The common belief is that women who have twins are more fertile but what does the science say?
A detailed analysis of more than 100,000 births to women born between 1700 and 1899, published on 24 May 2022 in Nature Communications, found the answer is no.
Analysis of the offspring of twins shows that they are not exceptionally fertile when compared to the rest of the population. In addition, without refined statistical analysis, previous studies on the subject could not determine whether women have twins more often because they frequently release more than one egg during ovulation, or whether it is the multiplication of pregnancies that increases their chances.
I was happy to meet Giorgio Bellettini at the Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors this week, and I thought I would write here a note about him. At 89 years of age Giorgio still has all his wits around him, and he is still as compelling and unstoppable as anybody who has met him will recall. It is a real pleasure to see that he still attends all sessions, always curious to hear the latest developments in detector design and performance.
Two recent analyses by the CMS experiments stand out, in my opinion, for their suggestive results. They both produce evidence at the two-three sigmaish level of the signals they were after: this means that the probability of the observed data under the no-signal hypothesis is between a few percent and a one in a thousand, so nothing really unmistakable. But the origin of the observed effects are probably of opposite nature - one is a genuine signal that is slowly but surely sticking its head up as we improve our analysis techniques and collect more data, while the other is a fluctuation that we bumped into.
The activist group Environment and Climate Change Canada has gotten political allies inside the government's Health Canada division to try and lobby for bans on decabromodiphenyl ethane - without having a replacement for a flame retardant used to keep home appliances, electronics, and electric wires and cables safe.
That is an unnecessary increase in risk, not to mention a high price increase for Canadians already in the midst of a supply chain crisis.
Since the Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded to biochemist Jennifer Doudna and microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2020, for developing the gene-editing technique known as Crispr-Cas9, Crispr has enjoyed a lot of attention and interest from scientists. The technique has been touted as a possible source of new treatments for diseases caused by genetic mutations, such as muscular dystrophy, and congenital blindness.
"All The President's Men" inspired young people to rush to journalism while "Mad Men" caused enrollment in advertising courses to surge and "Top Gun led to more Navy recruits.
Film and television shapes young minds and marketers know it. A whole generation of people will believe a show like "The Offer" is a history of "The Godfather" film the same way some believe "Food Inc" is science; because it is on a screen. Yet trends have changed as fashions have. 'Stewardess' is out of the lexicon while 'Congressman' is still in.
A new study finds that hugging a romantic partner can prevent the acute stress response of female bodies.
Women who embrace their romantic partner prior to undergoing a stressful experience had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in saliva compared to women who did not embrace their partner. No effect was found for men.
Some papers have claimed that massages, embraces combined with hand-holding, and embraces combined with affectionate communication can reduce signs of stress in women but those usually do not include men nor any effects of a brief embrace.
In the 16th century, it was shown by Paracelsus that 'the dose makes the poison' - too much medicine or anything else could kill while too little did nothing. In the 21st century activists have sought to dispel that. They claim homeopathic effects from chemicals at safe doses, endocrine distuption and u-shaped curves, but science knows better.
The recent precise measurement of the W boson mass produced by the non-dead CDF collaboration last month continues to be at the focus of attention by the scientific community, for a good reason - if correct, the CDF measurement in and of itself would be the conclusive proof that our trust in the Standard Model of particle physics when producing predictions of particle phenomenology needs a significant overhaul.
This was an opportunity for the public to give your feedback to NASA about their Mars sample return mission plans - can submit your comments to NASA here as a public comment.
This is for their draft environmental impact statement which they plan to submit later this year.
My comment is here
. Comment Submitted by Robert Walker
Comments were open to 11:59 May 15, ET, 2022. They got 170 comments (with some duplication). I
