PEREGRINE PULP

Because of light pollution, many birds around the globe sing almost an hour longer today than historically or those birds who reside in more remote areas. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv9472 Hunted to near extinction, since the 1980s green sea turtles were listed as 'endangered.' Decades of sustained conservation has just resulted in their status being lifted to 'least concern'. https://www.popsci.com/environment/green-sea-turtles-not-endangered The volume of

Last summer I was writing about my continuing confusion around pandemic-related matters and my feeling that there remains a serious lack of dialogue around any of it. No one liked that. So, let’s try this again. A TIMELINE - 2020 - January 22 - The WHO convened an emergency meeting about an outbreak of a novel coronavirus called 2019-nCoV. The committee could not reach consensus on declaring a global emergency. J anuary 25 - Ontario confirmed Canada’s first case. British C

While we were all distracted with wars and pandemics, politics and social change, our basic understanding of the universe sprung a whole bunch of leaks; or, that's how I'm choosing to read this while knowing some experts may disagree. Starting roughly around 1998, our best model of cosmology, that branch of astrophysics concerning itself with the universe at its largest scales, has been something given the obscurifying acronym ΛCDM (lambda cold dark matter). But since the ad

I’ve had some wonderful moments out on the quiet of the reef with green sea turtles. (If you’ve never done so, it’s really something you must seek out, even just once. I can recommend some spots.) Because they were abundant where I was, and knowing they’re found all over the planet , throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of every ocean, I never appreciated how threatened they were as a species ( Chelonia mydas ). Accidental catches (mostly fisheries bycatch and aba

I was just listening to a jolly gaggle of middle-aged Irishfolk. As happens four pints in, they started talking about their recent doctor visits. With a couple of males involved, the conversation inevitably turned to the digital rectal exam. One declared he'd never had the procedure done and had no interest in ever having one. All the others barked and howled, exclaiming he was foolish at best and what he really needed to do was have his head checked. I couldn't believe all t

The subject of the peopling of the Americas was always messy and it’s getting even more interesting all the time. Some will insist folks...

Like many folks, I’ve been playing with artificial intelligence off and on. Initially, back in 2023, I was turned off by how half-baked all the models seemed, especially on the visual front, while being somewhat pleased with what I was seeing and hearing in the realm of text-to-speech. Sometime in the late '80s, my mother brought a Commodore from work to train on. The text-to-speech that system produced was not meaningfully improved upon, by my own assessment, until just rece

I was recently looking for some statistics on iatrogenesis . That's just a fancy term for the medical system screwing up and causing harm rather than preventing or relieving it. Think: hospital acquired infections, adverse drug reactions , medical errors, psychological damage ,  and the like. However, as so often happens, I couldn't find what I was looking for but accidentally stumbled upon this extremely interesting study  on the prevalence of ineffective medical treatments

We’ve never really known a lot about blue whales  ( Balaenoptera musculus ); yes, despite our long history near and on the sea, blue...

Maybe twenty years ago I was writing about the strangeness of finding myself labelled an ‘atheist’. To begin with, I argued that labelling others was a weird practice, and that gifting someone membership in a group that they themselves haven’t or wouldn’t was a mode of conduct we probably wanted to avoid. (No, I couldn't have imagined the era we were about to enter. And you can imagine my consternation.) But, if you still insisted, then it seemed to me like framing things in

So what is this fluoride panic about? It’s certainly not about the existing evidence.

This is what I understood my ancestry to look like: My father’s family name is extremely English and my mother’s maiden name is a sort of anglicization of an Austrian surname, as I understand it. My maternal grandmother’s maiden name is also extremely English while my paternal grandmother’s could only be Scottish. And all of those folks and some of their parents and grandparents, like my parents and myself, were all born in Canada. Everyone else on the family tree I’m aware o

I was wanting to learn about and write something on how leaded gasoline became a thing. But then I came upon the biography  of its inventor.  Thomas Midgley, Jr. was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1889. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio and studied engineering at Cornell, earning a Master’s of Engineering in 1908 and a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1911. Five years later he was working for General Motors, at their Dayton Engineering Laboratories (DELCo) subsidiary in Ohi

For years we were hearing about the replication crisis in the world of psychology; how so much accepted work in the field had never been...

IS THIS HELPING ANYTHING? ​ • The “Doomsday Glacier” Is Irreversibly Melting, Researchers Say “It could fall apart quickly, in decades.”...

Someone once asked: If I’m not mistaken, you are arguing for humanity banding together to protect ourselves from a plethora of potential...

It's easy to find folks promoting organic. Abundant are claims that organic farming reduces environmental pollutants and greenhouse gas...

[A SOCIALLY DISTANCED PANDEMIC PUB QUIZ] 1) COVID-19 will: A) Soon be forgotten B) Decide to disregard natural and anthropogenic...