Science 2.0

Urban/local/small ag is a feel-good fallacy.

There is nothing wrong with wishful thinking and aspirations, we all have harmless beliefs that get into our brains. Some home ag is clearly ridiculous - a $150 machine to grow $0.25 worth of herbs is a gimmick for the rich - but mostly it's good, slow exercise or at least good to not be on a tablet watching TikTok videos so China can harvest your personal data. 

read more

In the course of Statistics for Data Analysis I give every spring to PhD students in Physics I spend some time discussing the apparently trivial problem of evaluating the significance of an excess of observed events N over expected background B. 

This is a quite common setup in many searches in Physics and Astrophysics: you have some detection apparatus that records the number of phenomena of a specified kind, and you let it run for some time, whereafter you declare that you have observed N of them. If the occurrence of each phenomenon has equal probability and they do not influence one another, that number N is understood to be sampled from a Poisson distribution of mean B. 

read more

Wealthy countries with natural 'breadbaskets' - places where it is easy to grow food - have so much abundance they can put special labels like 'organic' on tens of thousands of products and charge more and people will spend $100 billion on them.

Other countries need science, yet it is often the case that regions like Europe dictate what science poorer nations can use. Disagree, and you cannot sell in Europe. Then they mobilize relief efforts for the countries they keep poor. 

When poor people are geopolitical pawns for rich ones, can hunger ever be eliminated?

read more

After seeing the results of a randomized, controlled, double-blind, multinational, multi-center trial where 390 subjects got either Zevtera (192) or daptomycin plus optional aztreonam [the comparator] (198), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Zevtera (ceftobiprole medocaril sodium for injection) for adults with Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infections (bacteremia, adults with acute bacterial skin and skin structure infections, and pediatric patients three months and older with community-acquired bacterial pneumonia.

For bacteremia, 69.8 percent who received Zevtera achieved overall success compared to the current treatment at 68.7 percent.

read more

The science community is cheering while European politicians are seething, because Ghana’s National Biosafety Authority has approved 14 new genetic engineering products; eight corn and six soybean varietals.

Europe wields a heavy hammer in Africa. They subsidize to make sure they can compete with local farmers and then dictate to Africans that if they use any process that European NGOs want banned, the products can't be exported to Europe.

read more

Misinformation scholarship is not new, it just got more attention due to Brexit and Trump - and that's due to the left finally focusing on an issue when it's happening on the other side.

Prior to 2021 there was little concern among the left about the anti-vax movement - because it was dominated by their tribe. Academic progressive waved away overwhelming CDC data showing a clear apolitical demarcation by trotting out surveys showing the denial was not that small.

Yet if you asked who's more likely to deny evolution, the right or left, the left reflexively declared it was Republicans. Except the different between the left and right on evolution was only 9 points - far smaller than the denial of vaccine by the left.

read more

Anti-science activists and the environmental lawyers who fund them were giddy that a paper found Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in 45 percent of water they tested.

Oh no, let's run Big Science out of business. It's for the children!

read more

College students who took out $200,000 in loans to get degrees in 18th century French poetry are hoping to get their stupidity waived before the 2024 election, but until then it's smart to look at jobs that are in growing fields.

Northeastern elites want to hire other northeastern elites and the magazine Newspeak took a survey of growing businesses and found that the top field hired by wealthy people in 2024 will be Rat Whisperer.

If you bought that New York City penthouse apartment from Jon Stewart for $17.5 Million when it had a market value of $1.8M an asset value of $800,000, you are not the victim of a victimless crime - if you are a Republican, anyway, it is just the free market when he does it - you just didn't know how to deal with rats.

read more

Large Language Models, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence by companies selling rebranded autocomplete tools to other companies and the public, can automate a lot of entry-level projects but when it comes to anything more complex the flaws are quickly seen.

When Black people using social media exhibit possible depression in their prose, a paper claims LLM/AI tools don't detect it as easily as they do other skin colors.

read more

President Biden and his economists don't really believe in the free market, they instead believe that government 'primes the pump' of the economy, so if they subsidize and mandate something, like ethanol in gasoline or electric cars or solar panels, a miracle of capitalism will occur and the industry will take off. If they create inflation by giving $5 trillion in money to government union employees and political allies, they will curb it by raising interest rates. 

