Feed aggregator

For many people living with psoriasis, the red, scaly skin patches are only part of the story. Another challenge is the uncertainty about whether there is anything they can do themselves to help manage their skin.

Treatments have improved greatly in recent years. Creams, tablets and injectable medicines can all help control symptoms. Even so, many people still ask a straightforward question in clinic: is there anything I can do alongside my medication that might make a difference? Weight often comes up in that discussion. Psoriasis is more common in people who are overweight or living with obesity.

read more

These days I am putting the finishing touches on a hybrid algorithm that optimizes a system (a gamma-ray observatory) by combining reinforcement-learning with gradient descent. Although I published an optimization strategy for that application already, I am going back to it to demonstrate a case where the simultaneous optimization of hardware and software is necessary, for a paper on co-design I am writing with several colleagues.
In the course of the software development, I ran into a simple but still interesting statistical issue I had not paid attention to until now. So I thought I could share it with you here.

read more

A new paper says that players where a few superstars get the money leads to less cooperation and poor team performance. The authors say this salary compression is why teams won fewer games.

The authors also suggest that companies should strive for more equity in pay, to increase synchronized effort. Because individual effort by key people isn't enough.

They may have a point. The U.S. Army pays everyone, good or bad, the same, and it is the best in the world. But current military and veterans will laugh if a humanities academic suggests it it more efficient or cooperative because of equal pay. Instead, they will tell the stories of all the people their unit had to carry, because it's not a meritocracy and reductions only happen at promotion tiers. 

read more

In 2026, it is easy to feel intellectually knocked around by all of the health claims you read, and all claiming to be supported by science. Weedkillers causing cancer, food coloring causing diabetes, vaccines causing autism, and ultra-processed foods causing everything else are part of a Vast R̶i̶g̶h̶t̶-̶ Left-Wing Conspiracy to make us compliant and Evil Corporations rich.

Thinking about the new Trump administration in 2024, Republicans transforming into the 1990s Democratic party - except they haven't banned nuclear power again yet - was not on anyone's Cultural Bingo card.(1) 

read more

In late January 2026, New York Magazine published a striking piece of cultural reporting: wellness clinics, influencer funnels, and WhatsApp “consultants” selling the dream of brighter skin, faster fat loss, and cleaner energy—often via compounds framed as “peptides,” sometimes as other “cellular” molecules bundled alongside them.

read more