Learning Through Student Feedback
By Mark Pierce
The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown
First Nation Shell Middens And True Oysters
Something Happened In Silicon Valley
For the third time in 9 years I am visiting San Pedro de Atacama, a jewel in... Read >
In wealthy countries, the richest and the aspirational well-off can afford... Read >
The human race has made huge progress in the past few thousand years, gradually... Read >
You've heard that you should get eight hours of sleep per night, a whole industry... Read >
As the Trump administration continues to make significant cuts to NIH budgets... Read >
Live and on-demand video constituted an estimated 66% of global internet traffic... Read >
The 53-Year Odyssey Of Kosmos 482 And The Push For Sustainable Space
A Fallen Spacefarer Returns to EarthIn the early hours of May 10, 2025, skywatchers witnessed a long-lost Soviet space probe finally come home. After 53 years circling Earth, the Venus lander known as Kosmos 482 streaked through the atmosphere and disappeared somewhere over the Indian Ocean. This ...
Black Holes: Now With No Singularity
Albert Einstein has been proven right many times but some things his equations predicted have yet to be shown to be science and yet remain part of the popular consciousness about science.Like a "singularity", where the laws of physics cease to apply, at the heart of black holes. Though ...
Safe Water May Be Killing You
The drinking water treatment process is designed to remove harmful pathogens that are prevalent in nature, but a new study suggests that it may be harmful also.Scientists know that inert ingredients are not harmful you but the authors of the new paper invoke the environmental "chemical cocktail" ...
Earth-Like Exoplanets Are Common
A new study of light anomalies combined with results from a Korea Microlensing Telescope Network microlensing survey show that super-Earths exist as far from their host star as our gas giants are from the sun. Which means that Earth-like exoplanets are a lot more common NASA press releases over ...
Pesticides: Environmental Threat Or Anti-Science Populism?
With former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dictating a lot of science policy for the Trump administration, anti-science activists have been quietly cheering even though they uniformly voted for his opposition.They need a win. Claims that bees are dying off have been ...
PM2.5 Is Killing You, Claim Ecologists, Except There Are No Deaths
A new simulation claims small-micron particulate matter, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, is killing 250,000 people each year. PM10, 10 microns in size, is a well-known killer. That is wildfires and smog but after smog was drastically reduced in the 1990s, the target went down ...
'Public Trust Doctrine' - How Lawyers Use Children To File Climate Change Lawsuits
An ancient legal principle has become a key strategy of American children seeking to reduce the effects of climate change in the 21st century. A defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2025 has not stopped the effort, which has several legal actions continuing in the courts.The legal basis for ...
Cover Plants Can Remove Toxic Pesticides Like Copper Sulfate From Soil
For farmers, land is their most valuable asset so they protect it in ways environmentalists do not understand. By using science whenever possible, to reduce water, energy, and environmental strain.Even organic farmers use toxic pesticides but because they are older and less effective they must ...
Raman Spectroscopy Makes Saliva A Good Way To Detect Cancer
A few drops of saliva can now reveal what used to require a scalpel, a syringe or a scan.Scientists have developed ways to analyze spit for the tiniest traces of illness – from mouth cancer to diabetes, and even brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. Unlike blood tests or biopsies, saliva is easy ...
Toward A Unified Theory Of How Language Evolved
Humans are the only species on earth that uses language, combining sounds into words and words into sentence with infinite meanings. We do this using linguistic rules for calls and sentence structure. "A dog eats" tells us one thing while "a big dog" means another while "you're such a dog" from ...
Becoming The Music: How Our Brains Sync With Sound To Create Emotion
Some psychologists believe our brains and bodies don’t just understand music, we become it. We physically resonate with it. They call their belief Neural Resonance Theory (NRT). They use Theory is in the name, but it is not a theory like gravity or evolution, the proper name means it is ...
You Can't Spell Replanted Rainforest Without T-E-R-M-I-T-E
Nature is out to kill everything, it is the circle of life, and that is why replanting rainforest without including some termites is counter-intuitively bad, finds a new paper.The balance of nature doesn't exist and believing that plant diversity alone will work is in defiance of how ecosystems ...
