Aspirin is fine for headaches but like much of epidemiological correlation that suggests cause and effect, link aspirin to fewer heart attacks has been nothing but a subsidy for companies. New results of the ASPREE trial presented today at ESC Congress 2019 show it doesn't help older people even if they are in the highest risk of cardiovascular disease.

In America, where we have created pre-diabetes to try and convince people they are already ill and need medication, an aspirin regimen is common, due to belief it helps prevent cardiovascular disease. That is not the case in Europe for people who do not have free from cardiovascular disease  because there is increased risk of major bleeding (doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehw106).

This is a story running in the news, even on the BBC website, which is scaring a few people. There isn't any prediction of an accelerating population collapse. Indeed our population is increasing and is expected to level off some time between 2050 and 2100 and AFAIK nobody is saying our population will collapse in 2050 except these two CEOs in their interview.

This is another article I'm writing to support people we help in the Facebook Doomsday Debunked group, that find us because they get scared, sometimes to the point of feeling suicidal about it, by such stories. Do share this with your friends if you find it useful, as they may be panicking too.

The colorful Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) occur when charged particles from the sun interact with gases in Earth’s during darker winter months in high-latitude regions like Alaska, Scandinavia, and Iceland but a geomagnetic storm predicted for this weekend could result in aurora sightings even in Montana.

When particles from the sun interact with Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere and gases like oxygen and nitrogen, they gain energy and later release it, creating the light shows.

Late in the prehistoric Silurian Period, around 420 million years ago, a devastating mass extinction event wiped 23 percent of all marine animals from the face of the planet.

For years, scientists struggled to connect a mechanism to this mass extinction, one of the 10 most dramatic ever recorded in Earth's history. Now, researchers have confirmed that this event, referred to by scientists as the Lau/Kozlowskii extinction, was triggered by an all-too-familiar culprit: rapid and widespread depletion of oxygen in the global oceans.

We hear a lot about a crisis in organ donations but a whole lot of patients who died waiting for transplants got organs offered, but their transplant teams declined - and someone lower on the list got the transplant instead.

Candidates who died without a transplant received a median of 16 offers (over 651 days) while waitlisted.

And most patients were never made aware they got an offer at all.

Today I am back from the 8th edition of the ICNFP conference, which finished yesterday in Kolymbari (Crete). This event is very interesting because of its wide scope, bringing together physicists from quite different fields in a venue that, due to its very relaxing, secluded nature favours post-session discussions and exchanges among the over 250 participants. 

Celebrities and environmentalist jetting off to exotic locations to talk about climate change, renewable energy, and organic food may make you feel like the modern world is killing the planet but a huge collaborative study reveals that early humans across the entire globe were ruining their environments as far back as 10,000 years ago.

Farther back, 12,000 years ago, humans were mainly foraging, meaning they didn't interact with their environments as farmers do. By 3,000 years ago, farmers were feeding nations and causing free trade in many parts of the globe.

Claims that meat production are causing undue stress on the environment are highly exaggerated, as are the benefits of plant-based diets.

Instead of being ground in evidence, the plant-based and vegan diet fads could worsen an already low intake of an essential nutrient involved in brain health. And governments which spend time creating panic about salt and sugar fail to monitor dietary levels of this vital nutrient--choline--found predominantly in meat and eggs.

Artifacts from an archaeological dig at the Cooper's Ferry site located along the Salmon River, a tributary of the larger Columbia River basin in western Idaho, suggest that the original native Americans were here 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, about 16,000 years ago.

The findings add weight to the hypothesis that initial human migration to the Americas followed a Pacific coastal route rather than through the opening of an inland ice-free corridor. The belief is that timing and position of the Cooper's Ferry site, located at the confluence of Rock Creek and the lower Salmon River,  is consistent with and most easily explained as the result of an early Pacific coastal migration.

Human land use due to manufacturing, population, and agriculture changing the shape of earth itself has been termed the Anthropocene Epoch, but if less hyperbolic scientists of the future agree with that at all, they are likely to agree it started 4,000 years before cars were invented.

Significant global landcover change had occurred by then, so if a new epoch really did start, it was not in the 20th century, finds a new study by a large international team of archaeologists and environmental scientists behind the ArchaeoGLOBE project.