From earliest recorded history mankind has wondered how life on earth first arose.  The current diversity of life on earth is spectacularly well-explained by Darwinian (or Dawkinsian)…

For years, Mars Inc. has promoted M&M's as the "first candy in space." They can now add, "and latest at the moon." In a post-flight interview, the crew of NASA's Artemis II mission spoke of eating…

This post analyzes solid angle using concepts from differential geometry.

In a preprint titled "Low-cost passive single-shot ultrafast imaging at 685 Gfps" Eşlik et al write: Capturing ultrafast transient phenomena conventionally requires streak cameras or computational…

Paul Simon’s says there are 50 ways to leave your lover, and a similar abundance characterizes the contemporary literature on how to analyse a replication study. The recent SCORE replication project…

Or: Why Your Brain and an Octopus’s Brain Disagree About What “Yes” Means I have a confession that surprises no one who knows me: I am thoroughly, disproportionately,…

I always enjoyed making paper air planes since I was a kid, and checking out books from the library on folding different models. I was never that good compared to some of my friends, but I still…

Welcome to my 198th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.1. GCSE Question DistributionThanks to Jamie Frost for producing a detailed…

Unpacking Darwin’s greatest paradox: How the father of evolution unified humanity while sparking a century of scientific racism.

"This is how the attack by one petro-state (ours) on another (Iran's) may be turning out to be very bad for petroleum, because the only thing history loves more than a surprise party is…

An article in The Guardian yesterday notices the patterns we discuss on this blog and asks how society might adapt to an aging, shrinking population. In Japan, there are now companies that specialise…

Tomorrow, Raphaël Dalbarade will attend the European Geosciences Union (EGU) Annual Meeting, in Vienna, to present “When Climate Hazard Granularity Challenges Risk Pooling: A Spatial…

Perhaps, like me, you’ve tried diving down towards the bottom of a lake and noticed how after the first few metres, the water quickly drops in temperature. It has been a personal joy to test this in…

REDD+ over-crediting in Nature Communications Our paper on learning lessons from over-crediting in REDD+ projects came out this week in Nature Communications, led by Thomas Swinfield . The reception…

--> --> --> If you have spent any time reading scientific journals, news outlets, or even peer-reviewed climate research, you have almost certainly encountered a world map stretched beyond…

A science story first, then a US research ecosystem story later. When we think about using molecules to store energy, it's usually in the context of food or fuel, so that chemical reactions take…

It’s that time of year when prospective undergraduates are considering their various offers to study at university. As the Admissions Tutor for a large BSc programme, I’ve been spending a lot of time…

Are we at peak oil, perhaps even peak burning? Thanks to Donald Trump, renewables are looking better than ever. It turns out that using the oil weapon opens people's eyes to the alternatives. The…

One of the quieter successes of post-Independence India is that the gender gap in education has closed. The trajectory is plain in the historical data. In 1951, fewer than three in ten girls were…

The Century-Long Pause in Fundamental Physics Most readers first encountered quantum mechanics through its interpretations debate: Copenhagen, Everett, Bohm, hidden variables, many-worlds. The debate…

AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot Everyone has experienced this. There are studies and papers on why doing a thing X will yield less of another thing Y. Then, in reality,…

This book is the story of the makers of the Apollo Program space suits, International Latex Corporation (ILC). The book is written from the perspective of a former employee, so presumably it’s…

The dineutron engine would be powerful, but it would not have a mighty roar. It would not glow like a reactor core, spit exhaust like a rocket, or hum like a turbine. It would hide inside the nucleus…

It's out!Look, I've talked about this here before, that I don't feel a need to recap its contents. (Edit: Oops, turns out my previous post on the matter didn't explain it either. Oh well.) But,…

A note to myself on survival analysis — KM curves, log-rank tests & Cox models 🧮 If I wrote it the way I understood it, maybe I’ll actually remember it 🤞 Motivations We see survival…

Continuing with my exploration of understanding physics from first math principles (see previous post on functionals), I wanted to learn more about Sobolev spaces. These are a type of vector space…

Here's my map of all active and planned Solar System Missions and their destinations as of May 1st 2026. Data, images and documentation are available on my space exploration history GitHub repository…

I remember reading about global warming (I guess know it more as climate change nowadays?) in an encyclopedia that my grandparents bought for me when I was little. Although I don’t know the…

In the last episode of my column in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, we looked at a particle moving in an attractive central force whose strength is proportional to the inverse cube of…

This month’s open thread on climate topics. El Niño coming (shades of 2023), competitive predictions, ill-advised geo-engineering ideas, and massive shifts in renewable energy roll out. Surely…

The transition into Summer 2026 is being defined by rapid, significant changes in the oceans and the atmosphere. Latest oceanic analysis and forecast data confirms … The post Summer 2026…

I've put out a preprint on ArXiV which renewed the academic spam I receive. The two funniest points are: I also submitted another preprint on the same day which has attracted no spam whatsoever. This…

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Hi guys! Ralf here! today's animal of the month is Charnia Masoni...

The late Craig Venter. Photograph by Michael Janich. CC BY-SA 3.0. We received an e-mail just now from Joel Eissenberg, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Saint Louis…

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Hi all! An announcement on behalf of the STOC/TheoryFest organizers: ACM SIGACT is pleased to provide funds to support student attendance at STOC 2026. These travel awards are for students who are…

MuseLetter #397 / April 2026 by Richard Heinberg The 2026 Energy Crisis and Our Wile E. Coyote Moment Pop culture has long memorialized the Warner Brothers cartoon gag in which Wile E. Coyote, lured…

Sims alien pregnancy real?!

Retraction Watch reports on the mass resignation of the editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of Approximation Theory (\(\mathbb{M}\)). This follows in close succession from the mass resignation from…

Inspired by the recent publication here of thoughts on the new Koumpiodontosuchus paper… and by other work, in prep… I felt it appropriate to rescue another article from the archives, specifically…

Because I’ve been talking about enormous structures lately and describing them as ‘big dumb objects,’ I thought it would be fun to revisit the origin of that term. BDOs emerged in what was intended…

I taught two courses this year that I haven't taught before. One of them was our 4th-year undergraduate course on mathematical logic, "Logic, Computability, and Incompleteness". As usual, I ended up…

Princeton Scientist: We Don’t Understand AI | Tom Griffiths Transcript Tom Griffiths:One of the, I think, interesting challenges we have at the moment is having built systems that we…

As move into May.... ..I want to highlight this post. There are still cold fronts. I should put that like "cold fronts" Temps lowered not really cold. But... it's a concern for early in the season.…

UCLA Cardiology Grand Rounds 2020-10-23 | Video (better video below) Vanderbilt University Department of Biostatistics 2020-11-18 Vanderbilt Translational Research Forum 2021-11-04 | Video Consilium…

In February 1967, five Bellcomm engineers completed a 177-page study showing that a manned Venus flyby was feasible with a single Saturn V and Apollo hardware. Nobody flew it. But every engineering…

I wanted a general sense of how air quality looked in the American heartland. There were more sophisticated (and time-consuming) ways to obtain that. But within my time budget and my limited…

Kolmogorov and Alexandrov on a trip. From CultureMath , 2022. Problems, Problems Everywhere There’s a particular kind of mathematical paper that begins with a m

Educational tool for visualizing how simple rules at the grain scale give rise to dunes and ripples.