Science 2.0

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than rolls of dice suggest. A new study of the mimicry of several distantly-related South American rainforest butterfly and moth species with similar wing color patterns that may warn away predators (it's not a costumed bluff, the moths and butterflies are actually toxic to birds) found that they reused the same two genes - ivory and optix - to evolve near identical color patterns.

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of individuals, companies, and NGOs, from California to Minnesota to Massachusetts, have come under investigation for fraud in taking money from the federal government.

Now the Department of Justice is investigating an insider in Dr. David Morens, M.D., a career advisor inside the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which came into controversy when it was learned that they had funded gain of function research in the Wuhan Lab where SARS-CoV-2 may have erupted.

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There are many hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter and one idea to explore how strongly hypothetical dark photons interact with normal photons wouldn't even involve a new and expensive dedicated facility, says Tokyo Metropolitan University Associate Professor Wen Yin.

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Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific determination of what that even means.

There are metrics but standard 0-to-10 scales and questionnaires are subjective and basically only useful for justifying treatments to insurance companies, they are clinically not much help.

Pain patients were demonized by the Obama administration in their war on Big Pharma and "opiods" that many in Congress now claim to support and that may be why both doctors and patients minimize their symptoms on official forms. No patient wants to be told their pain is just recreational desire while doctors are the easy targets for government. That plus general recall bias and confusion about what a pain scale really means clouds the issue.

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An analysis of 6.14 million maternal-child health records  has linked prescription medications to higher rates of Autism Spectrum Disorder in offspring. 

Sterol biosynthesis–inhibiting medications (SBIMs) inhibit the cholesterol synthesis pathway and are include antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, beta-blockers and statins; aripiprazole, atorvastatin, bupropion, buspirone, fluoxetine, haloperidol, metoprolol, nebivolol, pravastatin, propranolol, rosuvastatin, sertraline, simvastatin, cariprazine and trazodone. 

These include some of the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States, accounting for more than 400 million annual prescriptions. 

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As some of the long-time readers of this blog know, in this column I have occasionally discussed probability calculations in the context of gambling and betting. A long time ago I also famously won a $1000 bet on the LHC not discovering any new physics. Below I will mention a similar bet that ended up not being agreed upon by the parties, for the sake of discussing a subtle effect one has to worry about when placing bets: the selection bias. 

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Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is also Lenin's birthday. 

That's not coincidence. The leader of the first Earth Day was not a politician, as the movement has greenwashed Democratic U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson into being, yet credible journalists and an alarming number of commenters will invoke the Earth Day site or some anonymous Snopes blogger or even Wikipedia(!) and claim the primary sources from 56 years ago are wrong. 

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If a lot of the food and health claims you read and hear today seem like things left over from the 1970s, that's because they are. The food activist community, vegetarians and other diet groups, rebranded their beliefs as Make America Health Again (MAHA) after former Natural Resources Defense Council and pillar of the Democratic party Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. switched sides and joined Republicans in the Trump administration, but they are the same claims that were psychological platforms of progressives.

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On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became the first to have his pitch speed measured during a game. Rockwell International experts clocked the ball velocity at 100.8 miles per hour.

That was the fastest pitch ever recorded.

Yet last season over 50 pitchers in Major League Baseball threw 100 MPH and 140 more hit that velocity in the minor leagues. In September of 2010, Aroldis Chapman threw 105.1 MPH. Clearly, pitchers have gotten a lot faster, due to superior training and better scouting identifying athletes who will excel at pitching and getting them to play baseball rather than basketball or something else. 

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Just a few years ago, there were concerns that minorities like blondes and redheads were going extinct. The future belonged to Miss Clairol because they're recessive genes and with just five generations of bad biological rolls, you could have less chance of Scottish hair than Senator Elizabeth Warren has of being Native American.
It may be that scientists just weren't seeing the signals.

Instead of going extinct, a study of 10,016 newer ancient West Eurasian genomes, plus 5,820 existing ancient sequences and 6,438 modern ones finds that red hair and fair skin have become more common over the last 10,000 years, not less. Evolution not only didn't slow down in that time, natural selection could those traits to speed up over the last 4,000 years.

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At what point is enforced identification with what is obviously a collapsing system called out by people on the inside of once-powerful industries?

Steelworkers once believed there was no limit to what they could grab from corporations, even autoworkers made that error. Twinkies went bankrupt to get out of union control and start over. Yet no one on the floor believe that would happen.

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Do you have a master in Science, and want to start a Post-Doc position directly? You can have it, in Padova (Italy), to work with me on the PHINDER project, an EIC-funded Pathfinder grantee.
I am offering a two-year position for research in nanophotonics-powered neuromorphic computing for particle detector development at INFN, Sezione di Padova. The call will open soon, so you should watch this space if you are interested.

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Honeybees get attention in environmental fundraising campaigns because people don't understand pollination.(1)

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A graphic from the Washington Post about motorcycle deaths is making the rounds again on Twitter, and it will set off a lot of comments by people who can't put it in context, so let's go back to the source paper.

Here is what you need to know:

If you ride 15 miles every day on a motorcycle for a year, you have a 1 in 860 chance of dying.

If you fly 500 miles every day on an airplane for a year, you have a 1 in 85,000 chance of dying.

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During the Obama administration, the credibility of the US Centers for Disease Control went into serious decline. Though it only became evident to most how incompetent career government bureaucrats were when COVID-19 hit - they denied it was a pandemic and said the President was being xenophobic for wanting to ban travel from China(1) - those of us inside the system saw that they were long not equipped to help with much at all. If you need six weeks to tell the public lettuce has E. coli, basically five weeks after people had eaten the lettuce, you are not a public health agency, you are just a government job works program.

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Running a pro-science nonprofit is a poor business model. Especially compared to lawyer groups like Environmental Working Group or rich deniers like Greenpeace.

'Your food is safe' is a terrible call to action but 'evil chemical corporations are killing you' gets the money rolling in - even though the former is true and the latter is a paranoid conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.

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Social authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people do with the government assistance they are now reliant upon. It keeps those in control in positions of power. The most recent example is with government funding for food coming attached to strings telling people what they can buy with the money.

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California government has a new proposal that could ban thousands of chemicals, even if they are natural.

California is, of course, famously anti-science. The reason lawyers who wanted to sue over weedkillers filed in San Francisco is because it is the most anti-science city in America's most anti-science state. And it worked. Juries readily believe that plants are just tiny green people so a weedkiller that only acts on a pathway not found in humans at all can still somehow cause human cancer. Even if you only sprayed it one time.

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Raw milk is known to be 700X more likely to cause a foodborne illness. Since evangelists for bacteria in food often hide illnesses to protect their beliefs it may be even higher.

Cheese will be safer, if it is aged long enough. Which means you are not dealing with a company that is in a financial panic. Like RAW FARM-brand raw dairy products.

When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was a lawyer for Natural Resources Defense Council and investor in solar gimmicks, he was adored by Democrats who shared his beliefs that science was a vast right-wing conspiracy. When he joined the Trump administration, some followed him and embraced his MAGA agenda(1), but many turned on him because he joined a Republican.

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In the 1960s and '70s there was a great deal of optimism about science - including tackling aging. In the following decades not much progress was made. There were studies and experiments, like low calorie efforts, but those were in mice and mice studies are only exploratory. We can't ethically wean human babies on a starvation diet, we don't make any decisions on animal models, no drug has ever been approved on those because mice are not little people.

Due to lack of progress, some argue that resilience, not longevity, should be the therapeutic endpoint. Lifespan is the wrong objective so people in the field have been targeting the wrong way.

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