Some politicians and cultural activists may claim that humans are propelled by consumerism but a new paper finds that isn't true. And that it is not true is a good thing.

If we were all driven by greed, there would be no poverty. Developing nations would embrace science and have plentiful food. But the environmental strain would be tremendous.

In 1347, the Bubonic or Black Plague first entered the Mediterranean via trade ships transporting goods from the territories of the Golden Horde in the Black Sea.

The disease tore through Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa, in some cases claiming up to 60 percent of the population. It resurged throughout the next 500 years.

The Biden administration has issued a decree that any furnace sold after 2029 must be a "condensing" furnace, and his environmental group allies are thrilled they have locked in another win.

It may not be a win for the public.

Neural networks are everywhere today. They are used to drive vehicles, classify images, translate texts, determine your shopping preferences, or finding your quickest route to the supermarket. Their power at making sense of small or large datasets alike is enabling great progress in a number of areas of human knowledge, too. Yet there is nothing magical about them, and in fact what makes them powerful is something that has been around for century: differential calculus.

Scientists just published a study of what may prove to be China's most ancient human fossil. The researchers employed microCT, geometric morphometry, and classical morphology techniques to investigate the remains of the maxillary and five teeth from the skull unearthed at the Chinese site of Gongwangling, on the vast plains on the northern slopes of the Quinling Mountains (province of Shaanxi, in central China) and was discovered by the scientist Woo Ju-Kang in 1963.

Though activists try to portray farmers as slathering pesticides and fertilizer on land, anyone who has farmed know it is just the opposite; land is their greatest asset and given price competition they need to control costs and inputs as much as possible.

A new paper says Generation X adults in the United States are more likely to have a greater number of chronic health conditions than those that preceded them, which will please environmental groups who claim that everything from pesticides to natural gas to cell phones is killing us, but is not science.

There are two issues to think about. One is that diagnoses don't mean much. If you get a diagnosis of chronic lyme disease, it does not mean that is suddenly a real disease, and life expectancy is basically meaningless.

It's difficult to imagine that a simple dietary intervention could mean less Alzheimer’s disease but that is why observational studies and epidemiology claims are placed into the exploratory pile until science can take a look.

A new paper correlates people with a higher  red blood cell (RBC) docosahexaenoic acid (DHA levels as 49% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease vs. those with lower levels, especially for those carrying the ApoE4 gene, which is also a risk factor for Alzheimer's. You know that correlation is not causation so modifying two risk factors with unclear biological meaning may or not be better than doing nothing and hoping for the best. 

A new study correlates SARS-CoV-2 specific T cells to lung function and those who suffer from long-term COVID symptoms, which impacts an unclear number of people.

The study found that patients suffering from long COVID symptoms had virus-specific T cell levels more than 100 times higher than those who recovered from the disease.

When I explain to the public (in this blog, or at public conferences or schools) how the Large Hadron Collider operates, I have to gloss over a lot of detail that is unnecessary to grasp the important concepts, which enable other discussions on interesting subnuclear physics. This is good practice, and it also saves me from having to study details I have forgotten along the way - they say that what you are left with when you forget everything is culture, and I tend to agree. I have a good culture in particle physics and that's all I need to do some science popularization ;-)