In synergy with the third season of the hit Netflix series "Stranger Things", Burger King is selling upside-down Whoppers starting today, retro 1980s packaging included.

If you are not familiar with the show, and without too many spoilers, "Stranger Things" is a science fiction-horror show revolving around teens in the 1980s. If you are not familiar with Burger King, I suppose it's simple enough to say they sell hamburgers. And want to catch up to rival McDonald's. 

RR Auction in Boston has a selection of pretty interesting Apollo program stuff, but you have to bid before 7PM.

This is the perfect time to sell, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing is a month away, so it may not be the perfect time to buy. I have made a decent amount of money selling key comics a month before the next Marvel movie release and buying identical or better copies a year later from people who made impulse buys.

Up for grabs is an American flag flown into orbit on Apollo 11, signed by Command Module pilot Michael Collins. There is also a burn chart page from the flight plan that went into orbit on the Columbia Command Module, signed by both Collins and Buzz.

This has lead to some clickbait headlines such as “Glacier melting doubled since 2000, spy satellites show”. However, that’ not what is new about this study; its figures just confirmed earlier results. Increased glacier loss is one of the more robust predictions of climate change, though the details are harder to model.

The new thing about this study is that it covered the entire region in a uniform way. This let the authors conclude that the ice is most likely being lost due to warming rather than to precipitation changes or soot from cities.

In today's Wall Street Journal my article Science Saves an Old Chestnut discusses the potential benefit of President Trump's executive order requiring USDA, FDA, and EPA to modernize when it comes to biotechnology approval. They have to consider actual risk instead of treating every product like a new invention. They don't make flowers go through tens of millions of dollars and 20 years of regulatory stonewalling, why do it for anything else? 

I am reading a fun paper today, while traveling back home. I spent the past three days at CERN to follow a workshop on machine learning, where I also presented the Anomaly Detection algorithm I have been working on in the past few weeks (and about which I blogged here and here). This evening, I needed a work assignment to make my travel time productive, so why not reading some cool new research and blog about it?

Once upon a time, epidemiologists believed bacon caused cancer, as did hot tea, a weedkiller that acts on no human biology, bread, apples, lettuce, mustard, tomatoes, and more.

That faraway time was actually last year.

You name it, and it is possible for statisticians at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to find a chemical in it that links it to cancer. With most foods, it is also possible for other epidemiologists to link them to prevention of cancer.(1)

What did epidemiologists once deny causes cancer? The cancer history of your family - genetics. 

Some parents with a lesbian, gay or bisexual child report just as much struggle to adjust two years after the fact as they did when they first learned of their child's sexual orientation, according to a recent survey. That has nothing to do with caring for their child, most do, but it informs how to make the adjustment easier for everyone involved.

New statistics released by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reveals that 50,000 more Americans age 55 and older got cosmetic procedures in 2018 than the previous year.

Aging gracefully is not in the cards for senior citizens with the means to change it, they now have choices, and those choices are likely spurred by the greater availability of later romances. Most common in her Ohio practice, says plastic surgeon Anne Taylor, MD; cosmetic fixes of the neck or double chin. Those are most prominent when looking down into a camera.

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #1

Tom, Dick and Harry explain a statistical method.


The mysterious Voynich Manuscript.


A simple analysis of a sufficiently large text can reveal much about the topic of that text, if the language is known.

If the text, as in the case of the Voynich Manuscript, is written in an unknown script, then the same simple analytical method can point the way to the underlying language, or language group.

Astronomers using data from the W. M. Keck Observatory have discovered a dizzying cosmic choreography among typical star-forming galaxies; their cool halo gas appears to be in step with the galactic disks, spinning in the same direction. 

This is the first-ever direct observational evidence showing that corotating halo gas is not only possible, but common. Their findings suggest that the whirling gas halo will eventually spiral in towards the disk.