Halloween is the time of year when you are most likely to find out your significant other is a vampire - or vampire hunter. Sure, vampires can't be real and never have been, there can't really be hunters for those any more than there are ghost hunters, but History Channel is stuffed with people hunting ghosts, so let's light a science candle rather than curse your supernatural darkness and tell you how to get rid of your partner's garlic breath after they return from a night of slaying.

Some controversial claims by epidemiologists with links to anti-meat groups (Frank Hu, Walter Willett, et al.) suggest that a normal human diet containing meat causes inflammation, which they then link to increased risk of heart disease.

A risk factor for a risk factor for a disease isn't very compelling but journalists often confuse hazard, including when epidemiologists use 10,000 doses, and risk, which is actual clinical relevance to people.

Halloween is just a few days away so prior to worrying about razor blades in candy or kids getting run down in the streets you may want to think about pumpkins.

They are full of toxic chemicals. Even organic pumpkins.

Andy Brunning, of the Compound Interest site, made this graphic for Chemical  &  Engineering News, but they have nothing to do with this article about the dangers of pumpkin chemicals. Theirs is informational, the snark is all mine.

Hurricane Katrina was not dangerous until it hit land in Louisiana. But it intensified and since activists had successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from making repairs, devastation occurred.

Injuries and lives lost may have been reduced if there was a better way to predict when a commonplace tropical depression or tropical storm will intensify. 

A new paper says there’s more than one mechanism that causes rapid intensification. 

The benefits of fluoridated water are well-established but when nature rather than science is in charge it can be harmful. The dose makes the poison and over 200 million people worldwide are estimated to be exposed to high fluoride levels in their drinking water.

A new study finds that long-term consumption of water with fluoride levels far above, 1000 percent more, established drinking water standards may be linked to cognitive impairments in children.

In pursuit of the ambitious goal of reaching net-zero emissions, nations worldwide must expand their use of clean energy sources. In the case of solar energy, this change may already be upon us.

A recent

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Is it possible for there to be ghosts? – Madelyn, age 11, Fort Lupton, Colorado

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Certainly, lots of people believe in ghosts – a spirit left behind after someone who was alive has died.

In a 2021 poll of 1,000 American adults, 41% said they believe in ghosts, and 20% said they had personally experienced them. If they’re right, that’s more than 50 million spirit encounters in the U.S. alone.

Harvard University, and its anti-science allies like The Guardian(1) paper in England, are again claiming that meat causes diabetes.

The occasional reader of this blog will excuse me if yet again I do not report here of this or that new result by the LHC collaboration, and instead discuss matters of lesser relevance. But to me, education is important. Even if I am not a University professor, but rather an employee of a research institute (and as such, not obliged to spend some of my time teaching), I do teach courses to university students. I do that because I believe I can give students a positive imprinting on the beauty of physics, on the exciting nature of research in fundamental science, and on how interesting all of that is.