Culture wars are as eternal as shooting wars, and that means there will always be war profiteers. Misandry and Manosphere poles get media attention when opening new fronts and those mean products appealing to both and then demography papers will follow.
Strange how time goes by. And strange I would say that, since I know time does not flow, it is just our perception of one of the spacetime coordinates of our block universe...
The thing is, on February 5 I will turn 60. An important date for anybody - I could say a milestone. First of all, let me say that we give for granted all the days of our life we got to live, but in truth we did not know it from the start we would make it far. I do feel rather young still, but I am very well aware that there are heaps of ways I could have ended my life earlier. Accidents, but also naturally occurring sickness.
At two months of age, infants lack language and fine motor control but their minds may be understanding how things look and figuring out to which category they belong, which would push back earlier beliefs about the foundations of visual cognition.
A new study recruited 130 two-month-old infants who were placed on a beanbag chair wearing sound-canceling headphones, while shown bright, colorful images which kept them engaged for 15-20 minutes. The team used functional MRI (fMRI) to measure changes in brain activity in response to pictures representing 12 common visual categories such as cat, bird, rubber duck, shopping cart and tree.
Opportunistic salpingectomy, proactively removing a person’s fallopian tubes when they are already undergoing a gyecological surgery such as hysterectomy or tubal ligation, may be a way to reduce ovarian cancer risk. Most ovarian cancers originate in the fallopian tubes rather than the ovaries and ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecological cancer.
In the modern world, it is easy to be newly concerned about the World Health Organisation. They were the last to declare COVID-19 a pandemic, they said not to blame China, and stood by while China bullied them into staying silence while the communist dictatorship tried to blame COVID-19 on American frozen food, and not their sloppy coronavirus lab next to the Wuhan wet market, where employees from the lab had already been caught selling experimental animals.
It's not new. Once upon time, they denied that Smallpox could be eliminated.
Professor Peter Mitchell got a Nobel Prize in 1978 for a chemiosmotic hypothesis of how ATP is made. Basically, how mitochondria turn fat, protein, and sugar into energy. Like most science, his breakthrough was built on 70 years of work by people before him, including Professor Fred Crane, who discovered Coenzyme Q, the body's natural antioxidant, in 1957.
Survey results conducted among registered nurses and advanced practice nurses in Michigan shows that the reason a third of them left the health care field is student loan debt. The Michigan Nurses' Study is a survey of 13,687 license holders that began during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022.
In the 1980s, colleges and universities began to lobby for unlimited student loans, arguing that a college education meant higher lifetime earnings. Congress agreed, but schools quickly began charging tuitions and fees that were clearly exploitative - 700% increases are just the average. Before unlimited student loans, you could pay tuition at a public college with money you made working a summer job, now it is a mountain of debt.
I recently listened again to Richard Feynman explaining why the flowing of time is probably an illusion. In modern physics time is just a coordinate, on the same footing as space, and the universe can be described as a four-dimensional object — a spacetime block. In that view, nothing really “flows”. All events simply are, laid out in a 4D structure. What we experience as the passage of time is tied instead to the arrow of entropy: the fact that we move through a sequence of states ordered by increasing disorder, and that memory itself is asymmetric.
Today I was saddened to hear of the passing of Hans Jensen, a physicist and former colleague in the CDF experiment at Fermilab. There is an
obituary page here with nice pics and a bio if you want detail on his interesting, accomplished life. Here I thought I would remember him by pasting an excerpt of my 2016 book, "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab", where he is featured. The topic of the anecdote is the data collection for the top quark search. The date is December 1992.
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This year opened in slow motion for me, at least work-wise. I have been on parental leave since December 16, when my third and fourth sons were born within one minute from one another, but of course a workaholic can never stand completely still. In fact, even as we speak I am sitting and typing at the keyboard with my right hand only (about 3-4 letters per second), while I hold Alessandro with the left one on my lap and I move my legs rythmically to keep him entertained.
