Not too many articles this month, especially as I’m avoiding covid-19 topics as there is way too much noise and things are moving so fast on that front.

• This paper is a little old but I hadn’t seen it before so here it is. Based on US data, it examines the relationship between the temperature and the ability of students to learn, finding that hot days reduce test scores with extremely hot days being the most disruptive. As you can expect, providing air-conditioning to schools makes a big impact. Plus this is about the US so think about how much more difficult it is in poorer hot countries.
• Next here’s an article about a new comprehensive review of the fossil record of the Kem Kem region in eastern Morocco which paleontologists have playfully called the most dangerous place on Earth. This is because they have discovered it to have been populated by an unusually high preponderance of large carnivores in the past, based on the region’s fossil record. Scientists have known about this for a long time so it even has a name, Stromer’s Riddle, in honor of the German scientist who in 1912 first identified the phenomenon of how it seems to have so many fossils of carnivorous dinosaurs compared to herbivorous ones.
• The next article is here mainly as an example of bad science writing. The phenomenon is question is real enough. Scientists trying to find particles coming from space in Antarctica were surprised to find high-energy neutrinos instead coming from the ground. This seems impossible as the Earth itself should be blocking them. They have been hunting for a good explanation for a years now and as the more conventional ideas have panned out, are reaching for more exotic ones. The latest idea is that the particles are somehow coming from a parallel universe in which time runs opposite of ours. Naturally this lead to a lot of excited news coverage. But it remains a very implausible explanation, offered only because we have thus far found nothing else and the math checks out. It’s not impossible but we should be properly skeptical of such wild claims.