Halloween Science: Your Ancestors May Have...
Learning Through Student Feedback
By Mark Pierce
Something Happened In Silicon Valley
The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown
With this post I would like to present a short update of my personal life to... Read >
A new call to action by ecologists uses a numerical model to note that wildfires... Read >
Last week I described how a boulder-sized meteorite exploded in the skies... Read >
Due to President Clinton's 1994 DSHEA law (Dietary Supplement Health and Education... Read >
Samhain,
All Hallows Evening. Hallowe'en, Halloween. The name has changed... Read >
1980s photo of the author, right; his father, center; and his sister, left.... Read >
Kennedy Effect: Now NIEHS Scaremongers Any 'Detectable' PFAS Levels
A National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences paper(1) is sounding the alarm about detectable per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in blood samples of Delaware residents.It sounds scary, but scientifically there are two things to keep in mind:1. We can detect anything in anything ...
Make Your Own Halloween Slime - In Both Gen X And Hippie-Dippie Baloney Versions
If a politician who used to be a Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer hasn’t banned all food coloring by the time
you read this, here is how you can make your own green slime. In both Gen X - chemicals that sound like chemicals - and more natural-sounding versions of chemicals. Basically ...
AT 2024tvd: A Black Hole Is Eating A Star Outside A Galaxy Center, And Spitting Parts Back Out
When you picture a black hole, you probably picture in the center of a galaxy with matter swirling toward it. You're not wrong but that is why the exception proves the rule.A recent study detected a surprising tidal disruption event where a black hole outside the center of a galaxy is tearing apart ...
How Synthetic Pumpkin Spice Took Fall Away From Organic Apples
In 2003, the Human Genome Project was completed and both Tesla and LinkedIn were founded. Those were all interesting but not revolutionary; cars and job sites already existed, and we knew a lot about DNA, we just didn't have a complete "map" of a genome.The biggest shift in culture was the introduction ...
Europe Rations Air Conditioning But The US Has Made A Map To Help People Optimize It
America uses less energy per capita than we did in World War II, and even World War I. Thanks to natural gas, we provide energy in most states at an affordable cost.(1) With the help of a new data set that shows where air conditioning is used, it will be even easier to know where things can be ...
UCLA: Asthma Sufferers Are Contributing To Climate Change
A new cross-sectional analysis estimates that asthma inhalers contribute the same carbon emissions as 530,000 cars each year. That's over over 2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases annually from the three types of inhalers approved for asthma or COPD during the years 2014 to 2024. ...
How The Ancient Volcanoes Of Ultima Thule Impacted Climate Then And Now
Some sixty million years ago a fountain of hot rock that rises from Earth’s core-mantle boundary unleashed volcanic activity across a vast area of the North Atlantic, from Scotland to Greenland. We can detect the effects in spectacular basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland.But why ...
Why The French Get Grumpy When It's Warmer
The French look at not owning air conditioning as a point of pride, and it may have made them so grumpy it explains why they passed laws saying no one can install it unless they get permission from their neighbors, and perhaps even the city or prefecture government.They can talk about mitigating ...
Your Predator: Badlands Future - Optical Camouflage, Now Made By Bacteria
In the various 'Predator' films, the alien hunter can see across various spectra while enabling camouflage from our vision.That happens in nature. Octopuses, squids, and the scariest of them all, cuttlefish, in the cephalopod family have evolved the ablity to modify their skin to blend in with ...
Are We Stochastic Parrots, Too? What LLMs Teach Us About Intelligence And Understanding
Having interacted for a few months with ChatGPT 5 now, both for work-related problems and for private / self-learning tasks, I feel I might share some thoughts here on what these large models can tell us about our own thought processes. The sentence above is basically giving away my bottomline ...
What's Happening In The Brains Of Protesters?
From Los Angeles to Portland to New York City, political protests have become common. That provides data for what may be happening in brains and how engaged people can avoid becoming a Tyler Robinson or Luigi Mangione or Antifa in Oregon.The US is not special when it comes to protests, the Carnegie ...
