The Tevatron collider, the giant marvel accelerator built at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the eighties and operated there for over thirty years, until its demise in 2012, lost one of its fathers the other day, as Alvin Tollestrup passed away.

Tollestrup was maybe the key contributor to the project of putting together a 1-TeV particle accelerator, solving many issues for the construction of its superconducting magnets. But he also was for a long time the spokesperson of the CDF experiment, and the driving force behind the collective effort that led CDF to see a first evidence of the top quark in 1994, and then claim discovery for the long sought sixth quark in 1995.

Beliefs that tumors are caused by the modern world's food and chemicals have suffered a setback. A 60-million-year setback.

The fossilized tail of a young dinosaur from in southern Alberta, Canada had the benign tumor as part of the pathology of LCH (Langerhans cell histiocytosis), a rare and sometimes painful disease that still afflicts humans, particularly kids.

As we lick our Valentine card envelopes and slip into something more comfortable, it’s a good time to ponder our sexual relationships.

In the early days of the environmental war on agriculture, activists claimed they were not against the science itself, they were anti-corporate. They didn't want a company in charge of the food supply.

The argument resonated with a lot of people, including university scholars, so when the opportunity to solve the vitamin A deficiency issue in the developing world became available with genetic engineering, it was an independent group of scholars that developed a GMO rice with higher levels of beta-carotene. They made this Golden Rice available for free.

A new analysis used Alaska Department of Fish and Game data and fish estimates from 2007 to 2016 to quantify the number and value of Pacific salmon harvested from streams, rivers, and lakes in Alaska. They estimate that it's 48,000,000 fish per year, and that is without  the recreational fishing catch and local communities where it's a food staple. The value is $88,000,000 per year.

While $88 million is a fine industry it speaks poorly about those who protest farming and hunting while claiming to care about nature. Good luck going to a fancy restaurant without having a server note that the salmon you might order was wild.

Do you listen to experts when it comes to food? If so, you are in the rarity. Most mimic what their friends do, according to recent survey results.

Study participants ate an extra fifth of a portion of fruit and vegetables for every portion they thought their social media peers ate - and they consumed an extra portion of snack foods and sugary drinks for every three portions they believed their online social circles did.

So our friends determine our eating behavior? Or do we tend to be friends with people who have our lifestyles? And what might that mean for government panels that want to nudge the behavior of the public? Will we see targeted ad campaigns at key social media users?

An experiment before the 2016 Trump-Clinton debate in metropolitan New York City showed that it was possible to have people be less polarized. 

They showed questionnaire responses where respondents were actually more moderate than their real responses, and then people justified their moderation.

Posing as political researchers, a research team from McGill and Lund Universities approached 136 voters at the first Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton presidential debate, on Long Island, and asked them to compare Trump and Clinton on various leadership traits (such as courage, vision, and analytic skills) by putting an X on a sliding scale. 

Have you ever used a public charging station to charge your mobile phone when it runs out of battery? If so, watch out for “juice jacking”.

Cybercriminals are on the prowl to infect your mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers and access your personal data, or install malware while you charge them.

Specifically, juice jacking is a cyber attack in which criminals use publicly accessible USB charging ports or cables to install malicious software on your mobile device and/or steal personal data from it.

NGC 4490, nicknamed the "Cocoon Galaxy" because of its shape, has "a clear double nucleus structure," according to a new paper.

It's only realized now because while one nucleus can be seen in optical wavelengths, the other is hidden in dust and can only be seen in infrared and radio wavelengths.

The work started when first author Allen Lawrence was taking undergraduate astronomy classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He had the chance to study one of two galaxy systems and picked NGC 4490, which is interacting with a smaller galaxy, NGC 4485. The system is about 20 percent of the size of the Milky Way, located in the Northern Hemisphere and about 30 million light years from Earth.

Intelligence Squared recently had a debate on nuclear energy kicked off by Bill Nye, the famous Science Guy, and moderated by John Donvan.

On the pro-nuclear side were Daniel Poneman, Deputy Secretary of Energy under President Obama, and Kirsty Gogan, co-founder of Energy for Humanity, while on the anti-science side was Gregory Jaczko, Obama's chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission(NRC), and Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.(1)

What was missing? An actual nuclear physicist.

Would you have a debate on vaccine safety without a doctor? A debate on climate change without a climate scientist? When it comes to nuclear energy, everyone is such an expert actual expertise seems to be irrelevant.