The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown
Learning Through Student Feedback
By Mark Pierce
Epidemiologists Blame 15th Century Science...
Something Happened In Silicon Valley
'Green' chemical products have generally gotten a pass from the environmental... Read >
A new paper from a California university warns that dust is changing the microbiome... Read >
A new paper from Ohio State University can be considered a giant endorsement... Read >
If you need any new evidence that science is just another arm of politics,... Read >
Former Natural Resources Defense Council Attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. didn't... Read >
People dedicated to the art of grilling often choose lump charcoal – actual... Read >
Reference Letters
Lately I have been writing lots of reference letters for students who are applying to Ph.D. positions in Physics, and in so doing I have found myself pondering on the dubious usefulness of that exercise. So let me share a bit of my thoughts on the matter here.Reference letters are meant to be an ...
Highlights From MODE And EUCAIF
After a month of intense travel, which among other things included attendance to the MODE Workshop in Crete and the EUCAIF conference in Sardinia, I am back to northern Sweden. Besides significantly improving my well-being, given the horrible heat wave that hit Southern and Central Europe in the ...
Bubbles In Ice Could Be A Future Medium For Secret Codes
Scholars have developed a method to encode binary and Morse code messages in ice. A 'message in a bubble' has limited practical utility, information storage in Antarctica and the Arctic is expensive but less challenging than storing message in ice, but they are more covert than paper documents ...
Isoprene: Plants Can Make Their Own Pesticide But The Environmental Cost Is High
As the developed world becomes more removed from science and health, it is easier to embrace beliefs that science and medicine are not needed at all, with some claiming that vaccines and pesticides are not really needed, the natural world can do it without modern tools.Companies will cater to that ...
Europe Ponders Another Year Trying To Combat Fall Armyworm Without Modern Pesticides
The polyphagous Spodoptera frugiperda (fall armyworm), a Lepidopteran pest, has European farmers in a panic and, when the environmental NGOs government funds are not around, it has politicians concerned also. Though classified as a priority pest since 2023, fall armyworm remains easy to establish ...
AI Reveals 10X More Yellowstone Volcano Earthquakes Than Known Before
Yellowstone was the first national park designated in the United States and is a popular tourist destination, but there is a lot going on underneath that people never feel.A new analysis of 15 years of historical earthquake data from the Yellowstone caldera used machine learning and found ...
Trump Ending Carbon Capture Mandates Attached To Grants Could Spark A New Industrial Revolution
The U.S. Department of Energy’s decision to claw back US$3.7 billion in grants from industrial demonstration projects may create an unexpected opening for American manufacturing.Many of the grant recipients were deploying carbon capture and storage – technologies that are designed to prevent ...
Meta-Analysis: Flower Strips With Two Or More Species May Reduce Pesticides
A new paper has found that flower strips along fields and ditches may be more than just a gimmick that lets people feel like they are improving the environment or saving bees. They may attract pests that eat pests that eat crops.If so, this could help Europe, which has declared it wants to reduce ...
RSV Vaccine For Pregnant Women Leads To 72% Fewer Babies Hospitalized With The Virus
Real world data show that the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine rolled out for pregnant women in the UK last year has already resulted in a 72 percent drop in babies being admitted to the hospital among women who took it. Experts predict that as more women take it, England is ...
Nearly Complete Harbin Skull From 146,000 Years Ago Belongs To The Denisovan Lineage
The discovery of the Denisovans 15 years ago set off a chain of evolutionary research into how they contributed to modern East Asians and Oceanians. A new study adds evidence. Researchers have confirmed that a nearly complete hominin skull from 146,000 years ago that was discovered near Harbin ...
The Lizard Poop Of Madagascar
Some 88 million years ago, Madagascar broke off from India.Isolated from all other landmasses, plants and animals evolved in seclusion, creating a biodiversity hotspot unlike anywhere else on Earth. One way biodiversity spreads is by endozoochory, which is the process name for animals eating plant ...
