If you have been in science media for any period of time, you have seen a predictable pattern; epidemiologists look through columns and rows of foods people claim they eat and diseases or lack thereof and if they get enough to declare "statistical significance" they write a paper noting down at the bottom that they can't show a causal relationship but then send press releases to New York Times...
read moreDo you take fish oil supplements, believing they are boosting your brain power? A lot of people do, but they are a placebo; another in a long chain of Miracle Foods created by epidemiologists when they aren't using suspect statistical correlation to create Scary Chemical claims.Yet journalists at places the New York Times and Washington Post love to create false balance by 'suggesting'...
read moreDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, chewing gum had a bit of a resurgence. Though gum companies disavow any health benefits - they like being in the candy aisle - people have always used it off-label for various benefits and did so to generate a response against possible virus exposures. People have always had habits they like. If have a cold, for example, I like to eat a cheese sandwich. If I...
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Polish Grandmaster Jan-Krzysztof Duda won the 2023 Armageddon Championship Series in convincing fashion but the intriguing science story is his biology while doing so.Armageddon Chess is often used as a tie-breaker, and in it, black plays second but is the winner if the game is a draw - and has a shorter clock. The Armageddon Championship Series compresses time and uses a double-elimination...
read moreAstronomers have speculated that black holes eat slowly. A recent paper argues that their computer simulation shows just the opposite. Don't get too excited, this is still a computer simulation about theoretical physics, which isn't out there with science-fiction but is limited by the fact that we know very little about black holes - including how fast they consume the universe around them....
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