As some of you may know, I've become deeply concerned, and indeed appalled by the large numbers of fake doomsday news stories, because I am so often contacted by people who get very scared and sometimes suicidal as a result of reading these stories. Fourteen tabloids and other papers have published this story so far, and none of them mention that it originates from a site known to publish fake news. The story is that the world is going to end because of two snowy days in Salento in Southern Italy, which they say is a prophetic sign of an imminent massive supervolcano eruption. I think it is a particularly striking case of doomsday news based on chinese whispers starting off from a fake story.

If you are against the exploitation of Blacks, stop mislabeling, or do not stuff humans into dual categories at all. Look at each individual in her own right.

I am happy to report, with this rather unconventional blog posting, that I am getting married on January 12. My companion is Kalliopi Petrou, a lyrical singer. There will be no huge party involved in the event, as Kalliopi and I have lived together for some time already and the ceremony will be minimalistic. None the less, we do give importance to this common decision, so much so that I thought it would be a good thing to broadcast in public - here.

Alternative Title:
“Inevitable ‘Society of Walls’ versus the True Legacy of Donald Trump: Dear Donald, please reform Academia!”

Confusion and misinformation are so intense in our time that even my readers, though at the right end of the IQ Bell curve, ask: How could deeply and widely knowledgeable scientists support Donald Trump in spite of his mentioning autism when criticizing vaccination procedures and doubting the “global warming consensus”?

Two days ago, before returning from Israel, my fiancee Kalliopi and I had a very nice dinner in a kosher restaurant near Rehovot in the company of Eilam Gross, Zohar Komargodski, and Zohar's wife Olga. 
The name of Eilam should be familiar to regulars of this blog as he wrote a couple of guest posts here, in similar occasions (in the first case it was a few before the Higgs discovery was announced, when the signal was intriguing but not yet decisive; and in the second case it was about the 750 GeV resonance, which unfortunately did not concretize into a discovery). As for Zohar, he is a brilliant theorist working in applications of quantum field theory. He is young but already won several awards, among them the prestigious New Horizons in Physics prize.

I thought it would be good to let you readers of this column know that in case you wish to order the book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab" (or any other title published by World Scientific, for that matter) you have 10 more days to benefit of a 35% discount off the cover price. Just visit the World Scientific site of the book and use the discount code WS16XMAS35).

To be science, there must be a theoretical foundation. What does psychology lack? A theoretical foundation. In fact, the only true theoretical foundation of psychology is widely derided by psychologists and psychiatrists alike, yet much of the world can only name one person in the field - and that person is Dr. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis.

Though opiods are getting all of the government attention, and the substitute fentanyl all of the attention in media, they are not the only substances putting people at risk. Kratom has gotten some media attention, but among users, psilocybin-containing 'magic mushrooms' are a bigger worry, with more than 10 percent in a recent survey believing their worst 'bad trip' had put themselves or others in harm's way, and a substantial majority called their most distressing episode one of the top 10 biggest challenges of their lives.

I am spending a week in Israel to visit three physics institutes for colloquia and seminars: the Tel Aviv University (where I gave a colloquium yesterday), the Haifa Technion (where I am giving a seminar today), and the Weizmann institute in Rehovot (where I'll speak next Wednesday).