Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it… Grandpa had a system of sludge distribution. He never filled the buckets fully so that, when he carried them, the sloshing goop wouldn’t spill over onto his boots. Sometimes he carried the buckets by hand,… Read More Lina Zeldovich: The power of shit
What was the name of the female scientist who pioneered the mRNA research behind the success of recent COVID-19 vaccines? Who was that 16th-century catholic nun from whom René Descartes stole the evil demon thought experiment that secured his place in public memory as the father of modern philosophy? I doubt you remember either woman. Their names… Read More Ann-Sophie Barwich: The absent woman
Across the Arctic, strange things are happening to the landscape. Massive lakes, several square miles in size, have disappeared in the span of a few days. Hillsides slump. Ice-rich ground collapses, leaving the landscape wavy where it once was flat, and in some locations creating vast fields of large, sunken polygons. It’s evidence that permafrost,… Read More Thawing permafrost is roiling the Arctic landscape, driven by a hidden world of changes / Researchers identified over 5,500 new viruses in the ocean
Decades of political campaigning against climate science and medicine have made public health a battleground of beliefs. Vaccine hesitancy, as seen in eastern Europe, based on distrust in authority, can’t be solved with rationality alone. So what might the antidote be? Rejecting science is not so much a grass-roots movement, says Péter Krekó, in… Read More Péter Krekó: Learning to live with the madness
The IITs have been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. This time it is not about the fat pay packets their students have got in the institute placements, but about ghosts and steppe people invading, or rather not invading, Bharatvarsh. First, the ghosts. The director of an IIT posted a video on… Read More Shobhit Mahajan: Peddling of anti-scientific beliefs by academia must worry us
The production and release of plastics, pesticides, industrial compounds, antibiotics and other pollutants is now happening so fast and on such a large scale that it has exceeded the planetary boundary for chemical pollution, the safe limit for humanity, a new study claims. We asked Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate at Stockholm University and one… Read More Chemical pollution exceeds safe planetary limit
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to unveil its measure of how close human civilisation is to the edge of extinctionOn 24 October 1962, an American nuclear chemist, Harrison Brown, started to pen a guest editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just as the Cuban missile crisis reached its climax. “I am writing on… Read More Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Is midnight upon us? Doomsday Clock panel to set risk of global catastrophe
Astronomers have detected a record number of gravitational waves, in a discovery they say will shed light on the evolution of the universe, and the life and death of stars. An international team of scientists have made 35 new observations of gravitational waves, which brings the total number of detections since 2015 to 90. Gravitational waves… Read More Donna Lu: Record number of new gravitational waves offers game-changing window into universe
An experiment that hung rhinoceroses upside down to see what effect it had on the animals has been awarded one of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes. Other recipients included teams that studied the bacteria in chewing gum stuck to pavements, and how to control cockroaches on submarines. The spoof prizes are not as famous as… Read More Upside-down rhino research wins Ig Nobel Prize
Almost everyone knows the name of Einstein, but that of Lev Landau is familiar only to a few followers of the exact sciences. And yet, both of them share several common features: They occupy first-rank positions in the short list of the greatest geniuses of the past century. They distinguished themselves by their freedom of thought and… Read More Albert Einstein and Lev Landau: Scientific geniuses as well as anti-capitalists and anti-Stalinists
After the truth-shower 