A new paper reaffirms how humankind's embrace of agriculture, and resulting lower 'cost' of food, led to a cultural boom that resulted in mass migration and many of the world's major language families.

If you speak modern Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Mongolian, you have a connection to neolithic millet farmers from the Liao River valley - Inner Mongolia and the provinces of Liaoning and Jilin in China. People speaking nearly 100 dialects and languages across 5,000 miles have a shared genetic ancestry stretching back 9,000 years, the research found.

You may not want to hear the same song over and over, but for patients with mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer’s disease, repeated listening to personally meaningful music induces beneficial brain plasticity, according to a new study.

It found that changes in the brain’s neural pathways correlated with increased memory performance on neuropsychological tests, supporting the clinical potential of personalized, music-based interventions for people with dementia.

Riding a wave of government mandates and subsidies, and ignoring that fossil fuel usage to create electricity is identical to what it was before a trillion dollars in additional subsidies for solar and wind alternatives, electric cars are now everywhere.

Writing in The Daily Beast, William Bredderman notes that the self-proclaimed whistleblower organization US Right To Know has a seedy undercurrent of malevolence; its relationship to the anti-vaccine movement. 

Welcome to the party. Get ready for your readers to be told you must have been bought off by Monsanto or Pfizer. While USRTK will claim its own funding has no impact at all on their content. 

Coronavirus has been with us for thousands of years and has mutated accordingly. Since it is in the same family as the common cold it was only recognized as distinct a few decades ago, and in the past severe cases were likely just treated as a flu.

But after SARS in 2003 and MERS a decade later, coronavirus has taken the world stage and it is never leaving the lexicon again. Every detected mutation is splashed across media outlets with no end in sight. Nearly everyone has to have been exposed at this point but well over 99 percent are unaffected and that leads to questions about how much more vaccines can help. Are antibodies from infection as good as a vaccination?

They can be, in a counter-intuitive way.

A long time ago, before starting the studies which would lead to a career as a particle physicist, I studied music. After getting a degree as a master in Antique Instruments, I studied composition for four years. But I was not particularly well versed in that tough discipline, and I did the right thing in dropping out. I was 18, and I decided that Science was going to be my job, not music. But I kept an interest in music and I continued - a bit erratically - to study the piano.

The title of this post is the same of a non-technical presentation I gave today at the 2021 USERN Congress. The USERN (Universal Scientific and Education Research Network) is an organization fostering the diffusion of science, which provides prizes to researchers who distinguish themselves for their scientific advancements, and strives for science across borders. As a member of its advisory board I was invited to give a presentation in the first session of the virtual congress, which deals with human versus artificial intelligence.

In response to increases in allergies, and then paralyzing schools and businesses because many parents conflate any allergic reaction with anaphylaxis, in 2017 allergists and pediatricians began recommending that parents start to introduce peanut product around the time their child begins solid foods to prevent peanut allergy.

A new study presented at the year’s American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) Annual Scientific Meeting reveals that it makes sense to do the same with eggs.

It's nice that a robot can fold a towel really, really slowly, but they're going to remain an academic gimmick until they can engage in social interactions. Then they could replace people. If you have spent any time on Twitter, you know people are done talking to anyone who does not look, talk, or identify just like them, so robot socialization couldn't come at a better time.

Corporate journalists and other pundits have argued that the 2020 election was a referendum on how the administration handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Is that true?