Today the University of Padova has issued a call for Ph. D. positions to start in October 2021, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy has 23 new openings. The English version of the call page is here.

Muons are leptons(1), fundamental particles formed in the atmosphere by cosmic rays that are a heavier cousin of electrons. The Standard Model has three generations of leptons; electrons, muons, and tau plus their three neutrinos. The Standard Model is in line with "the big bang" and measurements of the hydrogen/helium ratio - because the number of types of neutrinos affects the prevalence of helium.

Things were great, or at least in a kind of intellectual détente on the Standard Model, until recently.

Note: this is an updated version of the article. For the original discussion of the muon anomaly, published before the release of results, please scroll down.

Beer has been important throughout human history. Given how dangerous water was in the past, it is arguably true that civilization would not exist without beer.

Yet if you make your own, you have to think about waste. Spent grain, the malt and adjuncts left over from the mash, is 85 percent of brewing waste. If you don't have a compost pit or a farm somewhere close by, it's going inro the garbage.

Your risk of death is 100 percent. Yet your risk of early demise can be mitigated if you avoid things like ingesting alcohol and cigarettes and mustard gas.

Those are clear killers. What about salt, sugar, and meat? Those have not been established as science at all, they are instead examples of correlation. To create correlation is easy, it only requires looking at a group of people, finding what diseases they have, finding what foods they eat, and creating a "statistically significant" link between them.

Electric cars are popular, thanks to government mandates and subsidies, but they have a problem in the distance; massive amounts of battery waste.

The EU, for example, wants to have 30 million electric cars by 2030 and while politicians can ignore the fossil fuel demands and strain on the grid, electric cars bring something they can't ignore; the environmental impact of giant toxic batteries in landfills.

There are billions of vaccine doses coming along later this year. Biden says he will give excess doses to other countries, so the US is expected to be a huge donor later this year. Even if the US fully vaccinates everyone, adults and children, twice over, now and in the fall, the US has secured so many doses for 2021 that it will be able to fully vaccinate 1.3 billion people outside the US as well.

The remains of what probably was Marni Dee Sheppeard were found last week in the mountains of the west coast of New Zealand, near Otira. Although a positive identification is still pending, this does seem to mean that Marni has died while hiking in her beloved mountains, some time between mid November and December of last year.

Mathematics is a language and languages can be used to create stories. It just takes imagination to create time travel or wormholes or theories of strings or lots of nice things theoretical physicists throw into arXiv.

Sometimes math has to create a story because real numbers don't work, even if the physics does.

Wave-particle duality, a foundation of quantum mechanics, has a fascinating science history. James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations govern the device you are reading this article on, couldn't explain everything - he died of cancer at age 46. It was left to Albert Einstein a generation later, in his 1905 paper, to describe light as photons containing properties of both particles and electromagnetic fields - the waves of Maxwell.

Before 2020, it’s likely the word “antimicrobial” did not often cross your mind. Perhaps you walked down the cleaning aisle in the grocery store and saw a disinfectant with the phrase “Kills 99.9% of Germs,” but it’s likely that you didn’t give it too much thought.