Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley! It’s been a busy six weeks in North America, Europe, and Asia. The University of Leeds; Cambridge International Education; the International Congress…

Last week saw Edinburgh’s last significant eclipse until 2093, with 90.6% of the sun obscured, but unlike 90.6% of the […]

Even though I was only seven at the time, I vividly remember the summer of 1999. Not necessarily because The Phantom Menace and The Matrix were released, but because, on August 11th, a near-total…

The Society for Industrial Microbiology (SIMB) annual meeting in Austin the first week of the month was great fun. I caught up with two Warpers, saw some other contacts from that era and met a bunch…

Table of contents _ Some years ago I've published a post where I've briefly talked about the possibility to reach temperatures less than zero Kelvin. I've decided to republish it and extend the…

A public lecture I delivered on the Australian National University's role in the Artemis II Mission

There is a neat paper https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9405205 Seven Trees in One, where it is shown that there is a nice isomorphism between 7 trees and one tree.

SSA’s journal Seismological Research Letters has issued a call for papers for a focus section on the destructive 2026 Venezuela and Colombia Earthquakes. Deadline for submissions is 21…

Project facilitates best research practices in entertaining & educational environment

Todays big story, from Time, “Promising Results for mRNA Cancer Vaccine from Moderna and Merck:” In a release, the two companies report that people with melanoma who received intismeran,…

During a spell of thick wildfire smoke this summer, I was driving my kids toward the afternoon sun; it was a pale red, and we could look right at it—only a little brighter than the moon at dusk. I…

I made a big mistake in my previous entry in this series.  Actually, I probably made a few dozen, not least of which was deciding to tackle this topic at all without first laying a lot more…

Why northern Chile is flooding in 2026, and what El Niño has to do with it Northern Chile sits close to home for me. My family lives there now, even though I was born in the V region myself, so this…

In the title (The convergence engine: How nanotechnology enables AI, CRISPR, and quantum computing) for a December 31, 2025 Nanowerk Spotlight article, Michael Berger seemingly references K. Eric…

A new artificial intelligence, or AI, translation model could improve the accuracy and cultural appropriateness of Chinese-English public signs in tourist attractions, according to research in the…

[[{“value”:”In the last few decades our understanding of human evolution has expanded considerably. We have identified numerous new species, fleshing out a complex branching bush of…

In the last few decades our understanding of human evolution has expanded considerably. We have identified numerous new species, fleshing out a complex branching bush of relationships among early…

Writing to Learn Math: What did the author mean? Put the thought in your own words. Do you agree or disagree? Why? Do you want your children to develop the ability to reason creatively and figure out…

A San Pedro backyard full of escaped Sicilian lizards, and the Portuguese ships that gave the sweet orange its name in half of Europe's languages. Part IV of The Citrus Kingdom follows an…

I have my google alert set for the phrase “Galois Representations”. Every six months or so it pops up with a suggestion, and I can’t quite work out what algorithm is using. Here was…

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At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I had a simple and naive thought: if I just explain the science clearly enough, people will understand and stop believing misinformation!What a sweet, sweet…

For the past several weeks, I have been working my way through the major findings in the Energy Institute’s 2026 Statistical Review of World Energy. This article concludes that series. For readers…

For years I have struggled to find any ideas at all for explaining the mixing angle between the down and bottom quarks. It is measured experimentally at around .201 degrees, which is so small it gets…

There are a few concerning media stories of empty offices and schools in New Zealand due to respiratory illnesses – coughs and colds and “the flu”. So is #NZflu2026 in Read More ...

Voyager 2 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket on 20 August 1977. It visited Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus in 1986, and Neptune in 1989. It…

Why do some papers keep getting cited, and most don’t?

​We have covered this before, so I will only mention briefly that Eric Davis went vial on social media over the last 24 hours after he claimed once again that the United States possesses the…

Guth MAS. Implementing 212 Pb-Targeted Alpha Therapy: A Safety-First Theranostic Framework for Clinical Practice. Clin Nucl Med Open. 2026;3(3):DOI: 10.1097/nm9.0000000000000092. Table 1.…

So, I found this worth commenting on. Here you can see the percentage of all energy used derived from wind and solar in the Netherlands: [...]

tw: us politics, close up pictures of human brain

It is impossible to exactly define what intelligence would be in a molecule or complex molecular system. The Turing test is used to determine if a machine can match the intelligence of humans, but is…

Perhaps the most impactful Washington State wildfire of this summer is the Little Giant Fire near Lake Chelan, ignited on July 15 by a lightning storm and now extending over 135,985 acres (see map…

A quick look at gecko eggs, what they’re like, what they mean for gecko distribution, and where all that calcium comes from!

In the past, new PhD students would ask how they could succeed when they had to compete with the likes of say, Richard Karp or Avi Wigderson. I would say Karp and Wigderson have limited bandwidth and…

The great silence: why haven’t we found any aliens yet? is a great read. We have precisely zero evidence of advanced life in the universe beyond Earth. At the same time, there is growing evidence…

“Using mathematics to tell stories and using stories to explain mathematics are two sides of the same coin. They join what should never have separated: the scientist’s and the artist’s ways of…

Bongard problems are interesting puzzles; they’re sort of like Spot The Difference meets Raven’s Progressive Matrices. When presented with two sets of images, the challenge is to identify the latent…

PacBio had a major shakeup early this month. First came a large round of layoffs, which caught several individuals who were very much the face of innovation on social media. Next came the sudden…

This article supports the highly plausible theory that all humans share pre-Out of Africa admixture with "ghost" archaic hominin populations, but the methodology used is fairly new and untested.…

From Harper’s Weekly Review: NASA debunked a conspiracy theory purporting the Earth’s gravity would vanish for seven seconds amid an alignment of celestial events. “When I got to the hospital I…

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]When I was a kid, my dad would take us camping almost every year in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. We would hike along the…

I came across a pretty alarming video about a study that goes over how Starlink and other satellite company debris will eventually destroy the ozone layer. Basically, most of these low earth orbit…

By Jonathan Koomey, Zachary Schmidt, Karl Hausker, Holmes Hummel, and John WeyantResearchers and practitioners participating in the seventh assessment cycle of…

Professor Dave Goulson is a leading UK conservationist, known especially for his work on bee behaviour, ecology and conservation, but also a lot more. He’s also a celebrated author, and his…

  Preface. Before the fossil fuel age began, up to 90% were farmers. The end of the brief blip of oil production will send us back to that time (if we aren’t so far into overshoot we go…

UPDATE 21.08.2026: I tried the same trick as described in the next post, but with Chatgpt. It gives endless slop. So I put here the same conclusions: worth to pursue but clearly needing at least one…

Janice Pogue Lecture in Biostatistics, Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada 2024-12-06 Center for Biostatistics, Dept. of…

I want to start this post at the end: statistically significant results from low powered experiments are, almost certainly, an exaggeration to the truth. Below, I show the expected amount by which a…