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Header photo: Warming stripes for New York City, 1869-2023. Source: Climate Central.
The annual Ig Nobels, the awards for odd and funny scientific achievement, will be held outside the United States for the first time in its 36 years because of concerns about attendees' safety. The 2026 ceremony, which takes place in September ahead of the Nobel Prizes, will be held in Zurich. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year," Marc Abrahams, editor of event organizers the Annals of Improbable Research, told @AssociatedPress@flipboard.com.
#Science #IgNobels #IgNobelPrize #TrumpAdministration #USPolitics
Potentially good news for people with osteoporosis. Scientists from the University of Leipzig in Germany and Shandong University in China identified the cell receptor GPR133 (also known as ADGRD1) as being crucial to bone density. @ScienceAlert@flipboard.com shares what they discovered after running some tests on mice:
In a study of two million people with breast cancer, those who used complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) had a substantially increased risk of dying over a five-year span compared to people undergoing mainstream treatment (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and endocrine therapy). This was true even if both CAM and conventional treatments were used — the theory being that some patients may have opted out of some mainstream treatments. Here's @Gizmodo@flipboard.com's story at the first link, plus the JAMA Network writeup at the second.
Dry ice, commonly used to ship perishables, cleaning and to create smoky effects for rock concerts, has been found in a planetary nebula for the first time. Phys.org has more details, including how the team of astronomers discovered it:
In the early 1980s, it appeared the debate over humans having free will may finally had been settled. Experiments carried out by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet seemed to show decisions being made in the brain before people were even aware of them. But the scientists of today are skeptical. Read more from @sciencefocus@flipboard.com:
We know that coffee helps get the world out of bed, and it may even improve athletic performance (like sprinting to the bus after waking up late again) and many cognitive skills. So when’s the best time to take this performance-enhancing drug? @sciencefocus@flipboard.com takes a look:
Good news, folks! mRNA vaccines don't cause "turbo cancers" — first, because those don't exist, and second, because mRNA technology has been studied for decades and large population studies have found no increased cancer risk at all following vaccination. Here's more from @TheConversationUS@newsie.social on how the rapid spread of vaccine misinformation is threatening the development of this potentially transformative technology.