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Over the last two years, generative AI has smashed our ideas of what intelligence means, what AI can and cannot do, and of our place in the cosmos. A two-thousand year old journey from Aristotle to today, has culminated in a moment where human exceptionalism has finally been challenged.

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With some journals publishing 100,000 articles per year, you have to be truly naïve to believe they are all peer-reviewed in the sense that the public thinks peer review works. Journals don't pay for peer review, but they sure get paid, often even to publish articles.

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America is one of the most religiously, racially and ethnically diverse countries in the world, but that doesn't mean Latinos, Asians or Blacks believe that Democrats and Republicans want them as anything more than reliable voting blocs.

A new analysis finds that though Asians were up 35 percent between 2010 and 2020, Latinos increased 23 percent and the Black population increased by 6 percent even as Whites decreased 2 percent, minorities didn't vote in numbers similar to their eligible voter population.

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Estradiol is an estrogen hormone used medically during menopause and after hysterectomies to help reduce symptoms such as hot flashes and to prevent osteoporosis (bone loss) in women, but a new paper says it is linked to cocaine addiction.

Women are more likely than men to develop an addiction, try cocaine at a younger age, use larger amounts of the drug, and suffer from overdose. A psychologist says estradiol may be why.

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Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, government health officials went to Congress to ask for more funding to help with Ebola. Prior to that they asked for more funding to help stop Teen Vaping. Prior to that they asked for more funding to stop the Prediabetes Epidemic.

After the pandemic they created regulations to keep landlords from evicting deadbeat tenants. They created regulations to force COVID-19 vaccines on everyone...except fellow government union employees. 

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In July of 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan never arrived at Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean, on their trip around the world.

In September, the Deep Sea Vision team, funded privately by Tony Romeo, began scanning 5,200 square miles in search of Earhart and Noonan's Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft - and they think they have location it.

Their proof are sonar images of a plane-shaped object 16,000 feet down, under miles from Howland Island, where Earhart and Noonan were supposed to refuel.


Image: Deep Sea Vision

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Republicans joined the anti-vaccine movement in 2021 but you might not know it xisted prior to that. Academics and allied journalists would roll out surveys showing that the anti-vaccine movement was similar on both sides to rationalize the behavior of their tribe - while ignoring actual data.

Data like that that coast of California had more vaccine exemptions for school kids than the rest of the US combined. Some coastal schools had vaccine rates of just 26%. Fortunately, we had physicians like Dr. Richard Pan on our side, willing to defy his political party to save kids. We pressured the Governor to sign a law banning arbitrary exemptions and now California is nearly as high as Mississippi and Alabama in vaccine uptake.

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Like some soldiers become conscientious objectors if they end up in an actual military situation, or when over 300 armed government union employees suddenly forgot they had guns while kids were being murdered in Uvalde, healthcare workers, 18.8 million strong just in the US, were more likely to exit the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike the first two, healthcare workers were right to be afraid. 

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In 1845, two ships under the command Captain John Franklin, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, left England on a voyage to chart the top of North America and a Northwest Passage that would connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. 

Like the interior of Africa and finding the source of the Nile, Great Britain was using some its imperial wealth to explore the unknown and a veteran skipper like Franklin wanted to be first to make the breakthrough across the north pole.

Their ships were state-of-the-art; interior heating and storage enough preserved food to last the 100-plus men for months at a time plus chicken, pigs, and even for the early parts.

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Las Vegas calls itself Sin City, but there are few sins actually available. Having a cigar after a steak? Banned. Prostitution? Banned. The only big sin still legal is Gluttony, and you will pay a lot for that one, while Greed is allowed but stupid if you can do math. The house is always going to win eventually.

Still, if you are going to be a glutton, you can at least do it quasi-ethically; by only eating plants. 



A new analysis of Vegas reveals the best places to go if you prefer to avoid a normal human diet, but if we believed that was sound science we'd endorse organic food and get some of that $3 billion per year in environmental trial lawyer money.

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Pseudoscience often rebrands itself under new names but never really goes away. Some people not only believe in acupuncture, they even believe in acupuncture for their coffee grinds. Other things have even less evidence, like chakras, astrology, and their more modern weird love child, the Enneagram.

Like The Flu Fighter Martini, just because Enneagram numbers are in The Guardian, official media outlet of the anti-science left, does not make any of it legitimate.

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Harvard University is under cultural pressure, even from its own political tent, because its leader couldn't bring herself to condemn anti-Semitism, hate speech, and attacks on Jewish people by Harvard faculty and students. This would have been okay a few years ago, American progressives have long been opposed to Israel, but since Harvard targets microaggressions of all kinds, and 'stands with Ukraine' after the invasion by Russia, it was not just queasy but hypocritical.

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1.     January 6 was a shocking aberration.

2.     Whether due to term limit or a lost election, each US president up through Barak Obama, and each presidential candidate up through Al Gore, gracefully yielded when the time came, because that’s how the American system works.

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An analysis of 2,261 and 1,940 infants ages 12 and 18 months, respectively, found that COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy had no impact on infant neurodevelopment. 

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Children who had a successful first 10-14 weeks of kindergarten scored higher than others on tests of academic and social-behavioral skills at the end of the school year, according to a new demography paper. Important parts of the transition – what the scholars called a “big little leap” – included making new friends, learning to work with others and adapting to new academic demands.

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In the past two weeks I visited two schools in Veneto to engage students with the topic of Artificial Intelligence, which is something everybody seems to be happy to hear about these days: on the 10th of January I visited a school in Vicenza, and on the 17th a school in Venice. In both cases there were about 50-60 students, but there was a crucial difference: while the school in Venezia (the "Liceo Marco Foscarini", where I have been giving lectures in the past within the project called "Art and Science") was a classical liceum and the high-schoolers who came to listen to my presentation were between 16 and 18 years old, the one in Vicenza was a middle school, and its attending students were between 11 and 13 years old. 

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If you have bad breath and it hasn't been an issue your entire life, the most common cause may be that garlic and Limburger cheese sandwich you ate at lunch, but sometimes it's not a lifestyle issue. It could be an oral issue but it could also be a stomach one.

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In 2020, nearly 20,000 coronavirus samples in a database were removed by the Chinese government. Prior to that, I had noted a suspicious passing of a Chinese whistleblower, Li Wenliang, who had been arrested by the government and suddenly died.

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Republicans are still pretty new to the anti-vax ecosystem. Sure, decades ago there were some religious fundamentalists who denied vaccines, but when progressive states like California, Washington, and Oregon led the nation by far - the California coast actually had more arbitrary school kid exemptions than the entire US combined - more conservative states like Mississippi and Alabama had vaccines for kids at nearly 100 percent.

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The US Department of Agriculture believes that foreign countries may own up to 40,000,000 acres of farm land.

No one really knows despite the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 requiring it. 

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