A number of Master courses in the STEM area mandate students to find a research project abroad to which they participate for 3-6 months. Many of the students find projects that arise their interest through internet searches- at least this is the way I got to know a few of them: as I regularly put details of my research progress in this blog (among other places), I am evidently a visible target. I do not complain about this: many of the students who contact me end up contributing to the projects they get embedded in. In return, they usually get to add a few lines to their CV, and maybe authorship of one or two papers.

The dose makes the poison, except in academic epidemiology, where H-Index and citations necessitate writing papers claiming any dose is toxic.

This is why EXPLORATORY claims aren't actually science itself. When your only method is to ask people what products they use, if they feel sad, angry, or have a disease, and then correlating the product you wanted to target to the malady, it is easy to understand why during COVID-19 disease epidemiologists had a difficult time getting traction - they had never stood up to the cranks at Harvard School of Public Health and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences using food surveys to try and scare people about everything.

In the United States, 40 percent of births are to unmarried women, and there are nearly 13.6 million single parents raising over 21 million children. In 84 percent of cases, the single-parent homes are women. They are often low income.

That doesn't mean the fathers aren't involved. Over than half of unmarried low-income couples with children have positive co-parenting relationships and those supportive relationships were linked to their children showing more empathy, less emotional insecurity and fewer behavior problems.

Though there are science and engineering hurdles to overcome, governments are keen on using food for fuel. Corn is most common right now but sugar is also a target for legislators who want to pivot away from conventional energy.

Brazil is understandably interested in getting out in front of the issue. Sugarcane is one of Brazil’s main tools for ethanol from sugarcane is one of the most important renewable biofuels that can replace fossil fuels. 

A recent review of its importance to Brazil also discusses the history of sugarcane genetic improvement in Brazil from the arrival of the Portuguese to the currently available varieties.

In recent times, artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous. Besides powering our cellphones, directing what advertisements we get when we browse internet or read our emails, and creating content in the media, AI-powered hardware is more and more widespread, including self-driving vehicles, home appliances, and a host of other systems for industrial use.

Honeybees in man-made hives may have been suffering the cold unnecessarily for over a century because commercial hive designs are based on erroneous science, my new research shows.

While deforestation has declined rapidly in the last 60 years, clearing trees to make room for farmland was once essential. 

Even an island like England had farming going back thousands of years. Hundreds of dead tree trunks in the low-lying Fens of eastern England, caught in the machinery of Fenland farmers while plowing their fields, were from yew trees that populated the area between four and five thousand years ago. Yet farmers did not cut them down, Fen yew woodlands died rapidly about 4,200 years ago due to climate change, when peat expanded the trees fell and were preserved until today. It is likely that a rapid sea level rise in the North Sea flooded the area with salt water.

If you visit Japan, you may be surprised that Japanese traffic lights have blue on go rather than the green in the U.S. Actually, green is the standard there, just as red is, they just have a different definition of green.

It is rather common that things which should be basically the same for everyone, like a color, have not only different words but different meanings. A new study of basic color terms found that in cultures that have remained isolated, there are a lot fewer words for the tens of millions of colors we see.

Data tools like ChatGPT, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence (if you think a fancy autocomplete is actual AI), have the promise to do a lot of good. There are some concerns about human content 'creators' being replaced but we don't miss the 150,000 fewer bank tellers we had before the rise of ATMs and a lot of writing done by humans is pretty generic.

It's that time of year when activists, academics, and social media mavens hoping for media coverage begin to promote worry about Thanksgiving. 

Some risks are real, even if relatively slight; a lot more people driving mean more accidents and if you have a family member who is an International Agency for Research on Cancer epidemiologist, they will ignore the greater amount of driving and just tell you that Thanksgiving is deadly.(1) Food safety matters. Turkey should be 165 degrees Fahrenheit and ham 145, but anyone telling you that in a press release might as well be taking the bold stand of endorsing clean water.