Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is…

New study reveals the Arctic Ocean can both emit and absorb methane, acting as a complex climate player

Last year saw the appearance of a long-awaited second edition of Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs…

A couple of years back I was discussing the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (RMP). It includes a table expressing as a sum $$\frac1{a_1}+\frac1{a_2}+\dots+\frac1{a_k} $$ fractions with numerator 1 (“unit…

Should we build a biological repository on the moon? A report from DG#56

By Jonathan Montagu, CEO and co-founder of HotSpot Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC Of the recurring themes that tend to circulate in the drug development…

We’re not removing oil—we’re replacing everything it does. This essay is the third in a series examining oil’s declining strategic role. In the first two — The Last Oil War and Why Oil Volatility Now…

Preface. New Zealand and other countries in the southern hemisphere are expected to be safer since they are far from nuclear targets. But they would still experience extreme temperature drops and…

One 2026 quantum prediction is that it will to be the year when useful logical qubit based quantum computers will appear (dealt with prudently by Riverlane and Innovation Origins). In a sense, it…

Settembrini et al from Pointcloud GmbH (Zürich, Switzerland) published a paper titled "A large-scale coherent 4D imaging sensor" in Nature magazine. Link:…

Mediation analysis goes beyond asking “does the treatment work?” to ask “how does the treatment work?” Understanding the mechanisms by which an intervention achieves its effect can have important…

A Sydney tech entrepreneur, Paul Conyngham , had a rescue dog, Rosie, with advanced mast cell cancer and months to live after standard treatment. He paid for Rosie's tumor sequencing through the…

Peter Higgs Wouldn’t Get Hired Today. Neither Would I. Dear Magicians, In a 2013 interview with The Guardian, he observed that he “wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s…

Emory graduate student William Crandall loves working at the nexus of nature and cutting-edge technology. (Photo by Tharanga Samarakoon) Scientists developed a new way to help understand what happens…

Photo credit: Joan Rudd. Professor Joe Felsenstein has been awarded the Mendel Medal of the Genetics Society in the UK. According to their website, “The Mendel Medal is awarded by the President of…

Wolfgang Pauli invented his famous matrices to describe the angular momentum of a spin-1/2 particle back in 1927. You’ll see them in most courses on quantum mechanics. We tend to take them for…

June, tele-present wind (Mars wind version) will be featured in EMERGENCE(Y), a group exhibition at the Science Gallery, Melbourne

AMPLIFY-7P and REGAL both face delayed readouts as events accumulate slower than projected. A comparison of trial design, mechanistic evidence, and immune correlates, and why my conviction behind…

Have you heard of the EU Soil Strategy for 2030? It was launched in November 2021 as part of the European Green Deal, and its first law, the Soil Monitoring Law, went into force in December 2025. But…

* On February 25, NASA rolled back the SLS rocket and its attached Orion spacecraft from the vehicle’s launchpad at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to its assembly building about seven…

In patients with extensive disease involving the aortic arch and proximal descending thoracic aorta, a frozen elephant trunk (FET) extends the repair distally by combining an open surgical…

MAXI/GSC detected a new outburst from the black hole X-ray binary GS 1354-64 on December 25, 2025, MJD 61034 (ATel #17563). The source started the hard-to-soft state transition from around January…

We are back after seven months of break. This is the 85th episode of Decode Quantum, with me, Olivier Ezratty, and Fanny Bouton. In this new episode, we welcome Christian Weedbrook, the founder and…

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I wrote about mixotrophy, the under-appreciated "why not both" solution some organisms take to use both sunlight and other organisms for food.

Note: This is a computational essay , with code in Wolfram Language. Cyrtophora Sitting in a hostel room in Pondicherry in 1997, I was wondering what project to pursue for my master's thesis and…

Chapter 11 - Quantum Tic-Tac-Toe Portent This, then that. This event caused that event: cause -> effect. In relativity, events are spacetime events, tightly local in both location (space) and…

…symmetry isn’t just a preference for “pretty” shapes. Contents Introduction The HM-AM-GM-QM Inequality The two circles The Semicircle The Container The 3D container The Sum…

I’ve been working my way through the fourth edition of Reingold and Dershowitz’s Calendrical Calculations, and I want to talk about something I learned.

A continuous-time view of gradient-based optimization: starting from the observation that integrator choice matters in physics simulation, and transferring that insight to understand modern…

Miniature Robert Goddard biography that went to the moon with Buzz Aldrin On 16 March 1926, Dr. Robert Hutchings Goddard launched a rocket from his aunt’s farm (now a golf course) in a town a few…

This spicy example explains scales of measurement, continuous vs. categorical variables, and how you can measure and quantify anything. Uncommon Goods sells quirky gifts. While I was looking for…

(5-year-old spots a book at the library with a penguin on the cover.) 5-year-old: What’s that book? (I take the book down from the shelf and hand it to him.) Me: Just so you know, this book isn’t…

Notes on the theoretical limit of cell division times.

We are mainly water. The UN has estimated that a human needs about 50 liters of water every day to meet basic needs, though the Global Commission on the Economics of Water states that the total daily…

Patricia Fernández de Lis of the Spanish newspaper El País interviewed me about the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony moving to Europe. Here is the interview machine-translated into English. The original…

Quantum computing for the whole family!

Tony Leggett died last week. The New York Times has a nice obituary. One measure of his influence on me is that more than 20 posts on this blog feature his work. He received the Nobel Prize in 2003…

We are experiencing the microseason within the transition between winter and spring that the I-95 Corridor gets to experience together. (I think other parts of the country and world get more violent…

The concept of a test’s power, originating in Neyman-Pearson’s early work, by and large, is a pre-data concept for purposes of specifying a test (notably, determining worthwhile sample…

(Previously, previously) To not bury the lede, we finally have our first new value for the OEIS sequence A000769: a(19) = 32577 This was calculated in 255 GPU-hours using eight RTX 4090s rented from…

Exploring pip/tazo PTA for Pseudomonas using popPK simulation. Key finds: 30-min infusions fall short of 90% PTA at MIC 16; prolonged infusion helps, but neutropenic fever population sees the biggest…

Evidence Synthesis at the DEFRA science conference Starting with evidence synthesis , we got invited after our previous meetings with DEFRA to run a session about our evidence TAP at their annual…

Ok, I lied about the Nobel. I do like the theory the ai constructed given some hints , a quanta article on complexity generation, and Smolin's writings. Of course I need to post it here just in case…

A post calculating an estimation of pi for pi day!

When steady traffic limits the speed on a road, we argue that its throughput becomes independent of traffic density. As a result, the time required to reach a destination depends only on the number…

See an animation of a trapezoid innscribed in a circle, built with some maths and the help of an LLM. The animation My brother asked for my help to build an animation of a trapezoid inscribed in a…

Today I learned that cyclic quadrilaterals have supplementary opposite angles. A cyclic quadrilateral — a quadrilateral whose four vertices all lie on a single circle — has supplementary opposite…