The SciSchmooze
8 June 2026
Absurd: ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
MEDICINE / HEALTH
Several individual States [California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, & Washington] and the City of New York joined the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert & Response Network, GOARN. Wisconsin announced its intention to do the same. ¿Why? Because the United States officially withdrew from the World Health Organization [WHO] in January. Absurd.
Another deadly outbreak of an Ebola virus is underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Uganda. There are 471 known cases and 84 confirmed deaths but the numbers are climbing exponentially. A third of all staff of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control [CDC] stationed in Africa have been eliminated. In previous Ebola outbreaks, the CDC would rush supplies and manpower to assist in treating patients and in public education. The U.S. doesn’t do that any more. Absurd.
Google’s health research arm, Debug, wants to release 32 million male mosquitoes across California. ¿Absurd? Well, because these lab-bred mosquitoes are sexually sterile and because wild females only mate once, Debug’s program will likely result in roughly a billion fewer mosquitoes for California’s people and animals to contend with. Well, i grew up in Minnesota where a single lake can harbor a billion mosquitoes; and Minnesota has over 10,000 lakes. But this is California and it is possible that Debug’s program could reduce the incidence of West Nile Virus here.
Comprehensive (and expensive) studies by the Food & Drug Administration clearly demonstrated that the current Shingrix and COVID vaccines are safe. However, the F.D.A. has blocked the publication of those studies. Absurd.
Military personnel are no longer required to get a flu shot. It is now a matter of individual choice. This is, of course, a policy that is contrary to public health practices, especially for soldiers living in crowded barracks. Absurd.
PHYSICS & COSMOLOGY
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland is indeed large. It is housed in a 27 km circular tunnel. However, CERN scientists now intend to build a 91 km circular tunnel to house a more powerful collider, the Future Circular Collider. In the above illustration, the smaller circle shows where the 27 km LHC is located. The large circle is where the intended Future Circular Collider might be located. ¿Absurdly large and expensive? We shall see.
Prior to the 1925 PhD thesis of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, the prevailing belief was that the Sun and other stars were made of pretty much the same elements in the proportions as is found on Earth – just much hotter. Her understanding of the young science of quantum mechanics – and 2 years of work – led her to conclude the Sun had a million times as much hydrogen and a thousand times as much helium as believed. Although she studied at Harvard, at that time Harvard did not confer PhDs on women. Absurd. [Her PhD came from Radcliffe instead.]
BIOLOGY / ETHOLOGY
Give an I.Q. test to bumble bees? Absurd? But that’s what researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland accomplished. They gave the bees time to become acquainted with a small Styrofoam ball and – in a separate session – introduced a sugar-coated artificial flower. Then the tests began. Open this link and watch the one-minute video: Bumble Bee Exam.
You may already know that bacteria lack a nucleus. Multicellular organisms [e.g. fungi, plants, animals] have a separate nucleus that contains DNA and all the equipment and ingredients to maintain and transcribe genes. Having a separate nucleus helps protect the DNA from bacterial and viral infections. Therefore there must be carefully guarded passageways through the nuclear membrane – and that is represented above. It is called a nuclear pore complex. Every nucleus has a thousand or more, and each of those can facilitate the transfer of a thousand ‘materials’ per second while blocking unwanted ‘materials’ without getting ‘plugged up’. This would have been considered an absurd possibility just a few decades ago.
FUN NERDY FLICKS
Dzhanibekov Effect – Sophie Ardenot – 13 secs
¿Huh?
Hubble Space Telescope – 250 to 250 – Mike Massimino – 1 min
¿Why So Many Tornadoes in the U.S.? – Cleo Abram – 1 min
MicroSoft Majorana Qubit Chip – Dr. Ben Miles – 2 mins
Hutterites and Allergies – Cup o’ Joe – Joe Schwarcz – 4 mins
¿Cow manure cream?
The Speed of light – Big Think – Michelle Thaller – 4 mins
It’s all relative
The Impossible Rogue Wave? – NOVA PBS – Athena Brensberger – 6 mins
Inside the $22Billion ITER Fusion Project – CNET – 9 mins
¿What to Do with Sunken Nuclear Subs? – SciShow – Hank Green – 10 mins
Quantum Mechanics & Atomic Clocks – NOVA PBS Official – 11.5 mins
It’s how we detect Einstein’s Gravitational Waves!
Climate: A Civilization-Scale Threat – PBS Terra – Maiya May – 12.5 mins
Glass Recycling & Land Restoration – Business Insider – Francisca Troutman – 13 mins
Mystery Signals Are Jamming GPS – Veritaseum – Derek Muller – 43 mins
Life: Past, Present, Future – Star Talk – Betül Kaçar, Tyson, Nice – 65 mins
Wonderfully entertaining!
“Life is a form of chemistry that maintains a kind of memory over long time periods.”
Have a great week in science, and please consider one or more of the above listed events.
Dave Almandsmith, Bay Area Skeptics
“In the event of a nuclear holocaust, the only life remaining on Earth may be cockroaches, Keith Richards and physicists arguing about philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics.”
—Tim Wogan (ca. 1982 – ) British freelance science journalist