Rembrandt van Rijn was a master of light and shadow and a characteristic plasticity generated by a technique called impasto.
A new study shows he was also something of a chemist. An analysis of impasto layers in some of Rembrandt's paintings show they contain a very rare lead mineral called plumbonacrite, which means Rembrandt used a unique paint recipe.
Plumbonacrite is extremely rare in historic paint layers. The only other notable occurrence was linked to degradation of the red lead (minimum) pigment in a Van Gogh painting.
If you've read anything about computers for the last 25 years, you've read the hype about quantum computing and how it is going to be better and faster and with less heat and replace conduction-based chips and it will generally be awesome. And then nothing happens outside a lot of arXiv papers and some physics magic published in journals. Quantum computing has basically gotten the best marketing free pass ever, because it is always five years away and no one seems to get cynical.
Now it's only two years away.
On March 25 to 27 will be held the
school titled "Data Science in (astro)particle physics and cosmology", in Braga (Portugal). The lecturers are prof. Glen Cowan (RHUL), who will cover Statistics, and myself, who will cover topics in Machine Learning. I thought I would mention this here, as for me it is a novelty - in the past years I have often given lectures in advanced statistics topics at various Ph.D. schools around the world, but I never focused explicitly and solely on ML.
Do you prefer to rise early with the lark or stay up late with the owl? Your preference turns out to be partly decided by your genes. Our genetic study of nearly 700,000 people has revealed new insights about the genetics of chronotype – our preference to rise early or sleep late – and how it influences our mental and physical health.
Though our guts contain a trillion bacteria in various compositions, it's become popular to claim any detectable change is a bad thing. Unless it is to sell yogurt, where no detectable change is regarded as a probiotic good thing.
Now even at the nano- level. A new study claims ultra-small particles adhere to intestinal microorganisms, thereby affecting their life cycle as well as cross talk with the host. Nanoparticles’ binding inhibits the infection with Helicobacter pylori, a pathogen implicated in gastric cancer and the authors hope this could the development of potential 'probiotic' nanoparticles for food. Homeopaths are cheering.
Nothing killed science culture more than Spock from the 1960s television show "Star Trek." He was wildly popular because he was so logical and reasoned. Emotions did not enter into his decisions.
Scientists flocked to that mystique and so a whole generation of scholars sought to be dispassionate and data-driven in their interactions with the public.
In 2015, I predicted that someone was going to end up in the hospital due to overdoses on supplements.
But don't you always say they are useless placebos? a friend asked.
No, they are not all placebos, but products sold as supplements that do something are either actual drugs, like kratom, and thus should be regulated as drugs, they are useless placebos adulterated with actual drugs, like many Internet erectile dysfunction and diet pills, or they are useless in normal doses but toxic at high levels.
Like Vitamin D.
Like " I had insomnia last night" and "I am so OCD", medical terms often become colloquial. So it is with people who say they had a "stomach flu."
There are stomach virusus, but what many people commonly call “stomach flu” isn’t flu at all. "Flu" is short for influenza, and that is respiratory so it involves lungs, not the stomach. What people call a stomach flu is instead viral gastroenteritis. It could be rotavirus, norovirus, adenovirus or something else, and could have been through tainted food.
As the world's most powerful economy, we read a lot about how America needs to do more to use cleaner energy, and less of it.
Chicken eggs are already used for growing viruses that are used as vaccines, such as the flu jab but science is going one better;
chickens that are genetically modified to produce human proteins in their eggs as part of the egg white.
A new study found the drugs work at least as well as the same proteins produced using existing methods and high quantities of the proteins can be recovered from each egg using a simple purification system and there are no adverse effects on the chickens themselves, which lay eggs as normal.
