Science 2.0

We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology laughs at that notion. The next time you go on vacation, a new tool can show you how many places your vacation destination has been. Paleolatitude.org can do that, right down to the movements of small tectonic and ‘lost continents’ now called Greater Adria, the Tethys Himalayas or Argoland, which we kno…

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than rolls of dice suggest. A new study of the mimicry of several distantly-related South American rainforest butterfly and moth species with similar wing color patterns that may warn away predators (it's not a costumed bluff, the moths and butterflies are actually toxic to birds) found that they reused th…

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of individuals, companies, and NGOs, from California to Minnesota to Massachusetts, have come under investigation for fraud in taking money from the federal government. Now the Department of Justice is investigating an insider in Dr. David Morens, M.D., a career advisor inside the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which came into…

There are many hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter and one idea to explore how strongly hypothetical dark photons interact with normal photons wouldn't even involve a new and expensive dedicated facility, says Tokyo Metropolitan University Associate Professor Wen Yin. read more

Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific determination of what that even means. There are metrics but standard 0-to-10 scales and questionnaires are subjective and basically only useful for justifying treatments to insurance companies, they are clinically not much help. Pain patients were demonized by the Obama administration in their war on …

An analysis of 6.14 million maternal-child health records  has linked prescription medications to higher rates of Autism Spectrum Disorder in offspring. Sterol biosynthesis–inhibiting medications (SBIMs) inhibit the cholesterol synthesis pathway and are include antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, beta-blockers and statins; aripiprazole, atorvastatin, bupropion, buspirone, fluoxetine, ha…

As some of the long-time readers of this blog know, in this column I have occasionally discussed probability calculations in the context of gambling and betting. A long time ago I also famously won a $1000 bet on the LHC not discovering any new physics . Below I will mention a similar bet that ended up not being agreed upon by the parties, for the sake of discussing a subtle effect one has to wor…

Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is also Lenin's birthday. That's not coincidence. The leader of the first Earth Day was not a politician, as the movement has greenwashed Democratic U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson into being, yet credible journalists and an alarming number of commenters will invoke the Earth Day site or some anonymous Snopes blogger or even Wikipedia(!) and claim the primary sources from 56…

If a lot of the food and health claims you read and hear today seem like things left over from the 1970s, that's because they are. The food activist community, vegetarians and other diet groups, rebranded their beliefs as Make America Health Again (MAHA) after former Natural Resources Defense Council and pillar of the Democratic party Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. switched sides and joined Republicans i…

On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became the first to have his pitch speed measured during a game. Rockwell International experts clocked the ball velocity at 100.8 miles per hour. That was the fastest pitch ever recorded. Yet last season over 50 pitchers in Major League Baseball threw 100 MPH and 140 more hit that velocity in the minor …

Just a few years ago, there were concerns that minorities like blondes and redheads were going extinct. The future belonged to Miss Clairol because they're recessive genes and with just five generations of bad biological rolls, you could have less chance of Scottish hair than Senator Elizabeth Warren has of being Native American. It may be that scientists just weren't seeing the signals. Instead …

At what point is enforced identification with what is obviously a collapsing system called out by people on the inside of once-powerful industries? Steelworkers once believed there was no limit to what they could grab from corporations, even autoworkers made that error. Twinkies went bankrupt to get out of union control and start over. Yet no one on the floor believe that would happen. read more

Do you have a master in Science, and want to start a Post-Doc position directly? You can have it, in Padova (Italy), to work with me on the PHINDER project , an EIC-funded Pathfinder grantee. I am offering a two-year position for research in nanophotonics-powered neuromorphic computing for particle detector development at INFN, Sezione di Padova. The call will open soon, so you should watch this …

Honeybees get attention in environmental fundraising campaigns because people don't understand pollination.(1) read more

A graphic from the Washington Post about motorcycle deaths is making the rounds again on Twitter, and it will set off a lot of comments by people who can't put it in context, so let's go back to the source paper . Here is what you need to know: If you ride 15 miles every day on a motorcycle for a year, you have a 1 in 860 chance of dying. If you fly 500 miles every day on an airplane for a year, …

During the Obama administration, the credibility of the US Centers for Disease Control went into serious decline. Though it only became evident to most how incompetent career government bureaucrats were when COVID-19 hit - they denied it was a pandemic and said the President was being xenophobic for wanting to ban travel from China(1) - those of us inside the system saw that they were long not eq…

During the Obama administration, the credibility of the US Centers for Disease Control went into serious decline. Though it only became evident to most how incompetent career government bureaucrats were when COVID-19 hit - they denied it was a pandemic and said the President was being xenophobic for wanting to ban travel from China(1) - those of us inside the system saw that they were long not eq…

'Your food is safe' is a terrible call to action but 'evil chemical corporations are killing you' gets the money rolling in - even though the former is true and the latter is a paranoid conspiracy theory with no basis in fact. Yet there is a level where predatorts and their marketers get too aggressive and fatigue sets in. Young people have become the leaders in church attendance for the first ti…

This is not new, only a restriction using the source is new. Prior to 2026, social authoritarians claimed they could control behavior using taxes and regulations. Make things so expensive people stop. It generally fails. When New York City hiked cigarette taxes it didn't lead to any reductions in smoking, it led to reductions in black market purchases and one man died because the mayor forced the…

California is, of course, famously anti-science. The reason lawyers who wanted to sue over weedkillers filed in San Francisco is because it is the most anti-science city in America's most anti-science state. And it worked. Juries readily believe that plants are just tiny green people so a weedkiller that only acts on a pathway not found in humans at all can still somehow cause human cancer. Even …