Though nearly everyone recognizes that smoking cigarettes is a known carcinogen, many marijuana users think marijuana smoke is safe. They may not realize it is inhaling the smoke, not that the smoke is from one plant or another, that is the worry. Nicotine or THC is as harmless as caffeine, but when combusted in a leaf with paper and inhaled, everything becomes harmful. Including marijuana plants.

Ever since experimental physics was a thing, the worth of scientists could be appraised by how carefully they designed their experiments, making sure that their devices could answer as precisely as possible the questions that crowded their mind. Indeed, the success of their research depended on making the right choices on what apparatus to build, with what materials, what precise geometry, and how to operate it for best results.


(Above: Ramsay and Pierre Curie in their lab)

Nothing is more ridiculous than annual logjammed airports because celebrities use private jets to go to climate conferences and tell attendees eating four-course meals they need to do more to convince poor people using dung and wood for fuel that they should want solar panels. Environmental journalists insist they must also attend in person because it "builds relationships" and they promise to give money to some company that says it will plant a tree to assuage their guilt.

It's all nonsense, of course, the kind of rich white elitism that has a different name than in the 19th century but is still warmed over colonialism. 

In an Instagram post, the family of Bruce Willis revealed that the actor has been diagnosed with aphasia, and the cognitive decline resulting means he is stepping away from his acting career.

Aphasia is devastating for an actor because all three kinds - Broca's aphasia, Wernicke's aphasia, and global aphasia - mean a loss of communications ability. And when an actor has to struggle to communicate at all, they are losing the ability to act.

Fermilab, now a tourist attraction, found the Higgs Boson before the Large Hadron Collider did, but the lack of comparative luminosity made it a struggle to know that as quickly as the LHC did. 

That's why the discovery of a star by Hubble 28 billion lightyears away, a new record, may not last long if everything goes as planned with its long-delayed successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. It's so far away that Hubble can't tell astronomers if it is even one star or two, because statistical blips in the data need more clarity that a deeper space telescope will provide.

Tiger blood, rhino horns, any number of natural supplements, including from endangered species, are used in the alternative medicine spheres - and that market is dominated by Asia.

Sea cucumbers are used in Chinese folk medicine but are also a luxury food product and that demand has meant once-thriving Mexican sea cucumber populations have been decimated due to poaching. China doesn't care where its products come from, so any certification could be as illegitimate as an organic food sticker from Russia.

Sea cucumbers are ecologically critical but a new literature review finds that Asian food markets have them on the brink of crisis. 

The war in Ukraine has driven oil prices to their highest levels since 2008. As crude oil is the main component of gasoline, the first place Americans encounter price pain is at the pump, with 56% of every gallon of gas reflecting the cost of crude, followed by spikes in home climate control.

Pluto, the Solar System’s largest dwarf planet, just became even more interesting with a report that icy lava flows have recently covered substantial tracts of its surface. In this context, “recently” means probably no more than a billion years ago. That’s old, of course – and there is no suggestion that volcanoes are still active – but it’s only a quarter the age of the Solar System and no one knows how Pluto brewed up the heat needed to power these eruptions.

The news, coming nearly seven years after NASA’s New Horizons probe made its spectacular flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015, is thanks to analysis of images and other data by a team led by Kelsi Singer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Prior to the latest coronavirus pandemic, many were indifferent about getting the flu vaccine. They shouldn't be. Co-infections are not common but a new study finds that adults in hospital who have COVID-19 and the flu at the same time are at much greater risk of severe disease and death - over four times more likely to require ventilation support and 2.4 times more likely to die than if they only had COVID-19.

A new mode of how antibodies navigate the surface of pathogens like coronaviruses compares the migration of these pathogen hunters to the random movements of a child on stepping stones.

Antibodies are often thought of as Y-shaped proteins but perhaps a more accurate way to envision them is to flip the picture upside down and regard antibodies as walking stick figures, stepping on antigens. Those two characteristic “Y” branches function as legs of sorts.