Science 2.0

In the 16th century, it was shown by Paracelsus that 'the dose makes the poison' - too much medicine or anything else could kill while too little did nothing. In the 21st century activists have sought to dispel that. They claim homeopathic effects from chemicals at safe doses, endocrine distuption and u-shaped curves, but science knows better.

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The recent precise measurement of the W boson mass produced by the non-dead CDF collaboration last month continues to be at the focus of attention by the scientific community, for a good reason - if correct, the CDF measurement in and of itself would be the conclusive proof that our trust in the Standard Model of particle physics when producing predictions of particle phenomenology needs a significant overhaul. 

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There are many laws to protect the environment of Earth. As prt of the process in the US, NASA is inviting comments and it's the kast day to give your feedback to NASA about their Mars sample return mission plans - can submit your comments to NASA here as a public comment.

This is for their draft environmental impact statement which they plan to submit later this year.

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Once upon a time vaccine deniers were on the left and conspiracy theorists who felt government was out to control us using radio waves were on the right.

Now they have flipped. Welcome to political intelligence.

Environmental Health Trust, the brainchild of discredited zealot Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., thinks Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and especially 5G cell phone signals are killing us. The most bizarre part is he thinks cell phones were safer in the 1990s, when they emitted more radiation with more power.

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At the centere of our galaxy, the Milky Way, there exists what must be a black hole. But detecting it has been challenging because of the cosmic dust around it.

Now, for the first time, a group of radio antennas knows as the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole four million times more massive than our Sun.

known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced "sadge-ay-star") it obviously can't be seen, that is built into the black hole name, but it can be inferred thanks to a dark central region (called a “shadow”) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole.

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Despite shutting down its operations in 2011, data from an old experiment at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) has pushed scientists to further rethink the Standard Model.

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As a new century dawned just over 20 years ago, a new war began, this one on expectant mothers. Companies, and their paid influencers, began to trot and even fund "studies" which correlated whatever they were selling to some positive outcome. Organic food meant better grades, abstaining from coffee meant higher IQ, you name it and someone was blastly already worried mothers will fear and doubt.

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In the Liliʻuokalani Ridge in the Papahānaumokuakea Marine National Monument (PMNM) in the Pacific Ocean, the exploration ship Nautilus, operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust, caught sight of an odd formation that looks like a cobblestone road.

"It's the road to Atlantis," one explorer jokes, before another one asks, "The yellow brick road?"

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Mars doesn’t have tectonic plates like Earth, but it does have volcanically active regions that can cause rumbles, and one way to develop a better understanding of Mars’ mantle and core is to examine seismic active. In March, NASA’s InSight lander detected two strong, clear quakes originating in a location of Mars called Cerberus Fossae – the same place where two strong quakes were seen earlier in the mission. Those quakes have magnitudes of 3.3 and 3.1; the previous quakes were magnitude 3.6 and 3.5.

InSight has recorded over 1,300 quakes to date, but nothing like the magnitude 5 temblor that occurred on May 4, 2022. That is a medium-sized earthquake on Earth, they happen 5 times each day, but it is a size researchers only hoped to get during this mission on Mars.

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Sri Lanka is in the midst of a rebellion bordering on civil war, and as these things often go, it resulted from leaders out of touch with the people.

Last year, the government of Sri Lanka, with European environmental Wormtongues whispering in their ears, showed what anti-science activists called "leadership" and banned any process that was not "certified organic." 

The collapse of the country was so sudden, a few months, it can be taught in political science classes for how not to govern. Even socialists in Venezuela had to be shaking their heads and wondering what Sri Lanka was thinking.

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A half-mile-long stretch of tunnel in California is now colder than most of the universe. It contains a new superconducting particle accelerator, part of an upgrade project to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser, one of the last milestones before LCLS-II will produce X-ray pulses that are 10,000 times brighter, on average, than those of LCLS and that arrive up to a million times per second – a world record for today’s most powerful X-ray light sources. 

Crews have successfully cooled the accelerator to minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit – or 2 kelvins – a temperature at which it becomes superconducting and can boost electrons to high energies with nearly zero energy lost in the process.

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Seeing a doctor can be crucial to managing and preventing chronic disease but there has long been a racial gap in routine visits that can't be explained by racism or income. 

Maybe people didn't like like going to the doctor because the COVID-19 pandemic caused use of telemedicine to rise sharply, and as that happened gaps in visits disappeared for black patients at Penn Medicine. 

Once “normal” in-office appointments returned, previous inequities stayed erased, indicating that telemedicine wasn’t just a stopgap solution but a potential long-term tool for equity. 

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In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations World Health Organisation told the Trump administration not to cut travel from Wuhan, they insisted that there was no pandemic at all, and then that SARS-CoV-2 could not be transmitted from human to human.

A year later they repeated the communist dictatorship's claim that COVID-19 might have been caused in the US and shipped to China in frozen food, and finally corporate journalists started to believe what independent people in science media had been saying for a decade - the WHO has a Chinese influence problem.

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Astronomers have been assuming that real new knowledge of black holes might have to wait until 2030, when/if NASA’s gravitational wave detector, LISA, launches into space.

The Event Horizon Telescope may have something else in mind. They have called a press conference for Thursday and speculation is rampant about what it might mean.

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By looking at the ‘shadows’ of two supermassive black holes in the process of colliding, astronomers may have a way to measure black holes in distant galaxies and test competing theories of gravity.

Three years ago, the first ever image of a black hole, at the center of galaxy Messier 87, came into focus thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of synchronized radio dishes acting as one giant telescope.

Now a new imaging technique could allow astronomers to study black holes smaller than M87’s, a monster with a mass of 6.5 billion suns, harbored in galaxies more distant than M87, which at 55 million light-years away, is still relatively close to our own Milky Way.

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You never want to introduce a spoiler into an article so I am warning you now, before you read any farther, that a spoiler is inevitable if I am going to talk about the secret role I played in the new Disney MCU film "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness."

If you haven't seen it because you thought the first was rather generic, I am with you but you should go. It is completely bananas, in the way a Doctor Strange film should be. It has Sam Raimi written all over it and that makes it a blast.

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In 2001, after the US World Trade Centers were destroyed in a terrorist attack, assaults on middle-eastern buildings and people in San Francisco went up. Yet the middle eastern people attacked were Jewish, not Muslim. A common sentiment among intelligentsia was that the attacks were due to Israel being created by the United Nations in 1948.

Anti-Semitism has gotten worse rather than better since, despite governments creating laws against hate crimes, according to the 28th Annual Report on Antisemitism Worldwide.

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The Uralic language family and languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Saami and Hungarian began to spread west approximately 4,200–3,900 years ago, first to the central Volga region and later to the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic.

The Uralic language family is a few hundred years younger than the Indo-European one, and its spread led to contacts with Indo-Iranian language variants and the creation of a long contact zone in the area currently known as central Russia. Early loan words originating from this contact made their way into the Uralic languages that were beginning to emerge, including Sami, the Balto-Finnic languages, Mordvinic, Mari and the Permic languages.(1) 

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My attendance to the JENAS symposium in Madrid this week provided me with the opportunity to meet some of the senior colleagues who will influence the future development of technologies for fundamental research in the coming decade and more. Over coffee-break discussions, poster sessions, and social dinner I exploited the situation by stressing a few points which I have come to consider absolutely crucial for our field. 

Of course I am moved not only by caring for the progress of humanity but also by the fact that I would like the research plan I have put together in collaboration with a few colleagues to succeed... Ultimately, the two things are very well aligned though!

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