There is a different kind of 1 percent, and it isn't people who can afford to buy organic food. It's Americans who carry a handgun on a daily basis. 

It's not a surprise, given American history and horrific events like a psychopath in Las Vegas wounding or killing 500 people while police waited 70 minutes to attack him. A nearby hotel guest with a gun could have ended that more quickly. 

Short summary: A scrap book of nonsense. Theologically, morally, astronomically and politically abysmal. The author would not be accepted for admission to a course on astronomy at a university, never mind actually pass such a course. And it’s a similar position for theology. Most of the book, 75%, is not even written by him but just copy / pasted from the internet. It is appalling to think that this book reached the #1 position for astronomy books in Kindle on Amazon, and #5 for paperback. I’ve asked them to take it down for breach of copyright.

Yesterday, October 20, was the international day of Statistics. I took inspiration from it to select a clip from chapter 7 of my book "Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab" which attempts to explain how physicists use the concept of statistical significance to give a quantitative meaning to their measurements of new effects. I hope you will enjoy it....

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In 2017 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) published a report that it developed for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate the evidence that chemicals are capable of causing health effects at low-doses. 

There are reasons to get an HPV vaccine - it literally prevents cancer - but consumer marketing is misstating absolute and relative risk when it comes to throat cancer. A preventive vaccine against HPV types, 6, 11, 16, and 18 has been in widespread use for a decade, and a version that also protects against five other HPV types was FDA-approved in 2014. Those vaccines won't clear existing HPV infections.

Christopher Portier, Ph.D., recently gave a deposition in liability litigation hearings related to cases filed by environmental lawyers against Monsanto’s Roundup. If you are not aware, Dr. Portier is external special adviser to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) working group that prepared the Group 2A classification (“Probably carcinogenic to humans”) for glyphosate, the key component of Roundup.

Like many others, I listened to yesterday's (10/16/17) press release at the NSF without a special prior insight in the physics of neutron star mergers, or in the details of the measurements we can extract from the many observations that the detected event made possible. My knowledge of astrophysics is quite incomplete and piecemeal, so in some respects I could be considered a "layman" listening to a science outreach seminar.

Yet, of course, as a physicist I have a good basic understanding of the processes at the heart of the radiation emissions that took place two hundred million years ago in that faint, otherwise unconspicuous galaxy in Hydra. 

It’s been shown that the primary route of human exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) is through the diet.   One source of BPA in the diet is the protective coating inside many food and beverage cans, which helps to protect the safety and integrity of the food.  Epoxy resin-based coatings have been used for decades because they excel in this

If you read a headline declaring that scientists had discovered that up to 75 percent of human food samples were found to be contaminated with some scary-sounding substance, like arsenic, what would you think? (1)

You'd be worried, and rightfully so. But if you then found many paragraphs into the story the scientists admitting that the scary substance is in such minuscule trace amounts that it can't possibly pose a risk to human health, how would your feelings change? In an era of "fake news", you'd feel like that's just what you got.

There are many stories about Yellowstone today by journalists saying it will erupt as a super volcano soon and that the effects will be devastating. No that is not what the study was about.

First, there is no sign of it erupting.

Then what about the study? The  scientists looked at when it last erupted as a supervolcano 631,000 years ago years ago. They think there was a magma mixing event a few decades before the eruption. The research was about the timing of that event. It wasn't about how to predict the next eruption.