Side Effects Update: Lecanemab To Slow Alzheimer's
In 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration an Alzheimer’s therapy shown in clinical trials to modestly slow disease progression but side effects, brain swelling and bleeding, occurred in some.Though clinical trials have taken twice as long and cost twice as much due to government regulations ...
Fisetin To Prevent Artery Hardening
In a new study, researchers found that the polyphenol fisetin helps protect blood vessels from hardening, which is a common problem in older adults and people with kidney disease. If eventually validated in human trials, it might mean it could prevent vascular calcification and reduce cardiovascular ...
Social Drinking Is A Bigger Problem Than Drinking Alcohol Alone
No doctor tells patients to smoke cigarettes "in moderation", they are a known carcinogen and not smoking cigarettes is one of the top three ways to prevent lifestyle diseases. Yet culture has been grabbed by twin pincers when it comes to alcohol. American women are told if they have a glass of ...
Opiate Of The Masses: Ancient Andes Used Hallucinogens To Keep People Positive
Americans like to be outraged by things, in 2025 the right is outraged by seed oils while the left is outraged about lack of capitalism, but older civilizations wanted people to stay calm.When we think of the Andes today, we may think of the Incas, but they were colonizers just like Spain ...
Here's Your Chance To Buy Gems Buried With Buddha 2000 Years Ago
Almost 2,000 years ago in modern-day Uttar Pradesh, India, someone deposited a cache of gems inside a reliquary (a container for holy relics), along with some bone fragments and ash. The gems were precious, but the bones and ash even more so, for according to an inscription on the reliquary, they ...
Only Polarized People Want Companies In Polarized Political Issues
Last year, companies began to pull back from promoting their Diversity Equity Inclusion efforts and social justice activists blamed the incoming Trump administration. It has been a violation of federal law to discriminate for 60 years so to moderates it seemed odd to add a layer of discrimination ...
COVID-19 Border Closures Increased German Dislike Of Immigrants
Early in 2020, the President of the United States said America should cut travel from China due to COVID-19 concerns. This was dismissed as xenophobia by states like New York and California, because the World Health Organisation had not declared it a pandemic.(1)In Europe, 18 countries knew better ...
Character In The Dark: How People Face Moral Dilemmas
An old saying goes that 'character is what you are in the dark', which is a way of stating that how you'd behave if no one was there to see you is really who you are outside the world of surveys.Yet a new study may show why surveys predict outcomes so poorly. Researchers found that people typically ...
Drones Work For Pesticide Applications
Though organic™ farmers sell bucolic imagery of hoeing by hand and sunsets over fields of corn, it is just marketing to the gullible. All farmers who make more than enough money to pay their real estate taxes(1) are high-tech gurus. They use real-time data on the health of their land and their ...
If You Buy Magic Rocks, You're The Target Market For HoLDI-MS To Detect Nanoplastic
Homeopathic levels of plastic are the latest environmental scaremongering fad (Nanoplastics! Microplastics!) dominating partisan corporate media when they are not suddenly simping for Trickle Down Economics, Vaccines, and Capitalism they distrusted just a short while ago.Naturally, companies are ...
How Things Are Made
If the supply chain collapsed tomorrow, could you build a toaster? Would you really even want to try? People make homemade jam and all-natural weedkillers that are ironically stuffed with chemicals but no one makes their own toaster. It would be among the first things dismissed as unimportant ...
US Government Wants To End 54 Years Of Subsidized Media
The Trump administration’s drive to slash government spending on everything from the arts to cancer research also includes efforts to carry through on the Republican Party’s long-standing goal of ending federal funding for NPR, the nation’s public radio network, and PBS, its television counterpart ...
According to observations made by NASA using the James Webb Space Telescope, there is a three point... more »
In the past few years my activities on this site - but I would say more in general, as the same... 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 »
... more »
