A Million-Year-Old Mammoth May Hold The Key...
What Will It Take For Real Farming In Space?
The Analogy: A Powerful Instrument For Physics...
First Nation Shell Middens And True Oysters
Tracking Particles With Neuromorphic Computing
At the IV Workshop in Valencia a student from my group, Emanuele Coradin, presented the results of a novel algorithm for the identification of charged particles in a silicon tracker. The novelty is due to the use of neuromorphic computing, which works by encoding detector hits in the time of arrival ...
By Tommaso Dorigo
K0 Regeneration
Last week I got to the part of my course in Subnuclear Physics for Statisticians (yes, there is such a course at the Department of Statistical Sciences in Padova, and I have been giving it since its inception 6 years ago!) where I discuss CP violation in the system of neutral K mesons. In one of ...
By Tommaso Dorigo
Flying Drones With Particle Detectors
Nowadays we study the Universe using a number of probes and techniques. Over the course of the past 100 years we moved from barely using optical telescopes, that give us access to the flux of visible photons from galaxies, supernovae, and other objects of interest, to exploiting photons of any ...
By Tommaso Dorigo
The Nobel Prize And The Role Of AI In Scientific Advancement
The 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, who many have called “the godfather of AI”. The award seems apt for the time we are in. In the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’s press release, they explained their decision to award the prize to the pair ...
By Mark Pierce
Knee Point Prediction And Battery Capacity Degradation
Electric cars and solar and wind energy alternative schemes have a few crippling limitations; low energy densities and unavailability when people need energy most. Batteries could help with that second one except current batteries are legacy technology that are held back by subsidies and mandates ...
By News Staff
American CO2 Is Below World War II Levels But We Keep Emissions High In Poor Countries
In politics, one way to make your belief in alternative energy seem feasible is to make its competitors expensive. President Obama did that when he began to subsidize the domestic solar energy industry at unprecedented levels.(1) He brought in Dr. Stephen Chu, who had advocated $9-a-gallon gasoline ...
By Hank Campbell
Mercury Emissions Are In Decline Yet Doomsday Prophets Claim They Are Up
If you read environmental groups, we are closer to our doom than ever. Bees are nearly extinct, cell phones are causing cancer, and hydroelectric power is devastating the land.None of those are true yet they all have claims found in journals and in media. So it has been with mercury emissions, ...
By Hank Campbell
Simulation Predicts 50% Of Recurring El Niño Events Could Be Extreme In 25 Years
The recurring El Niño phenomenon was in full force from mid-2023 to mid-2024 and as predicted it brought higher temperatures. In this case, it brought the highest temperatures since accurate records have been kept, for 12 straight months.A team of climate scientists created a numerical simulation ...
By News Staff
Non-Europeans Opt Out Of Genomic Databases, Leading To Lack Of Diversity
When Senator Elizabeth Warren had her claims of native ancestry debunked by DNA testing, it was a warning shot to everyone who identifies that way - don't take a test. Most native Americans had long said that anyway, they knew how biology worked better Washington DC staffers. After five generations ...
By News Staff
Smarter Soybeans Mean Affordable Food In Poorer Regions
It is easy for wealthy countries to spend $135 billion on an organic food process that uses higher quantities of older, more toxic pesticides at greater environmental strain, because it is a niche luxury item.In countries that are poor, which often means  outside natural breadbasket climates ...
By News Staff
Bacterial Genes Can Be Genetic Shapeshifters
Prokaryotes, single-cell organisms such as bacteria, undergo inversions which cause a physical flip of a segment of DNA and change an organism’s genetic identity the way you might change a wig. They can occur within a single gene, in defiance of the more common 'one gene codes for one protein' ...
By News Staff
Free Health Care Is Not Enough: High Food Inflation Leads To Fewer Cancer Screenings
Over 50,000,000 Americans get subsidized or free health under the Affordable Care Act but that doesn't mean usage of preventive care increased across the board. Instead, a new analysis found that the inflationary spike which led to much higher costs for housing, food, and utilities are barriers ...
