Cicadas aren’t the only scientific rarity expected this month. At the end of May three planets will be visible to the naked eye in one small area of the sky. The planets Mercury, Venus and Jupiter will form “the tightest gathering of three naked-eye planets that the world will see until 2026,” according to the [...]

Candy Sticks Steve Snodgrass It's cool to eat as much candy as you want, you guys, no problem, just live off the stuff. Good news, guys! Candy isn't going to make you fat or kill you or anything negative at all! Feast on M&M's like an 8-year-old on Halloween, because you're totally good on this one. Says a study funded by the National Confectioners Association, a trade group representing the candy, chocolate, and gum industry. Some findings from the study: 1.) "Frequency of candy […]

Dear New President, Welcome.  TPP has lost track of exactly how many presidents this university has had in his academic career here; that's because most of them were pretty forgettable.  You always remember the good ones (exactly one) and the really terrible ones (my first), but most of them were inbetween.  If they managed to do one or two good things before moving on we considered ourselves lucky.  Our last one has done quite a few good things, mostly on the […]

America on crack via NYT A New York Times mini-documentary examines the flawed science behind the 1980s 'crack baby' scare. The New York Times has a fascinating documentary on the crack cocaine epidemic that gripped the United States in the 1980s. The short of it: The "crack baby" scare that threatened to spawn a generation of damaged children never materialized. For those of you who may not recall, the mid-1980s were rife with hysteria surrounding cocaine--in particular crack cocaine--and the […]

RICAP-13 will be the fourth edition of the RICAP Conference. The acronym stands for Roma International Conference on Astro-Particle physics, the Conference is entirely dedicated to the study of high […]