This is not the first time I’ve been struck by the spiral, fractal nature of Romanesco broccoli, an edible flower in the broccoli family.  The flower’s form approximates a natural…

The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day.…

This past week we launched SCOPE , a new center for science communication and public engagement. We marked the occasion with a fun symposium , as well as a Science Café event the preceding evening…

They are not just bringing life. “In the last 2500 years, the Yellow River has noticeably shifted its course 26 times, dramatically shifted nine times, and has flooded over 1,600 times. These…

I really enjoyed rraxijf the ASA Nation’s Data At Risk 2025 report. I’m very late to the party reading it but it does such a valuable service. I’ll have more to say from it soon, but great work by…

Foreword If you are not already familiar with my opinion that IQ tests HAVE ISSUES, please read previous posts on this site before reading this. TLDR: My French is not good enough to research this,…

I just took this image of a Silk worm larvae! I had a hunch, Xrays are just super Source

[Africa on the traditional world map based on the Mercator projection, left, and on the 2018 Equal Earth map, right.] ........................ UN Votes to Adopt New World Map That Shows Africa's True…

Source: XKCD.

Today’s post is a look at something I had not considered before acquiring a new microscope objective – a Zeiss Plan Neofluar 63x, NA 1.2, water immersion, coverslip thickness correction…

Viewed as a major breakthrough in radio astronomy, China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) has detected 156,411 neutral hydrogen sources across nearly half the sky.…

If you were to order a "storm" for the Northwest, you would request one that drops lots of rain over the crest and eastern side of the Cascades, decisively ending the wildfire season and providing…

A precise comparison of Jason Hreha’s Six Systems model and the Big Five, including their mapping, differences, uses, and evidence limits.

Our first foray into lossy compression will be in the audio realm, looking at a pair of companding algorithms (short for "compressing and expanding") used extensively in telecommunications: A-law and…

The radon sensor is fully back online this week.

The headline this week: another 1+ inches of rain fell in the last seven days.

On August 12, 2026, Levent Alpöge of Anthropic posted on X constructions for Hadamard matrices of orders $n \in \{668, 716, 892, 1132, 1244, 1388, 1436, 1676, 1772, 1916, 1948, 1964\}$, resolving all…

In 2-divisible groups, we can divide by 2.Are all 2-divisible Abelian groups natural? This question appears to be a big cardinality problem. The video below explains this a bit. When learning group…

A Galápagos land iguana. I’m back from a floating week-long workshop on the “Distribution of Consciousness,” organized by the International Center for Consciousness Studies (ICCS).…

In 2017 it was announced, and quickly ridiculed, that dinosaur feces containing bone fragments belonging to some of our early human ancestors were found in the fecal matters of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.…

The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day.…

Reading Hannah Ritchie's Not the End of the World

In my book Doctors and Distillers, I wrote a lot about the medicinal history of bittering agents used in many aperitifs, herbal liqueurs, and amaros. Suze is a gentian liqueur, and gentian is one of…

Looming crisis… Experts are warning that Germany is heading into the heating season with dangerously low natural gas reserve fill levels. Currently, Germany’s gas reserve fill level…

Being one of the fastest growing regions in the world, Asia Pacific’s stature in the scientific community is growing as is the region's ambition to play a greater role in shaping research through…

Despite some problems of its own, the ongoing Microsoft Majorana saga has been striking a pleasant contrast with the rush by artificial intelligence (AI) companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to show…

A particular line from the open statement mathematicians wrote against the design of the latest Caltech Mathathon, due to happen in late October, has stuck with me:Mathematicians do not only prove…

My dad went to a conference recently, and when I asked him about what happened there he said it was a conference for people in biosecurity. When I asked him about the different kinds of biosecurity…

Leo Szilard crosses the street on his way from the Imperial Hotel to the British Museum and invents the atomic bomb.

The face-on spiral galaxy M74 with a bright core and faint spiral arms in a wide star field

It was impossible to believe, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard) that their most important military rival, the U.S., wasn’t pursuing an active biological warfare program: As part of my duties at…

Two camps can read the same brain measurement and both feel confirmed, and the reason has less to do with the data than with the question each is asking.

By Cally Oldershaw . This is a DK Children's Anthology, but partway through, I largely forgot that it is supposed to be a children's book. I'm allowed to learn things and enjoy wonderful photographs,…

I summarise the journey of evolution from David Attenborough's opus magnum and pull out the fun facts about nature.

Experiments, discoveries, and a new way of thinking about AI

Luna 16 was the first robotic probe to land on the Moon and return a sample to Earth.

It is now clear that a very strong or "super" El Niño will be in place this year. Some are even calling it a GODZILLA El Niño. Several media outlets and amateur YouTube channels/social media sites…

Over the last four posts, we conceptualized and engineered the TeaFlon system. We designed a fusion protein (The Destroyer and The Hook), simulated its 3D folding physics in-silico, formatted the DNA…

In the last post, we successfully compiled our TeaFlon fusion protein in a physics simulator to prove our code works.

Mathematicians are unhappy about OpenAI. Several influential mathematicians wrote an open letter. The gist of their argument is that they form a community that trains young people. When AI started…

Sometimes, an example is so little that I forget to add it to my blog. Like this, my favorite way to review scales of measurement and ordinal data in particular.

KEY POINTS – Animal Ag Ammonia and Human Health 1. Ammonia is considered by the EPA to be a “severely hazardous substance,” with direct health risks at the local level, major regional health…

Following on from my post about the problematic field of mitochondrial transplantation, another paper was bought to my attention, in which the authors injected mitochondria into the eyes of human…

Tropilaelaps in Turkey, recent studies of the complexity of the waggle dance, and (yet more studies on) the influence of queen cup size on the size of the resulting queens. Bigger is not always…

Where I decide to start learning statistics, which could be dangerous in the long run...do you really want detailed analysis of my sticker collection?

I don't have anything smart to say, beyond a general sense that something unfair transpired, but I'd love to hear what smart things you all have to say.

Uintacrinus socialis from Utah, USACrinoids are one of my favourite echinoderms. It is magical when all the elements come together to preserve a particularly lovely specimen in such glorious…

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a NASA space telescope that carries a wide field instrument with a 300.8 megapixel visible and near-infrared sensor that provides a sensitivity comparable to…

The new view of the history of the crocodile lineage starts in the Triassic period, with them as active, land-dwelling, warm-blooded animals, in many cases even running on two legs. They diversified…