Chinese Researchers Are Rewiring Brains Using Interfaces
Human evolution and culture have been shaped by our increasing ability to communicate. A new review from China believes that brain-computer interfaces mark the next leap: a direct connection between mind and machine. They note breakthroughs in neural signal decoding, AI, and bioengineering but ...
Activin-A: Muscle Weakness In Cancer Survivors May Be Treatable
Tumors can destroy the blood vessels of muscles even when the muscles are nowhere close to the tumor. That is the key finding of a new study that my colleagues and I recently published in the journal Nature Cancer.Muscle loss in cancer patients is a major health problem, but the exact causes of ...
Like Food Coloring Now, Cultural Mullahs Once Claimed Mexican Food Was A Gateway To Disease
In 1915's The Temperance Program, Thomas F. Hubbard et al. laid out the progressive case for why alcohol needed to be banned so convincingly that in 1917, with Democratic control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they got the 18th Amendment to the Constitution out of Washington, D ...
Taurine’s Anti-Aging Hype Takes A Hit In Rigorous New Study
A new study is pouring cold water on the idea that taurine – a nutrient found in the body and in foods – is a magic bullet for aging. Researchers led by Maria Emilia Fernandez at the U.S. National Institute on Aging found that taurine levels in blood do not reliably decline with age in humans ...
Phytosterols In Vegetarian Diets Linked To Lower Risk Of Diabetes
Diets high in phytosterols, such as vegetarian diets, have long been linked to lower risk of heart disease and diabetes by lowering low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol but food surveys, questionnaires, and diaries are not reliable enough to make clinical determinations while in mouse experiments ...
The End To Universities Using Graduate Students As Piggy Banks Is Near
In the 1980s, the majority party in Congress saw demography claims that people with college educations made more money than those without. Universities began to lobby for student loan changes. Many smaller private schools were facing funding crunches and people going to college would fix ...
Forget Political Posturing, It's Hard To Warn People About Dangers Like Floods
Flash floods like the one that swept down the Guadalupe River in Texas on July 4, 2025, can be highly unpredictable. While there are sophisticated flood prediction models and different types of warning systems in some places, effective flood protection requires extensive preparedness and awareness ...
UC Davis Epidemiologists Out To Scare New Mothers Again
In the modern era we can detect anything in anything. Being able to detect in parts per billion, trillion and even quadrillion means that if an epidemiologist can "correlate" a chemical to harm in a spreadsheet, someone raising money opposing science can weaponize the result.A new paper finding ...
The Right Of Return Is Complicated
My June 28 column on the Middle East drew a comment concerning Palestinians ejected from their homes by the post-WWII influx of European Jewish refugees to what’s now Israel. Eighty years after the fact, descendants of those displaced still feel much anger.The primary reason the “right of return” ...
Counterfeited In China: US Tariffs May Hurt Criminals The Most
In early 2025, the Trump administration began to place tariffs on countries that already had them on the U.S., like China, Brazil, and many in Europe. China has already begun to experience deflation but a new book reveals that the business sector likely to be impacted most is the $500,000,000,000 ...
Contrary To The Poltical Narrative, A Lot Of Government Science Funding Doesn't Go To Science
Every day we read a new headline warning us that American leadership is about to erode because of budget cuts to 'science.'We have been told tuberculosis was about to be eliminated by a vaccine but a grant got cut and, gosh darn it, now Republicans ruined it. We have been told we'll be set back ...
More AI In Health Care Could Save Lives
Imagine walking into your doctor’s office feeling sick – and rather than flipping through pages of your medical history or running tests that take days, your doctor instantly pulls together data from your health records, genetic profile and wearable devices to help decipher what’s wrong.This ...
Ban Left Turns And Traffic Congestion Goes Down
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Why I've been away and why I'm back.I'm 79yo now. I receive a state pension which falls short... more »
Eric Weinstein's theory of Geometric Unity is wrong. So is every other so-called theory of everything... 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 »
