Are you worried about getting cancer from a light bulb? Probably not, but if someone conspiratorially intones that 5G wireless towers are emitting radiation and you are a woman or a milllennial, you are a lot more likely to worry than men or Generation Z to be concerned, according to a new survey. Even though the radiation is the same.

After over one year of forced confinement, due to the still ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, academics around the world seem to have settled down on the idea that after all, we can still do our job via videoconferencing. We had to adapt to the situation as everybody else, of course, and in a general sense we are a privileged minority - other human occupations which are only possible in person suffered way more.

New York's Indian Point nuclear power plant was banned on April 30th of this year - because the ruling political party and the environmental lobbyists who guide decisions convinced themselves that solar was ready to fill the gap.

Now the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, has told residents they need to shut off their air conditioners during a heat wave, because they don't have enough electricity. At the state level, alleged serial sexual predator Governor Andrew Cuomo is deflecting from his scandals by appealing to his base with another ban on energy - making the state one on natural gas using hydraulic fracturing permanent.

In 2019, Biogen announced that it was abandoning its late stage drug for Alzheimer’s, aducanumab but then in 2021 they got FDA approval for it.

Two new gravitational-wave events, dubbed GW200105 and GW200115, were detected on Jan. 5, 2020, and Jan. 15, 2020, but they happened 900,000,000 years ago.

It took that long for the gravitational waves from two black holes gobbling up their neutron star companions to finally hit Earth.

This first-ever detection of a black hole merging with a neutron star occurred during the second half of the LIGO and Virgo detectors third observing run, called O3b. Although multiple observatories carried out several follow-up observations, none observed light from either event, consistent with the measured masses and distances.

Major droughts in California happen every 20 years and smaller ones more frequently, yet northern California has not built major water infrastructure since the 1960s while the population has doubled. Environmental lawyers block any infrastructure improvements so no new water storage can be added and regulations about water flow in rivers were based on an optimistic guess. During the current drought California is sending so much water to the San Francisco Bay, which doesn't need it, that they have to issue warnings for people on the rivers.

Most people don't recall the LinkedIn data breach from nine years ago, the Adobe customer cyber attackers from eight years back, that Equifax exposed private information of millions of people just four years ago.

Those are the high profile ones but most participants in a recent University of Michigan study remained unaware that their email addresses and other personal information had been compromised in five data breaches on average. Most breaches never make the news, and often they involved little or no notification to those impacted. 

(Inside Science) -- Tens of thousands of years ago in what is now Europe, people held their hands against cave walls and blew a spray of paint, leaving bare rock where their hands had rested. Many of these stencils show all five fingers, but in some, fingers appear to be shortened or missing. 

Researchers have proposed grisly explanations for these absent digits: Perhaps the artists lost fingers to frostbite or disease, or perhaps they endured amputations for ritual purposes or punishment. But other experts have long argued that it's more likely they weren't missing any fingers at all. Instead, the stone age artists may have been folding their fingers down to make hand signs -- possibly humanity's earliest venture into writing on the wall. 

The popular belief is that sexual activity must have declined during the pandemic, but that relies on the trope that young people go to bars and sleep with strangers and that lessened.

Some people were instead getting busy during the pandemic more than ever before. Older men with erectile dysfunction prescriptions. The qualifier "prescriptions" is because the number of men using them dwarfs the cases of actual erectile problems, the pill just makes it better.

In a review of National Sales Perspective data, the researchers found that sales of prescription daily-use erectile dysfunction drugs, such as tadalafil, soared after March 2020, when the country went into the nationwide lockdown.

One of the reasons why I love my job as a researcher in experimental physics is that every day brings along a new problem to solve, and through decades of practice I have become quick at solving them, so I typically enjoy doing it. And it does not matter whether the problem at hand is an entirely new, challenging one or a textbook thing that has been solved a million times before. It is your problem, and it deserves your attention and dedication.