Posts

Survival in Greenland during the Little Ice Age involved more than adults—children played a role too. Inuit and Norse toys reflected their societies’ interaction with the environment, showing how play fostered learning, innovation, and cultural adaptation.

The SONIA trial made headlines by challenging a major assumption in breast cancer care: that drugs like CDK4/6 inhibitors must be used right away in advanced HR+/HER2– breast cancer. The study found no significant difference in survival between using these drugs early or later. It even showed that later use led to fewer side effects and lower costs. But not everything was so straightforward.

Puzzle solution

Charles Darwin’s 165-year-old theory about how fish end up in isolated ponds has finally been proven! Researchers have demonstrated that waterbirds can indeed transport aquatic life between water bodies - effectively fish can withstand air exposure. Further to this, here I show, the duration of air exposure doesn’t affect the eggs' hatching timeline.

Solution to #238 “Can you retrace the chess knight’s path?” puzzle.

The banana index measures greenhouse-gas emissions of foods relative to the banana. But it overlooks other crucial environmental factors like land use, prompting a reevaluation of its findings to include this essential dimension.

Solution to #224 “Can you find the ring inside the Russian dolls?” puzzle.

Puzzle #212 from the New Scientist is: “Why isn’t the sound working?”, Mum muttered as she hit the mute key on the remote control. “You’ve probably got the wrong remote, Mum”, Sam said.

Solution to #204 “Can you work out what number my son thought of?” puzzle.

The article by Matsuo et al. (2019) appeared in my newsletter. It is another attempt to sell deep-learning (DL) as a promising alternative to traditional survival analysis. To this end, they compare the performance of their DL model to Cox proportional hazard regression (CPH) when predicting survival for women with newly diagnosed cervical cancer.