly been speculation. However, a recent paper published in Nature by Liu et al. suggests that this may be possible.