If bankruptcies double and people have to work two jobs to afford off-brand toilet paper, they reframe that as a booming employment market.

read more

In a 2019 Wall Street Journal article, I brought a "genetically rescued organism" some popular attention. It was the American Chestnut, which had been devastated by a blight that conventional techniques and chemicals could not stop.

read more

In 1969, a fellow who felt that the eugenicist founders of Sierra Club were not militant enough in their war on brown and black people under the guise of 'population control' set out to create his own organization. He latched on to the most popular progressive positions of the day - nuclear power etc. - but declared the group to be in opposition to all science.

read more

When we created the Science 2.0 movement, it quickly caught cultural fire. Blogging became the thing to do, to such an extent that corporate media entered with contracts for scientists while outlets like the BBC began to explore publishing user-generated content.

Social media filled the void when the blogging movement faded and while it changed journalism - articles about social media responses became common - it did nothing for knowledge creation and scientific peer review. Instead of blogging being a firewall for the public regarding science content, pay-to-publish journals claiming to be peer-reviewed instead overwhelmed the ability of scientists to look at it all.

read more

Tirzepatide facilitates weight loss in obese people with type 2 diabetes and therefore improves glucose control and also results in improved cardiovascular disease outcomes.

A recent analysis compared a group of adults with type 1 diabetes who were prescribed tirzepatide (off-label) to a control group of adults with type 1 diabetes who were not using any weight-loss medication. The investigators reported significantly larger declines in body mass index (BMI) and weight in the treated group compared to controls. HbA1c decreased in the treated group as early as three months and was sustained through a one-year follow-up.

read more

One of the now rare species of oysters in the Pacific Northwest is the Olympia oyster, Ostrea lurida, (Carpenter, 1864). While rare today, these are British Columbia’s only native oyster. 

Had you been dining on their brethren in the 1800s or earlier, it would have been this species you were consuming. Middens from Vancouver Island's norther tip to California are built from Ostrea lurida.

read more

A Devonian bony fish mortality plate showing a lower shield of Zenaspis podolica (Lankester, 1869) from Lower Devonian deposits of Podolia, Ukraine.

While war rages on in the Ukraine, our hearts go out to those who live and work here contributing much to our understanding of Podolia, a historic region in Eastern Europe, located in the west-central and south-western parts of Ukraine, in northeastern Moldova. 

read more

The Hallstatt Limestone is the world's richest Triassic ammonite unit, yielding specimens of more than 500 ammonite species.


Along with diversified cephalopod fauna  — orthoceratids, nautiloids, ammonoids — we also see gastropods, bivalves, especially the late Triassic pteriid bivalve Halobia (the halobiids), brachiopods, crinoids and a few corals. We also see a lovely selection of microfauna represented. 

read more

Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park covers 23 hectares of the Bulkley River Valley, on the east side of Driftwood Creek, a tributary of the Bulkley River, 10 km northeast of the town of Smithers in northern British Columbia. 

read more

About a month ago I was contacted by a colleague who invited me to write a piece on the topic of science outreach for an electronic journal (Ithaca). I was happy to accept, but when I later pondered on what I would have liked to write, I could not help thinking back at a piece on the power and limits of the use of analogies in the explanation of physics, which I wrote 12 years ago as a proceedings paper for a conference themed on physics outreach in Torino. It dawned on me that although 12 years had gone by, my understanding of what constitutes good techniques for engagement of the public and for effective communication of scientific concepts had not widened very significantly. 

read more

Life may be detected in a single ice grain containing one bacterial cell or portions of a cell which means it could be found in the frozen sea spray from the moons orbiting Saturn or Jupiter.

Finding that will take is a mass spectrometer onboard a spacecraft, and that will happen when the Europa Clipper mission launches in October with the The SUrface Dust Analyzer.

The authors couldn't simulate grains of ice flying through space at 2 to 3 miles per second to hit an observational instrument so they used an experimental setup that sent a thin beam of liquid water into a vacuum, where it disintegrates into droplets. They then used a laser beam to excite the droplets and mass spectral analysis to mimic what instruments on the space probe will detect.

read more