The occasional reader of this blog will excuse me if yet again I do not report here of this or that new result by the LHC collaboration, and instead discuss matters of lesser relevance. But to me, education is important. Even if I am not a University professor, but rather an employee of a research institute (and as such, not obliged to spend some of my time teaching), I do teach courses to university students. I do that because I believe I can give students a positive imprinting on the beauty of physics, on the exciting nature of research in fundamental science, and on how interesting all of that is. 

If you are a parent, or know a parent, you have had someone claim that if their kid eats sugar they get 'hyperactive' - that may happen, but only because a child has been told they get hyperactive and act that way, the same way if you tell a child rum cake has rum they may act drunk.

Biologically, it doesn't work that way. Sugar can certainly help you if you are diabetic(1) and "anti-sugar rhetoric is simply diet-centric disease-mongering engendered by physiologic illiteracy,” according to Edward Archer, PhD.(2)

A new study sought to analyze the chewing nature of four types of gum bases and along the way determine bubbling capacity also. Gums are generally oils, resins, and elastomers generally held in pleasant form by the gum base. 

So gum base is important to manufacturers. Chewing gum is a $25 billion per year business, 1,740,000,000,000 sticks. If humans chew each stick for 10 minutes, that is over 33,000,000 years we spend at it - annually. 

Common sense says that if you have a lot more people walking, often in dark costumes, and just as many people driving, plus more people drinking alcohol than would otherwise occur on a Tuesday, pedestrian fatalities will go up. 

Common sense is right. They will.

Antiviral drugs are generally considered to be a 20th century invention. But recent research has uncovered an unexpected facet to your immune system: It can synthesize its own antiviral molecules in response to viral infections.

My laboratory studies a protein that makes these natural antiviral molecules. Far from a modern human invention, nature evolved cells to make their own “drugs” as the earliest defense against viruses.

When science finally settled the debate between genetics and lifestyle regarding oral health, the world began to set new benchmarks for improved health overall. After World War II it was discovered that bacteria in our mouths create acid from carbohydrates, and that acid erodes the enamel on teeth, which will mean more decay and cavities.

Our five senses are gathering information at all times. One way our brain sorts the abundance of information is by combining information from two or more senses, such as between smells and the smoothness of textures, or pitch, color, and musical dimensions.

It may be why we began to associate higher temperatures with warmer colors, lower sound pitches with less elevated positions, or colors with the flavor of particular foods. A new paper argues that such unconscious 'crossmodal' associations with our sense of smell can even affect our perception of colors.

A new paper has given a name for long-term symptoms that test negative for COVID-19 - "long colds."

Coronavirus is very similar to the common cold, so similar that coronavirus was not known to be distinct until the 1960s. Most who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 and got COVID-19 experienced symptoms like a cold, but those with co-morbidities or who had severe reactions got more like a super flu, some with devastating effect. Even after recovery, some still report lingering effects, given rise to the term 'long COVID.'

Controversial social media video site TikTok has one supporter - a public relations academic at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

A recent paper, ironically in a journal from a publisher that has also been called predatory, argues that TikTok may be effective for encouraging women to get a pap smear, which aids in early detection of cervical cancer, which kills some 4,000 women each year in the United States. 

As I am waiting in Prague airport for my flight back home, after a few days spent discussing the options of the SWGO collaboration for the detectors we are going to build, I came across (through compulsive scrolling on twitter) a thread that caught my attention. It was about emails to academics on PhD openings. Since I found the discussion there a bit too forgiving on the academics, I wish to express my position here - possibly in a less toxic environment.