If human beings go to Mars, they need food - and that means macaroni and cheese. 

Currently, plastic packaging can keep food safe at room temperature for up to twelve months but a new paper in the journal Food and Bioprocess Technology could keep ready-to-eat macaroni and cheese safe and edible with nutrients for up to three years. It's proof-of-concept but they may have time to get it right, if delays and development of the James Webb Space Telescope are an indication of the glacial timescale that NASA will need to send humans back to space.

Though the $35 billion supplement industry claims to be superior to vaccines and other medicine, the unknown constituents of shady health products could be causing cognitive defects, finds a new study.

Turmeric, a commonly used spice sometimes even injected by Americans who don't understand medicine, is sometimes adulterated with a lead-laced chemical compound in Bangladesh, one of the world's predominant turmeric-growing regions.

As young children worldwide protest over climate change, I thought I'd do a post about Bernie Sanders' Green Climate Change plan.

(click to watch on Youtube)

Bernie Sanders' idea is one of many ideas but one of the ones that promises the most radical action most quickly. He plans to spend $16 trillion on it, and claims that all of this will be recovered, that it will pay for itself.

This is another study that has hit the news, this time scaring people with the idea that the whole of the US may lose all its birds rapidly in the near future.

Short summary - studies like this are hard to do and the 3 billion figure should be treated cautiously - there can be observer effects. If accurate, the reductions are mainly in the most common birds, and some of them nuisance species such as the starlings. There is no possibility of the most common birds in the US going extinct.

This is a story that is scaring some people. New research that is suggesting that perhaps the climate is more sensitive to CO2 than previously thought - but this is way jumping the gun. We get many results like this sometimes running too hot, sometimes too cold. Only the ones that go too hot hit the headlines. But the IPCC will look at all the evidence with their next high level review in 2021. Meanwhile we should use the values for the high level review in 2018 which remains our best estimate to date.

A new strain of disease-causing bacteria has been identified which may explain a rise in more serious Strep A infections in England and Wales, according to results from cases published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal. 

When the Australian federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, went snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef in August, she told waiting reporters on the shore that she’d seen “amazing wildlife, fish, turtles, clams … a reef teeming with life”.

Such an upbeat assessment seems at odds with the Scientific Consensus Statement, released by the Queensland government in 2017, which said “key Great Barrier Reef ecosystems continue to be in poor condition”.

A few weeks ago, in an article where I discussed some new ideas for fundamental physics research, I briefly touched on an incident in which Paul Frampton, a well-known theoretical physicist, got involved in 2011. The paragraph in question read:

If you live in a city, your chances of being involved victim of a criminal act go up, and as cities grow in size, crime grows even faster.

But not all crimes go up at the same rate.  Rape grows only linearly, at roughly the same pace as a city's population, while car theft and robbery compound and outpace the population.

A new mathematical model says the same underlying mechanism that boosts urban innovation and startup businesses can also explain why certain types of crimes thrive in a larger population.