By Hank Campbell
The End Of Alcohol Is Nigh
Two Presidents ago, political appointees engaged in behavior that didn't make much sense(1) and had no benefit for public health. For example, they declared there was an epidemic of something they invented called "pre-diabetes" and insisted that smoking cessation tools that were twice as effective ...
By Hank Campbell
Biden Administration Stopped The Youth Vaping Epidemic That Wasn't
Vaping in kids had its day. While useful before and since for smoking cessation and harm reduction in cigarette smokers, vaping only became a fad in teens when, as predicted, social authoritarians in the Obama administration declared it an epidemic - if on a survey a young person claimed to have ...
By Hank Campbell
Kitchen Countertops Are Giving You Cancer
“This is a new and emerging epidemic, and we must increase awareness of this disease process so we can avoid delays in diagnosis and treatment for our patients,” says University of California in Los Angeles radiology resident Sundus Lateef, M.D.Epidemic? Again? No.Americans are now so healthy ...
By Hank Campbell
Red Alert Fatigue - Why Americans Are Getting Immune To Political Hysteria
“I am definitely not following the news anymore,” one patient told me when I asked about her political news consumption in the weeks before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. This conversation happened around the time I talked with a local TV channel about why we saw fewer political yard ...
By The Conversation
She's Not Going To Propose This Holiday And Here's Why
The Christmas period isn’t just for presents, sparkling lights and too much festive food – it’s also prime time for couples to get engaged. And for heterosexual couples, this is likely to happen in a specific way. The man will do the asking. Traditional views around marriage are changing ...
By The Conversation
Rutgers Study - Forcing DEI Programs On People Increases Hostility
If you have done nothing wrong, do you want to be treated like a criminal? That was always the failure of Social Justice Social Science efforts like the Implicit Bias test; you're a racist, the test will show you how racist you are. You may not hate anyone so it would be perfectly understandable ...
By Hank Campbell
Minnesota Trial Lawyers Want To Ban Neonics - Here Is Why That Is A Mistake
Minnesota is having a challenging year, so challenging they are approaching California as the wackiest state, according to other states. They have a chronic anti-Semitism problem, including a member of Congress who may soon have to register as a foreign national, a Governor so completely associated ...
By Hank Campbell
Of Momshells And Snowmanning: How Holidays Change Popular Language
I rarely win when it comes to cultural language stuff. Before 1999, an attractive older woman, for example, was to me a "Momshell" and no woman had any objection to a portmanteau of mom and bombshell (if they heard it - but a woman should not hear it, or your charm goes way down) yet after 1999's ...
By Hank Campbell
AI And The Poetry Problem
Artificial Intelligence is artificial, but it is not intelligence. That could change some day but it isn't happening soon, Large Language Models are fine for a few things but limited in most. That is why Ben Affleck can talk in a hurry and assure fellow film creatives that their jobs are safe. ...
By Hank Campbell
And The USERN Prize Winners For 2024 Are....
USERN (Universal Scientific Education and Research Network, https://usern.org) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that supports interdisciplinary science across borders. Founded in 2015 by a distinguished Iranian Immunologist, Prof. Nima Rezaei, USERN has grown to acquire a membership ...
By Tommaso Dorigo
ChatGPT Is Cheaper In Medicine And Does Better Diagnoses Even Than Doctors Using ChatGPT
General medicine, routine visits and such, have gradually gone from M.D.s to including Osteopaths and now Physicians Assistants with no decline in quality, and Large Language Models, colloquially called "Artificial Intelligence", like ChatGPT can assist at very low cost.A recent experiment found ...
By News Staff
The "drone panic" of 2024 easily claims the title of the most absurd astronomy and physics-related...  more »
This came up on 2nd November 2024 (give or take a day), a broadcaster objecting to a carbon capture...  more »
Sheer beauty — a beautiful Euhoplites ammonite from Folkstone, UK. These lovelies have a pleasing...  more »
March is here, and with it begins a season of intense travel for me - something which for some...  more »
By Anonymous
...  more »