I recently read a book by Martin Rees, "On the future". I found it an agile small book packed full with wisdom and interesting considerations on what's in the plate for humanity in the coming decades, centuries, millennia, billions of years. And I agree with much of what he wrote in it, finding also coincidental views on topics I had built my own judgement independently in the past.

Half a decade ago, France's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) tried to fight for its credibility in the face of a scientific onslaught against their latest epidemiology findings by actually lowering the "risk" of something.

Like everyone else, when it was announced they were 'studying' it - in IARC, that only means mouse models that support claims of cancer and surveys that can be linked to cancer - I assumed they would finally do what they had wanted to do since the early 2000s; declare coffee a carcinogen.

And get $15,000 an hour expert witness contracts from lawyers who could then sue, claiming someone who cut the lawn and drank a cup of coffee got cancer due to the coffee. 

The American Heart Association is concerned that stroke and heart attack survivors don't think enough about 'risk' of LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, now colloquially termed 'bad' cholesterol.

Prior to the Olympics in Beijing, China solved a pollution problem they previously claimed they never had by banning all cars except those for communist party elites. It did little for CO², Beijing had a PM₁₀ (smog) problem, but it showed drastic interventions could help the air.

If a school doesn't have a strong sports program, universities that have seen faculty and administrative salaries skyrocket have used the unlimited student loan debt program created in the late 1980s to fund growth. Yet a few years prior to that, a science fundraising option had also been made available.

In 1980, Democrats passed the Bayh-Dole Act and it reversed long-standing policy that if a discovery was made using taxpayer-funding, it could not be privately monetized. It became possible for scientists who did applied work to start a company or sell a patent so a corporation even if the American people had paid for it.

What is multithreading? It is the use of multiple processors to perform tasks in parallel by a single computer program. I have known this simple fact for over thirty years, but funnily enough I never explored it in practice. The reason is fundamentally that I am a physicist, not a computer scientist, and as a physicist I tend to stick with a known skillset to solve my problems, and to invest time in more physics knowledge than software wizardry. You might well say I am not a good programmer altogether, although that would secretly cause me pain. I would answer that while it is certainly true that my programs are ugly and hard to read, they do what they are supposed to do, as proven by a certain record of scientific publications. 

In the field of gender-affirming care for the LBGTQ+ community, there are drastic solutions - controversial if it involves those unable to grant real informed consent - but there are also therapeutic benefits to minimally invasive procedures, write a group in Canadian Medical Association Journal, and taxpayers should fund those.

Obesity is closing in on smoking and alcohol as the top killer among lifestyle diseases. Over 25 percent of the world is overweight and in countries like the UK and US, that number is approaching 70 percent. It is correlated to things like heart disease.

Is it a genetic issue, and therefore exculpatory? A new paper hopes to show that. The authors analyzed brain scans of 1,351 young adults across a range of  body-mass index (BMI) scores. They found that the overall volume of the hypothalamus was larger in overweight and obese people. They declared a significant relationship between volume of the hypothalamus and BMI.

Malaria infects 250,000,000 each year and kills nearly 700,000. It is so rare in America that academics and activists can lament chemicals that kill mosquitoes which transmit it to humans, and even block mosquitoes engineered to prohibit reproduction, but the damage is too great to risk on tinkering with alternatives.

Wait a minute - why is an article about automatic differentiation labeled under the "Physics" category? Well, I will explain that in a minute. First of all, let me explain what automatic differentiation is. 
Computing derivatives of functions is a rather error-prone job. Maybe it is me, but if you give me a complex function where the dependence on a variable is distributed in several sub-functions, I am very likely to find N different results if I do it N times. Yes, I am 57 years old, and I should be handling other things and leave these calculations to younger lads, I agree.