What do you conclude when different foods are claimed to be eaten on surveys by people who have one type of stroke but not another? Not much. But it will still be a food frequency questionnaire…

In an age of deepfakes and alternative facts, it can be tricky getting at the truth. But persuading others – or even yourself – what is true is not a challenge unique to the modern era. Even the…

Edgar Allan Poe, The author, poet, editor, and literary critic, died in 1849 at age 40 in Maryland. He was chronically depressed, he had even tried to commit suicide using laudanum a year before his…

Katherine Johnson, a Mathematician doing a job known as being a “computer” for NASA in the movie “Hidden Figures” died today at the age of 101.  She started out at a time where being such a…

A new paper claims that the Mediterranean diet may increase "longevity" and it created its mystical conclusion using the favored magic wand of food studies, epidemiological correlation, sprinkled…

Tomorrow morning the Cornell arXiv will publish the preprint of a long scientific article, the result of 4.5 months of painstaking work by yours truly. So I thought I would give you a preview of its…

Merge is a controversial belief by some that human language faculty arose in humans through a single gene mutation, rather the evolving gradually. This human burst of genetic exceptionalism is…

A new paper says scientists can make their work more appealing to the public by making it more personal. I learned of it through a paid university PIO but few scientists will see the irony in that. I…

You might know blue whales are an endangered species while pandas are not. Yet there are 25,000 blue whales and only 2,000 pandas.  There are 100,000 sea otters yet they are still classified as…

After Valentine's Day, two important things happen in Florida: baseball spring training and snake orgy season. Nerodia fasciata fasciata, the banded water snake, doesn't want to bite you, and they…