There is an old proverb that says that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. While it is good advice generally, when it comes to health care, one has to be cautious about overdoing prevention.

My former physician in Cleveland before he retired was very much into preventative care. At any sign of something that seemed like an early warning sign, he would suggest prophylactic measures. He would prescribe diagnostic tests and look for signs that something needed attention. So when it seemed like my bone density was slightly lower than it ought to be, a symptom known as osteopenia (which is not the same as osteoporosis which is manifestly low bone density), he suggested that I take daily doses of the drug alendronate (which is marketed under the name Fosomax) which purports to increase bone density. I bought a supply but never got around to taking it and decided to wait awhile. Why? Because in general, I try to avoid routine medicine intake. Since my bone density was still close to normal, I decided to not take any medication to treat it until the signs worsened. After all, I was being compared to the western norm while that may have been my bone density all along. I told him of my decision and he understood it.
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I love watching videos of animals and plants that use camera technology to reveal what is invisible to the naked eye, either by using time-lapse techniques to speed up the extremely slow or high speed cameras to slow down the incredibly quick.

In this video, biologist Adrian Smith films seven species of moths with high-speed cameras to show how beautiful and graceful they are. Films such as these remind me how limited is the range of our senses. There is an incredibly beautiful world that is all around us that we just do not see. Thanks to this technology, we now can.

You might think of moths primarily as the pesky creatures that get drawn to your lamplight and love nothing more than gnawing through your well-worn knitwear. However, as this video from the Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University shows, they can also be quite majestic – especially when captured on ‘fancy science cameras’. Shooting seven different moth species at a whopping 6,000 frames per second (fps) – compared with the standard 24 fps for film and television – the biologist Adrian Smith, who heads the research lab, guides viewers through the incredible biophysics of moth flight.

The WHO has rolled out the world’s first malaria vaccine to all children in Africa. The vaccine was developed way back in 1987. It is only 30% effective and administering it is cumbersome because it requires four doses and protection fades after four months. But given that there are more that 200 million cases and 400,000 deaths per year due to malaria, the impact could still be large.

Because of the heat and poverty, many children in Africa sleep out in the open without protective nets covering them, making them highly vulnerable to mosquito bites.

Malaria is a major scourge and the world needs a much better malaria vaccine. Maybe the new vaccine-making techniques developed to deal with the coronaviruses can be adapted to find one for malaria.

The publication Big Think, that is dedicated to disseminating articles that deal with important ideas, asked me to submit an essay that explored the main ideas of my book The Great Paradox of Science. It was not easy to do so because the argument I developed had to be closely reasoned, which was why I felt it required a book-length treatment.

But I gave it a shot and came up with a 2,000 word essay that I think gets the gist of the book fairly well. You can read the essay here. As a bonus, they have also created an audio version of the essay that lasts for about 14 minutes.

The maglev train that can run at high speeds by ‘floating’ above the track is an engineering marvel that people in the US unfortunately have no direct experience with, thanks to the gas and automobile lobbies effectively killing the train system so that what exists here is an embarrassment when compared to what exists in other parts of the world. Eric Laithwaite, known as the father of the maglev train for his development of the magnetic levitation process, takes us step-by-step through the design of the system.

Maglev (magnetic levitation) trains are elegant and audacious works of engineering that operate by harnessing the power of magnetic repulsion and electromagnetism to move traincars that quite literally float above the track – today, often at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour. In this lecture at Imperial College London from 1975, the British engineer and professor Eric Laithwaite (1921-97) deconstructs the fascinating physics at work behind his plans for a maglev train, which he first modelled in 1940s and perfected in the 1970s. Well-regarded in his time as both a lecturer and an engineer, Laithwaite presents a series of demonstrations that build, step by step, until he finally unveils a small maglev train model. The first commercial maglev train debuted at Birmingham Airport in 1984, and today Laithwaite’s engineering breakthroughs help power many of the world’s fastest trains.