Do You Have A Sixth Sense? NIH Funds An Interoception Study To Find Out
The process by which the nervous system continuously receives and interprets the body’s physiological signals to keep vital functions running smoothly, a "sixth sense" called
interoception
that tells your brain when you need to breathe, when your blood pressure declines or when you have an ...
American Heart Association: Thank Ozempic For Less Type 2 DIabetes
At the upcoming American Heart Association meeting, participants will learn of the epidemiological results of 63,656 military veterans with Type 2 diabetes in the Million Veteran Program who took GLP-1 receptor agonists (semaglutide - "Wegovy", dulaglutide - "Trulicity", etc.). The survey analysis ...
Forced Organ Donation Remains Problematic But A Science Solution For Transplants Is Coming
There is legitimate concern about increased social authoritarianism in governments worldwide. The state has gained more financial control everywhere. Even in the U.S nearly 60% of wealth is controlled by politicians, and it is the most "capitalist" country.It led to a culture where the American ...
In Longevity Studies, Old Dogs Can Teach Us New Tricks
The older you get, the more frail you become. The more frail you become, the greater the risk of falling, hospitalization, and shorter life expectancy.Doctors talk about physical activity to reduce frailty but less attention is paid to biology. A new paper suggests that the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal ...
The Next Plague: Did We Learn Anything From COVID-19?
In early 2018, colleagues and I released The Next Plague and How Science Will Stop It and coronavirus was in there, because there had already been two coronavirus pandemics, SARS and MERS, this century.No one anticipated that SARS-CoV-2 would erupt in Wuhan, China, and be the worst pandemic since ...
Drugs, Crime, And… Homelessness?
A commenter contested my statement that gang murders are a much greater menace to public safety than homelessness – at least, here in Albuquerque. So let’s unpack.PreliminariesWe’ll first acknowledge that we feel compassion for the unhoused who suffer from various kinds of PTSD (and may have ...
Why Dogs Get Addicted To Their Lamb Chop Toy
In 1956, prize-winning puppeteer Shari Lewis appeared on the Captain Kangaroo children's show and debuted a new...well, it was basically a sock with eyes.(1) She called it Lamb Chop, though, and her ventriloquism was a big hit with kids.Imagine what she would think if she knew Lamb Chop toys were ...
The Birth Paradox
Surely you’ve noticed that many countries are subsidizing births – and others are banning abortions – even as tech lords lament the number of “useless people” in the world. You’ve noted the contradiction, and you’ve asked yourself, “What’s going on here?” Cool Hand Luke might ...
Doctors Urged To Proactively Address Cancer Myths - Groups Like American Cancer Society Won't
Information freedom is a good thing but there is no question it has been weaponized. Many scientists have been ruined by activists and their trade groups who use Freedom of Information Act rules to find a sentence in correspondence with corporations or trade groups, remove it from context, and ...
November First
Today is November 1st, the day dedicated to the dead, and I am in northern Sweden where daylight is scarce this time of the year. The two things conjure to arise thoughts of a darkish nature. [Above, a lousy picture taken this evening in a cemetery in Gammelstad, close to Lulea, in Norrbotten ...
Don't Marry A Ghost; If You Divorce It Will Haunt You
When I wrote Halloween Science 2.0, I wanted to get it down to a brisk 150 pages, which means taking a chainsaw to a lot of the material I had.(1)Like the woman who left her corporeal significant other to become a ghost groupie. Amethyst Realm, that is not her Dungeons&Dragons name, she calls ...
Impostor Participants Are Skewing Epidemiological Surveys
Impostor participants are people who fake data in order to take part in health research or are automated computer ‘bots’ which mimic human behavior and responses. As claims get promoted in journalism about harms related to PFAS in water, weedkillers causing cancer, or food coloring causing ...
AI Helps Doctors Look At Lots Of Data Fast For Diagnostic Clues
Actors, artists, and musicians are rightly worried about the impact of AI on their incomes but doctors and scientists welcome the help. They know typewriters didn't make literature worse than writing in longhand and "AI" - LLMs - likewise removes the 'how' of information access so thinkers can ...
Air India Flight 171 - Flawed EE Bay Water Ingress TheoryRichard Godfrey, in many videos on the... more »
As a member of the public, how can you determine whether Tylenol, also known as acetaminophen,... 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 »
