We hear a lot about a crisis in organ donations but a whole lot of patients who died waiting for transplants got organs offered, but their transplant teams declined - and someone lower on the list got the transplant instead.

Candidates who died without a transplant received a median of 16 offers (over 651 days) while waitlisted.

And most patients were never made aware they got an offer at all.

Today I am back from the 8th edition of the ICNFP conference, which finished yesterday in Kolymbari (Crete). This event is very interesting because of its wide scope, bringing together physicists from quite different fields in a venue that, due to its very relaxing, secluded nature favours post-session discussions and exchanges among the over 250 participants. 

Celebrities and environmentalist jetting off to exotic locations to talk about climate change, renewable energy, and organic food may make you feel like the modern world is killing the planet but a huge collaborative study reveals that early humans across the entire globe were ruining their environments as far back as 10,000 years ago.

Farther back, 12,000 years ago, humans were mainly foraging, meaning they didn't interact with their environments as farmers do. By 3,000 years ago, farmers were feeding nations and causing free trade in many parts of the globe.

Claims that meat production are causing undue stress on the environment are highly exaggerated, as are the benefits of plant-based diets.

Instead of being ground in evidence, the plant-based and vegan diet fads could worsen an already low intake of an essential nutrient involved in brain health. And governments which spend time creating panic about salt and sugar fail to monitor dietary levels of this vital nutrient--choline--found predominantly in meat and eggs.

Artifacts from an archaeological dig at the Cooper's Ferry site located along the Salmon River, a tributary of the larger Columbia River basin in western Idaho, suggest that the original native Americans were here 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, about 16,000 years ago.

The findings add weight to the hypothesis that initial human migration to the Americas followed a Pacific coastal route rather than through the opening of an inland ice-free corridor. The belief is that timing and position of the Cooper's Ferry site, located at the confluence of Rock Creek and the lower Salmon River,  is consistent with and most easily explained as the result of an early Pacific coastal migration.

Human land use due to manufacturing, population, and agriculture changing the shape of earth itself has been termed the Anthropocene Epoch, but if less hyperbolic scientists of the future agree with that at all, they are likely to agree it started 4,000 years before cars were invented.

Significant global landcover change had occurred by then, so if a new epoch really did start, it was not in the 20th century, finds a new study by a large international team of archaeologists and environmental scientists behind the ArchaeoGLOBE project.

This is me according to the Daily Express. End of world: Scientist’s terrifying warning of apocalypse asteroid - ‘Would boil oceans!’ It is nonsense! I gave no warning, and as a science blogger I am not the person to issue a warning either. I wrote an article to HELP scared people who panic about such things. It was awful and many are panicking and it is not impossible someone has committed suicide over this.

With fires happening in South America, the left has such dominance over social media in America they convinced the public that policies of right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil were to blame, while in Brazil the right's dominance of social media put him in power.

Northwestern University computer scientists say they can prove that WhatsApp use played a key role in the electoral process. Their analysis shows that the Brazilian right in 2018 did what the American left did in 2008; they used social media to beat their opponents in a way that left them baffled.

Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanically active body in our solar system but 550 light years away in the inconspicuous constellation of Lepus, underneath the bright Orion constellation, an exo-Io could be hidden at the exoplanet system WASP-49b. 

The possible exomoon would orbit a hot giant planet, which in turn would race once around its host star in less than three days. 

Theoretically, large amounts of sodium at an exoplanet could point to a hidden moon or ring of material, and ten years ago, researchers at Virginia calculated that such a compact system of three bodies: star, close-in giant planet and moon, can be stable over billions of years.  

“A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it,” the physicist Max Planck wrote.