In the 19th century, charlatans traveled around selling magic potions, tonics, and salves but to stop them no one decided to ban actual medical research.

The issue facing "AI", which is short for Artificial Intelligence, is that the only people who will feel bound by top-down control were never going to be a problem in the first place. Large Language Models, termed Generative AI, can be a huge positive in health care, but because it is misunderstood and there is a lot of exploitative media coverage there are ongoing efforts to kill it before it really gets going.

In recent geological history, 90,000 of every 100,000 years have been ice ages. It's been 12,000 years since the last one so we may be due.

Or not. Climate science has a few rules but a lot of exceptions and 700,000 years ago a big exception occurred. At that time the planet experienced a “warm ice age” and it permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth. Though it became warmer and with more rain, the polar glaciers also expanded. Geological data in combination with computer simulations published in Nature Communications hopes to lend insight into this paradox.

Saturn’s rings are one of the jewels of the solar system, but it seems that their time is short and their existence fleeting.

A new study suggests the rings are between 400 million and 100 million years old – a fraction of the age of the solar system. This means we are just lucky to be living in an age when the giant planet has its magnificent rings. Research also reveals that they could be gone in another 100 million years.

The rings were first observed in 1610 by the astronomer Galileo Galilei who, owing to the resolution limits of his telescope, initially described them as two smaller planets on each side of Saturn’s main orb, apparently in physical contact with it.

The call for applications to Ph.D. positions at the University of Padova opened yesterday, and it will remain active for less than one month (deadline is June 7th at 1PM CEST). 

The USERN organization (Universal Scientific Education and Research Network) will soon issue its next bulletin, to which I contribute with an opening message in the function of the president of the organization. I thought the contents of the message would be of some interest to some of my readers here, so I decided to attach below my original text. Before we go there, though, I would invite all of you to learn about USERN by visiting its web site, and consider becoming a member (it is free!) - or even better, if you share our views, support us!

A message from the USERN President

In the past two decades, children have become more obese and have developed obesity at a younger age. A 2020 report found that 14.7 million children and adolescents in the U.S. live with obesity.

Because obesity is a known risk factor for serious health problems, its rapid increase during the COVID-19 pandemic raised alarms.

Few authors dare to say aloud things about physics or the history of physics that may go against the status quo. Alexander Unzicker is one of them. In his last work, Make Physics Great Again. America has Failed (2023; translated into English from the original in German: 2022, Einsteins Albtraum – Der Aufstieg Amerikas und der Niedergang der Physik, Westend Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt), like in his previous works, he dares to touch a raw nerve that is usually avoided in politically correct environments. This book is certainly polemical.

A new paper in Canadian Medical Association Journal has linked irregular heartbeats in 322 Chinese cities to small-micron particulate matter, invisible pollution that needs an electron microscope to visualize. Given its minute size, PM_2.5 is one-fourth the size of real pollution, PM10, there is four times as much of it, so the paper could have used PM₁₀ and achieved the same statistical significance. It just would have been less dramatic

Screening is underway to find a patient for the world's first bladder transplant in humans. 

A revolution is taking place, but we seem to not yet realize it. 
Paradigm shifting technologies often produce an abrupt transition when they get adopted. However, that transition is not easy to recognize early on: the effects of an exponential trend appear linear at the begninning, so the explosive force of the transition that occurs a little later takes many by surprise.