Yves here. Synchronicity strikes! Lambert and I were discussing some of the extreme views expressed in comments yesterday. He attributed it to hysteria in the zeitgeist finally getting to the site. And now we have a theory as to why! It’s a neoliberal infestation.
By Marc Schuilenburg, assistant professor at VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Originally published at openDemocracy
In 1980, hysteria died. That was the year it was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) handbookand ceased to be considered a medical condition. But we need only look around us to see that hysteria has never been more alive – just consider the run on toilet paper at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Or the consumer hysteria every Black Friday, or the overheated discussions taking place on Facebook and Twitter every day.
Climate change may be sparking more lightning in the Arctic.
Data from a worldwide network of lightning sensors suggest that the frequency of lightning strikes in the region has shot up over the last decade, researchers report online March 22 in
Geophysical Research Letters. That may be because the Arctic, historically too cold to fuel many thunderstorms, is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world (
SN: 8/2/19).
The new analysis used observations from the World Wide Lightning Location Network, which has sensors across the globe that detect radio waves emitted by lightning bolts. Researchers tallied lightning strikes in the Arctic during the stormiest months of June, July and August from 2010 to 2020. The team counted everywhere above 65° N latitude, which cuts through the middle of Alaska, as the Arctic.
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It often goes unmentioned that protons, the positively charged matter particles at the center of atoms, are part antimatter.
We learn in school that a proton is a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks two “up” quarks and a “down” quark, whose electric charges (+2/3 and −1/3, respectively) combine to give the proton its charge of +1. But that simplistic picture glosses over a far stranger, as-yet-unresolved story.
Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
Older workers face a wide range of discrimination in the workplace, with one of the more enduring biases that they struggle to learn new things. New research highlights how wrong that is.