There is a big difference between a trial lawyer convincing a jury in one of America's most anti-science regions that an herbicide that only acts on plants might be able to cause human cancer, and scientists with knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology who know better.

Advertised as the “greatest thing you’ve never seen,” the 2019 U.S. Air Guitar Championships will take place this summer.

Competitors from around the country will don elaborate costumes, construct fantastical personas and perform comedic pantomimes of famous rock solos. Impaling themselves with their air guitars, swallowing them and smashing them to smithereens, they’ll elevate guitar playing to heights only imagined by real guitarists.

The winner will go on to represent the U.S. in the Air Guitar World Championships, which will take place in Oulu, Finland, in late August.

Cows and chickens will never go extinct because they are food, and some useless critters like Aedes aegypti have managed to tough it all despite being just disease vectors. For everything else, it can be a crap shoot. Nature is out to kill us all.

Yes we are getting extinctions at a far higher rate than normal. But it is nowhere near a mass extinction yet. Just the start of a slide towards one that may play out towards the end of this century and in the 22nd century. Also we are not risking a major mass extinction like the Permian / Triassic one. The word “mass extinction” does not have a well defined threshold but I think many who read these stories think it means that there would be almost no animals, fish, trees, plants or insects left or hardly any. No it doesn’t mean that. It means fewer species of each but not a world without them.

My aim here is not to dispute the many scholarly articles about us being at the start of a new mass extinction, but rather, to clarify what they mean.

Biogen recently announced that it was abandoning its late stage drug for Alzheimer’s, aducanumab, causing investors to lose billions of dollars.

They should not have been surprised.

Using ancient fire remains from 11 well-preserved and overlapping open-air hearth structures, scholars have inferred Neanderthal group mobility and settlement patterns which indicate specific occupation episodes, perhaps according to season

At the very large and very small levels, gravity does not really work the way it should. At the very large level, instead of contracting, the universe has both expanded and accelerated despite detectable forces that could cause it. 

Measurements to determine how fast the Universe is expanding over time are known as the Hubble constant. It has been determined by a cosmic distance ladder, calculated by observing pulsating stars called Cepheid variables in a neighboring satellite galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud, 162,000 light-years away.

When defining the distances to galaxies that are further and further away, these Cepheid variables are used as milepost markers. 

A new index of scientific output has been released and it finds that the United States continues to dominate in research, bolstered by the private sector accounting for nearly 70 percent of science funding, where most other developed countries instead rely on government.

The analysis factored in the number researchers as percentage of population, patents, papers released, and GDP spending. 

Scholars recently characterized plasma levels of the biomarker dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and its sulfated form (DHEAS) – jointly referred to as DHEA(S) – to be biological determinants of chemobrain, difficulties related to memory and attention in cancer patients even months after completing their treatment.

DHEA(S) are neurosteroids that help to regulate brain development, but it was previously unknown whether their levels correlate with cognitive function or are associated with the onset of chemobrain.

The study showed that early-stage breast cancer patients with higher plasma DHEAS levels prior to chemotherapy were found to have a lower risk of developing chemobrain in the specific domains of verbal fluency and mental acuity.

When we think of Mt. Everest, it's usually imagery like Sir Edmund Hillary and his guide Tenzing Norgay in parkas and with oxygen tanks making the hazardous 29.000 climb. And then there are the dead bodies, nearly 300 of them, those who perished on the trek to the summit.

What we don't think of is a man running, yet that is what Kilian Jornet Burgada did part of the way in famous photos - and then after 26 hours and 31 minutes, the fastest climb ever(1), he came back down, rested, and did it again, all within a week.