Science 2.0

Nowadays it has become exceedingly hard to distinguish legitimate academic endeavours from scam in my mailbox. Not even AI filters can sort stuff out properly: my inbox often contains invitations to fake conferences, or to publish with non-existing journals, while my spam folder at times contains honest invitations of academic value. I could touch the reality of the problem a few months ago, when…

Every now and then, for one reason or another, an academic will have to update one's own CV. This is a chore in general - once you get tenure, why should you care to keep a detailed record of your past activities? - but it also carries some benefits. In fact, by sifting through the data (hard disk folders containing talks, large databases of publications, mailbox) you can get a bird's eye view of…

Though numerical models and popular films like An Inconvenient Truth projected Arctic ice collapse due to global warming and then climate change, the reverse was true in the real world. Ice expanded. That changed in 2015 and a new model estimates why. The authors say the Southern Ocean which surrounds Antarctica has gotten warmer, bringing salty water from the deep up to the surface. Those water …

You may have read that Asian cultures respect the elderly more than Europe but Asian senior citizens may not agree. However, it may not be that young people have gotten less respectful, it could be that young people are wealthier than in the past. And that makes them lonelier. Over the last 40 years, the wealth of countries like the United States and Japan have increased substantially. Poor peopl…

[For the first part of this two-part post, see here] Alas, we are all offenders. When we get stuck in a highway queue, with the clock ticking and our meeting time dangerously approaching, we often act irrationally, driven by instinct rather than rational thinking. But this needs not be so. Back home, as we sit in our old armchair with a long drink in our hand and coolly ponder at the problem, eva…

A new tool drawing on billions of uses of more than 20,000 words and diverse real-world texts claims to have found that human language is systematically biased, but not against things. It is instead biased toward safety and that has impacted everything from psychology claims to how Large Language Models (LLMs, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence and AI). read more

I was reached this evening by the news of the passing of a dear friend, Enrico Stomeo. Enrico was an architect by profession, but for me he was rather defined by his activity as an amateur astronomer - in fact, if I had to define what a serious amateur astronomer is, I would more or less consciously be describing him. [ Above, a recent picture of Enrico ] The Associazione Astrofili Veneziani read…

Californis is the largest dairy producer in the United States. It is also the most anti-science state, distrustful of the modern world. That is why coastal cities had measles parties until the COVID-19 pandemic happened; they believed the MMR vaccine caused autism in children. They love raw milk because they believed pasteurization eliminates magical nutrition that scientists can't detect. read m…

There are concerns about projected warming on the Earth’s surface and in the lower atmosphere even while the planet’s upper atmosphere has cooled. It's not a paradox, it's a pattern and a recent paper described the mechanics of how it works. The short answer is that carbon dioxide (CO2) reacts differently to wavelengths of light. Closer to earth, CO2 traps it but it makes the stratosphere better …

Nobody likes to wait in line. Whether you are sitting in your car waiting to reach the toll booths, on a plane waiting to disembark along with the other passengers, or in a queue at the ticket office, you may experience a range of feelings ranging from perplexity (“What am I doing here?”) to impatience (“Why is this not moving forward?”), to annoyance (“What is that idiot in the front chatting ab…

The Supreme Court recently issued another ruling that seeks to end racial discrimination. most recently in specially-created political districts. What has not been an issue, because it was not obvious like universities and Louisiana politics, is how grants get chosen. A new study says that there was a component of racial favoritism in science funding as well, and it's only been revealed in the wa…

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…