NASA has flown a drone on Mars. A tiny robot. A flying robot. On. Another. Planet.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Succeeds in Historic First Flight Similar:Visiting the #scienceofpixar exhibit @kaminsciencecenterQuick visit to see my mother and siblings.Students are trusting software like this to do their work.A former student working in SEO shared this. I miss Google classic.Googling Is for Old People. That’s a Problem for Google.I’m thinking this is a still…

Infrared photo confirms Munch wrote “madman” inscription first noticed in 1904

“Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!” (“Can only have been painted by a madman!”) appears on Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s most famous painting The Scream. Infrared images at Norway’s National Museum in Oslo recently confirmed that Munch himself wrote this note. The inscription has always been visible to the naked eye, but the infrared images helped…

Swiss cheese metaphor for fighting the pandemic: “Multiple Layers Improve Success”

The anti-maskers are right when they say masks aren’t 100% effective. The pro-face-touchers are right when they say not touching your face isn’t enough. The bar-hoppers and close-talkers and eaters-in-crowded-diners are right when they say social distancing alone won’t stop the spread of a pandemic. The “98.2% survival rate” crowd is right that most people…

We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time

You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity…

Scientists thought only male birds sang – until women joined the research

For more than 150 years, scientists have considered bird song to be an exclusively male trait, but female scientists have changed that. Americans often idealize scientists as unbiased, objective observers. But scientists are affected by conscious and unconscious biases, just as people in other fields are. Studies of birds’ vocal behavior clearly show how research approaches…

COVID-19 Becoming Less Deadly

Bits and pieces from a news article that summarizes recent scholarly studies. Some  moderately good news, and a reminder that increased testing means finding more cases, and finding them earlier, which means people get medical treatment sooner. (More testing means less suffering and fewer deaths. For those of us who care about such things.) Over…

Destroying trust in the media, science, and government has left America vulnerable to disaster

From The Brookings Institution (non-profit, deeply sourced factual writing; has been accused of both conservative and liberal bias; is cited in Congress about equally by conservative and liberal politicians; leans a bit left in terms of loaded language): American institutions are not perfect, of course. We all should want to improve scientific practices, remove bias…

Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs broke the story of Hope Hicks’s COVID-19 Infection

Those darned reporters. Always publishing newsworthy facts of national importance that powerful people would rather keep silent. When Hicks tested positive, she worried about others around her who might be infected, too, but the White House sought to keep that information from the public. Without Jennifer Jacobs, a dogged Bloomberg reporter who broke the story…

NINE officials have COVID-19 after ‘superspreader’ SCOTUS event

So negative! Why does the lying America-hating fake news media keep publishing stories that make Trump look bad? Where are the reports about superspreader events in the Obama White House? Where are the stories about Obama’s family members and staff ostentatiously refusing to take precautions that their own medical experts recommended that all Americans take?…