A multi-institutional study has found that a shorter course of post-mastectomy radiation, combined with breast reconstruction can time from 25 to 16 treatment sessions while remaining safe and effective.

Breast cancer is the second most frequently diagnosed cancer for American women and nearly 40% have mastectomies. The majority who do undergo reconstructive breast surgery.

Starting tonight, and lasting until Thanksgiving, Earth has a second moon.

Last week I was in Valencia, to attend the fourth MODE Workshop on Differentiable Programming for Experiment Design. It was a great meeting, with 80 participants eager to discuss their latest results in application of complex deep neural network models and similar concoctions to problems in fundamental science. 
Of particular significance is the fact that the average age of the participants was somewhere between 25 and 30 years. In my opening speech I made the point that given the downward trend of that number, soon we will be running a kindergarden. But nobody laughed - these kiddos are serious about machine learning, and they showed it with the excellent quality of the material they presented.

The recurring El Niño phenomenon was in full force from mid-2023 to mid-2024 and as predicted it brought higher temperatures. In this case, it brought the highest temperatures since accurate records have been kept, for 12 straight months.

Prokaryotes, single-cell organisms such as bacteria, undergo inversions which cause a physical flip of a segment of DNA and change an organism’s genetic identity the way you might change a wig. They can occur within a single gene, in defiance of the more common 'one gene codes for one protein' standard.

With a 4th generation nuclear plant finally getting built in the U.S., 30 years after the federal government blocked all advanced energy research, there are so few old environmentalists still in power that alternative energy wishful thinking can make way for science. They aren't going without a fight, though. Solar and wind haven't improved in 50 years but have still gotten $4 trillion in subsidies - all to change conventional energy share by 0.1%.

When COVID-19 broke out, it was a US election year and that meant a lot of common sense gave way to politics. Democrats charged that then-President Trump was putting lives at risk by telling FDA to fast-track a vaccine, after insisting that closing airports to China was racist and xenophobic because the World Health Organisation had not declared a pandemic. Government insiders spread the word to debunk concerns about a nearby wet market in Wuhan and the safety of its two labs even though an employee had been convicted of selling lab animals in that wet market. China scrubbed its coronavirus database out of existence to outsiders. 

New mothers are under a lot of pressure. They are told they have to breastfeed and if they don't, the formula they use may cause their child to have worse grades in school. And if the government shuts down formula factories for no coherent reason and imports aren't allowed because the identical product in Europe hasn't spent a billion dollars and 10 years to get FDA approval, that is a worry.

Theories in physics come and go, some are popular yet entirely speculative and fade away quickly, like String Theory, and Superdeterminism, while others continue to provide hope for a framework that can unify gravity at the very large and very small levels.

The SWGO Collaboration (SWGO stands for Southern Wide-Field Gamma Observatory) met this week in Heidelberg, hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) to discuss progress in the many activities that its members are carrying forward to prepare for the finalization of the design of the observatory and the following construction phase. 
As a member of the collaboration I could learn of many new developments in detail, but I cannot discuss them here as they are work in progress by my colleagues. What I can do here, however, is to describe the observatory as we would like to build it, and a few other things that have been decided and are now public.