I’ve written in the past about the tendency of some researchers to compensate for weak study design or small sample size by over-hyping their research findings, particularly with the news media.

Recent survey results by SciDev.Net/CABI reveal that the majority of science journalists (633 respondents from 77 countries) believe that the field is not consolidating the way some other mainstream/legacy journalism specialties are.

Proving the universe seems like a gargantuan task, but we might have a chance to do so with exascale computers.

This past Thursday I held a public lecture, together with my long-time friend Ivan Bianchi, on the topic of Art and Artificial Intelligence. The event was organized by the "Galileo Festival" in Padova, for the Week of Innovation.
Ivan is a professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Padova. We have known each other since we were two year olds, as our mothers were friends. We took very different career paths but we both ended up in academic and research jobs in Padova, and we have been able to take part together in several events where art and science are at the focus. Giving a lecture together is twice as fun!

For most of this century, anyone in London has been photographed and filmed an average of 300 times each day. Their reasoning to start such intrusive scrutiny was that England, Wales, and Scotland led the developed world in crime, and a tourist attraction like London needed extra monitoring.

Today’s global energy inequities are staggering.

Ivermectin is an over 30-year-old wonder drug that treats life- and sight-threatening parasitic infections. Its lasting influence on global health has been so profound that two of the key researchers in its discovery and development won the Nobel Prize in 2015.

I’ve been an infectious disease pharmacist for over 25 years. I’ve also managed patients who delayed proper treatment for their severe COVID-19 infections because they thought ivermectin could cure them.

Even if insurance and household incomes are similar, white people are more likely than people of color to be sent home after surgery rather than to a skilled nursing facility. People of color are also more likely to stay in long-term care or get care at home, according to results presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY 2021 annual meeting.

The reason, the authors believe, it is that people of color are more likely to have severe diabetes and high blood pressure, which can impact recovery. 

It used to be that allergies were somewhat rare but if you go to an allergist today, you are almost certain to be declared allergic, or at least sensitive, to something. How much of that is actual biological change versus how much is that the country that purchases 85% of the world's prescription medication loves to get medical diagnoses is unclear.

Now the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology believes that nearly half of the population of the EU have allergies to something. A survey of Americans in 2020 estimated that approximately 30 percent of Americans of all ages have allergies. Since they are self-reported surveys rather than dianoses, what is unclear is how many of those are people claiming issues like gluten sensitivity.

Though it is common to see environmental videos of birds caught in plastic, less well known is that, like cats, seabirds love to eat it.

Paracelsus famously noted that the dose makes the poison but in the 1990s some activist scientists began claiming that any dose is a poison, so even if birds excrete the plastic, chemicals can "bioaccumulate" and cause harm.