There is no question the government and its hand-picked advisors have hyped claims of opioid addiction beyond all sense. Doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and legitimate pain patients have all been steamrolled in an effort to stop what is really a recreational use problem. 

Data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys between 1993 to 2017 covering 27 states and Washington, D.C., before and after "medical" marijuana laws were adopted and 7 states from before and after recreational marijuana laws were adopted covering more than 1.4 million high school students finds that marijuana laws appear to be associated with a decrease in the odds of marijuana use in the past 30 days or frequent marijuana use after medical marijuana laws were passed.

When you ingest sugar from honey or sugar from cane, your body converts it to a common currency - adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The same goes for fat and protein.

It's the calories that matter and too many of any of those will result in body fat - and that is not all equal. The location of where fat is stored in the body can have significant implications for human health, according to a new study which compared fat cells from under the skin and from the harmful fat inside the abdomen, creating the first comprehensive genomic map that reveals unique features, which appear to 'hard-wire' different types of fat early in cell development.

The next time you need to get a creative boost, try playing a video game. Not all day, that is the road to unemployment, but taking a break to play an open-ended building game, like Minecraft, has been found to increase creativity. Especially if you just do whatever you'd like.

Population level metrics such as Body Mass Index (BMI) or statistical correlation using epidemiology don't do much to inform individual experience, and psychology faces the same issue. Surveys can tell us whatever surveys can tell us about what a particular group of people taking surveys think, but there is a reason that no polling group does well with Congressional districts that are contentious. It simply doesn't work. As we learned when we first believed the anti-vaccine problem was a fringe religious issue, what people claim on surveys is not their behavior.(1)

Automated automobiles are coming, the question is how they will behave. Not how they will perform, anything is guaranteed to be safer than millions of distracted individuals and ATM machines have shown what accuracy will look like, but how they will behave, their driving style, may impact individual uptake in the short term.

Do you want robotic efficiency, a car that won't stop at a cross-section when no other cars are around, or automation that emulates average human driving and not only stops but even peeks ahead to get a better "view" like a human might? The surprising result was that efficiency was not the overwhelming winner; people today prefer a blend of both. 

The underlying central metaphor of the new Marvel film "Spider-Man: Far From Home" is that news shouldn't be trusted. Many agree, but whether or not people label it "fake" seems to be based on how different their own bias is.

If you are a Republican and regard CNN is biased, having a conservative voice on their network does not make the outlet seem less biased, it makes the participant seem less credible, even if they believe the individual is honest. 

In modern American culture, two exploratory fields in science compete to scare the public or suggest the promise of miracle cures; epidemiology and studies in mice.

Many people who are old enough to have experienced the first moon landing will vividly remember what it was like watching Neil Armstrong utter his famous quote: That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. Half a century later, the event is still one of the top achievements of humankind. Despite the rapid technological advances since then, astronauts haven’t actually been back to the moon since 1972.

This seems surprising. After all, when we reflect on this historic event, it is often said that we now have more computing power in our pocket than the computer aboard Apollo 11 did. But is that true? And, if so, how much more powerful are our phones?

Andras Kovacs studied Physics at Columbia University. He currently works as CTO of BroadBit Batteries company. Andras recently wrote an interesting book, which I asked him to summarize and introduce here. The text below is from him [T.D.]








This blog post introduces a newly published book, titled "Maxwell-Dirac Theory and Occam's Razor: Unified Field, Elementary Particles, and Nuclear Interactions".