A new era in German politics has begun. Angela Merkel has retired after 16 years as chancellor and a new coalition government is taking shape. Preliminary results show Merkel’s CDU party came a close second to the SPD, and it looks likely that the next chancellor will be the SPD’s Olaf Scholz. Whoever takes over […]

He’s back! After his stupendously, mind-bogglingly, world shattering success rabbiting on about the history of astronomy on the History for Atheists YouTube channel, he can now be heard going on and on and on and on and on and on…  about the history of astronomy from Babylon to Galileo Galilei on the monumental, prodigious, phenomenal Subject […]

At the 32nd International Symposium on Human Identification (ISHI), being held this week in Orlando, FL, Parabon NanoLabs will unveil for the first time the predicted faces of three ancient mummies from an ancient Nile community in Egypt known as the Abusir el-Meleq. The mummy samples, estimated to be between 2,023 and 2,797 years old, were […]

Worms don’t wiggle when they have Alzheimer’s disease. Yet something helped worms with the disease hold onto their wiggle in Professor Jessica Tanis’s lab at the University of Delaware. In solving the mystery, Tanis and her team have yielded new clues into the potential impact of diet on Alzheimer’s, the dreaded degenerative brain disease afflicting […]

Women who menstruate experienced irregularities in their menstrual cycle because of increased stress during the COVID-19 pandemic, a new Northwestern Medicine study has found. This is the first U.S. study to evaluate the impact of stress on peoples’ periods. The study surveyed more than 200 women and people who menstruate in the United States between […]

Clover plants grown in Mars-like soils experience significantly more growth when inoculated with symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria than when left uninoculated. Franklin Harris of Colorado State University, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 29, 2021. As Earth’s population grows, researchers are studying the possibility of farming Martian soils, or “regolith.” […]

Although plastics are durable and strong, a little sunlight can split them apart into microscopic pieces and spur reactions, producing new molecules that can end up in the environment. But how the polymers and additives in these materials influence this process is a mystery. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology show that additives in […]

Since LIGO’s groundbreaking detection, in 2015, of gravitational waves produced by a pair of colliding black holes, the observatory, together with its European partner facility Virgo, has detected dozens of similar cosmic rumblings that send ripples through space and time. In the future, as more and more upgrades are made to the National Science Foundation-funded LIGO observatories—one […]

For the past decade in Los Angeles and the State of California, the question is not if there will be wildfires—but rather when and where they will sprout up and how to protect people from these threats. As such, firefighters need to know how to plan and deploy limited resources. One such solution is controlled […]

A study published today shows that Americans have shorter lives than similarly situated Europeans, and that is true even in the richest areas. At the same time, longevity of Black Americans has been catching up, and the life expectancy gap between Black and white Americans fell by 48.9%. The paper, “Inequality in Mortality between Black […]