It is reasonably good news. Kim wanted the US to drop all sanctions in response for dismantling the publicly disclosed plant to make nuclear weapons materials. They weren't ready to do that. The US were willing to drop all sanctions in response to him completely denuclearizing but he wasn't ready to do that. He has a vision but not the same as the US vision but closer than it was a year ago.

Trump talked about them knowing the country very well (including nuclear facilities that NK has not disclosed). And that he wasn't willing to do enough.

Not a big disagreement. More that they were on the point of a big agreement but it fell through. And as Trump said he is not afraid to walk away from a deal.

UPDATE: 2010 GD37 is now REMOVED from the risk list - it turns out that it's just an ordinary main belt asteroid. 2010 GD37 is now REMOVED from the risk list

This UN Report is not saying we are going to be unable to feed everyone. But we need to be careful to maintain the biodiversity of the wild relatives of our crops and also of our ecosystems to be most resilient. We don’t risk mass famine, they say that specifically in the interview with the BBC but we need the biodiversity to deal with future issues such as for instance pests and diseases of our crops. On this the situation is rather encouraging, especially if you read the report itself.

Even if you are obsessed with "natural" things, the awesome power of physics can still help you make fun colors. It's all thanks to “structural color,” the ability of an object to generate color simply by the way light interacts with its geometric structure.

I often read in the news about the new and exciting things that will be discovered if we invest big $$$ on new tech, such as a new big smasher 100 m below the surface of the Earth. This can of course be true; we have seen miraculous things being discovered in the field of particle physics, mainly due to the fact that a persistent vision by a group of scientists managed to continuously shed light on the harsh road of discovery.

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference last week, Rice University integrated circuit (IC) designers unveiled technology they say is 10 times more reliable than current methods of producing unclonable digital fingerprints for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

As the regulars here already know, I am an employee of the INFN. This is the "Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare", which translates as "National institute for nuclear physics", a slight misnomer of historical origin, as the institute today actually centers its activities on SUB-nuclear physics - i.e. study of elementary particles (but nuclei are still one of the targets!). 

Ribbon worm? Arrow worm? Since the discovery of its fossil over a century ago, paleontologists have speculated about what branch of evolution Amiskwia sagittiformis was on.

Charles Doolittle Walcott, who first described it, compared it to the a group of ocean-dwelling worms that are fierce predators, equipped with an array of spines on their head for grasping small prey - modern arrow worms (chaetognaths), but later scientists could not find evidence of the canonical grasping spines so they believed instead it might be a a ribbon worm, or its own distinct lineage only distantly related to anything that resembles it today.

Limenitus archippus, the viceroy butterfly is a mimic, modeling its orange-and-black colors after the queen butterfly, a bug that tastes so disgusting predators have learned not to eat it or anything that looks like it, including viceroys.

The apparent dependence of mimics on their models made biologists wonder if the fates of the two species are forever intertwined. If so, then what happens when the mimic and the model part ways? Thanks to a new study, scientists know. Viceroy butterflies living in northern Florida, far away from the southern-dwelling queen butterflies, are not only more abundant than their southern kin, but they have also developed their own foul flavor.

I don't drink much milk now, though I did when I was a kid. I think I eat more cheese than I did then, and that makes sense. We were a poor family on a subsistence farm and cheese is expensive. Milk was not. At least if you got it right from the farmer. 

But most of us don't get it right from the farmer, which is one reason why an increase in milk prices in the U.S. won't help dairy farmers much, any more than it will in Australia or any other country. Most people do not buy dairy products from a local farmer, they buy food in stores. And the products in those stores may not even have been made using milk from this country.