Scientific papers should have two Discussion sections - one written by the authors, and the other by an independent researcher. According to a new paper from Michael S. Avidan, John P. A. Ioannidis and George A. Mashour, this "second discussant" system could help ensure more balanced and objective inference in science. The authors begin by noting that while the reproducibility crisis has focussed attention on the Methods and Results sections of papers, Discussion sections are not free ...read more

Flooding characterized by the National Weather Service as "major to historic and catastrophic" is continuing across parts of the central plains and Upper Midwest. The flooding has come in the wake of last week's "bomb cyclone," which dumped heavy rain atop snowpack with high water content. The resulting runoff has triggered record-setting flooding throughout the Missouri and Mississippi river basins. As I'm writing this on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 19, more ...read more

Digging into NASA’s Apollo-era history of nuclear propulsion for manned deep space missions, I found another gem in the history of the government not really knowing how to address women’s clothing. This time, we’re talking beauty and badges. For the back story on this image, we need to the Plum Brook Station before it was a NASA centre, all the way back to the Second World War when it was the Plum Brook Ordnance Works. In 1941, some  9,100 acres of land was acquired by t ...read more

The Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia is one of the most active volcanic areas on Earth. It isn't surprising to find multiple volcanoes erupting each week and this week is no exception. Two side-by-side volcanoes -- Bezymianny and Sheveluch -- were simultaneously erupting over the weekend (above). The eruption at Bezymianny was big enough to cause some air travel over the peninsula to divert flight paths to avoid the ash, but that's business-as-usual in Kamchatka. Kamchtka is ...read more

CBD, or cannabidiol, has exploded onto the market in recent years. Sometime in the past decade, this purportedly medicinal marijuana extract went from being an obscure stoner oil to the wellness product du jour, flooding from holistic markets to the mainstream. Analysts at the investment bank Cowen Inc. predict the industry will balloon to $16 billion by 2025. In comparison, CBD sales totaled less than $1 billion last year, though that’s no small feat for a field that didn’ ...read more

On New Year's Day, NASA's New Horizons probe streaked by a tiny world dubbed MU69, or Ultima Thule, the farthest object humankind has studied up close. With most of the data still on the spacecraft waiting to be transmitted, scientists are still getting to know this distant body. We know that it's composed of two chunks of rock loosely stuck together. We know that it doesn't have moons or rings that New Horizons might have careened into on its close pass. And we kno ...read more

Do human beings have a magnetic sense? Biologists know other animals do. They think it helps creatures including bees, turtles and birds navigate through the world. Scientists have tried to investigate whether humans belong on the list of magnetically sensitive organisms. For decades, there’s been a back-and-forth between positive reports and failures to demonstrate the trait in people, with seemingly endless controversy. The mixed results in people may be due to the fact that virt ...read more

I just came across a paper with an interesting title: The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”. The conclusions of this work are even more interesting. According to the authors, Edward Dutton et al., humans evolved to be religious and atheism is caused (in part) by mutational damage to our normal, religious DNA. Atheists, in other words, are genetic degenerates. Despite the talk of mutations, there is no genetics in this paper. No atheist genomes were sequenced and found ...read more

Last month, NASA's Mars InSight lander started digging into the Red Planet. Its HP3 (Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package) instrument was designed to burrow and measure Mars from underground, uncovering new geological evidence about how heat flows through the Martian soil. The part of this instrument that actually burrows into the ground is known as the mole. It was meant to penetrate up to 16 feet deep. But it stopped just hours after it starting digging. The ...read more

Over the last half century, spacecraft have visited every planet and their major moons, as well as two dwarf planets and more than a dozen asteroids and comets. Thanks to high-res images, we know these worlds intimately and can appreciate what makes each of them unique. These days, fewer than 3 in 10 Americans are old enough to recall a time when our neighboring worlds were indistinct dots in even the most powerful telescopes. And yet, even before there were spacecraft to show us, in the ...read more