Science 2.0

In 2014, a new invasive species from Asia was detected in Pennsylvania, but by the time government knows about it, it is too late and spotted lanternflies have since spread to more than 100 counties across 14 states. 

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Fresh off his single "Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction", United Nations Secretary-General and proud socialist Antonio Guterres has debuted his follow-up “Humanity is on thin ice", backed up by his in-house group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - who had their own big hit when they told us the Himalayas would be melted by 2035 in its Fourth Assessment Report,

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Some companies profited during the government lockdowns and then lingering social stigma about being outside the home. Exercise bikes, office furniture, and coffee machines all did well.

It will be decades before we know how many have been impacted in ways that were unanticipated. Being at home, for example, should have given more time to exercise, yet it often did the opposite. Despair, prevalent media discussing disaster in real time, and social isolation don't lead to a desire to exercise in some.

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If you own an electric car in America, you paid a premium to do a good work; save the planet from CO2 emissions.

Except perhaps not. Unless you are a wealthy elite who can spend $60,000 on a car and $25,000 on solar panels (government subsidies funded by poor people aside) 80 percent of your electricity probably came from conventional energy, like natural gas, anyway.

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President Biden issued another slap to those oil-guzzling Republicans intent on ruining Gaia, or he enraged environmentalists by letting oil-guzzling Republicans ruin bucolic Alaska, all in one day.

Even in the same minute.

Which was it? Neither, and that is a problem with corporate media. To get you to see an ad and get them paid they have to write a headline that is most appealing to you - and if you are someone in the middle, you quickly receive both.

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These days I am spending a few months in northern Sweden, to start a collaboration with computer scientists and physicists from Lulea University of Technology on neuromorphic computing (I'll soon write about that, stay tuned). The rather cold weather of March (sub-zero temperatures throughout the day) is compensated by having access to the night show of northern lights, which are often visible from these latitudes (66 degrees north).

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Athletes use custom-​made insoles because they know a fraction of a second can make the difference between victory and defeat, but to do that specialists must first create a pressure profile of the feet. Athletes walk barefoot over pressure-​sensitive mats, where they leave their individual footprints and then orthopedists create customized insoles by hand.

The optimization and adjustment takes a lot of time and if you are a wealthy elite, the money is less of a worry but for people with musculoskeletal pain the cost may be out of reach.

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Once Big Tobacco wrote out tens of billions of dollars in checks in a settlement brought on by their efforts to suppress the risks of cigarettes and cancer, lawyers pivoted to a war on all nicotine.

There is no evidence nicotine is harmful compared to something like caffeine, it is certainly nowhere near as harmful as a legitimate carcinogen like alcohol, but we suddenly got claims about second-hand smoke - still unsubstantiated - being as risky as smoking and even third-hand smoke - PM2.5 left on objects after smoking - all thanks to the statistical miracle-maker known as agenda-driven epidemiology.

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Water is over 70 percent of the surface of the earth but how that came to be, through what mix of random chance and extraterrestrial involvement, has been a debate. Earth is a relatively small planet and relatively near its star so creating large surface oceans is difficult.

A new study analyzed melted meteorites that had been floating around in space since the solar system’s formation four and a half billion years ago and found they had extremely low water content, among the driest extraterrestrial materials ever measured. This led them to conclude that water was likely delivered to Earth via unmelted, or chondritic, meteorites. 

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Harvard biologist David Sinclair is so convinced he has the secret to staying 'biologically young' that he *ta da* sells it. And it is all things you can buy. Or do.

He is mostly vegetarian and mostly doesn't drink. Okay, a moderate diet and exercise, you don't need a degree for that, you just need to have read "Readers Digest" any time since 1963. He looks young and perhaps always will, but just like someone may buy some brand Kim Kardashian sells, it doesn't mean they will look like her, it is an aspirational purchase. He knows that but wants to sell you stuff anyway.

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An analysis of over 4,300,000 patients in 8,119 161 primary care visits found that publicly insured people, those using the Affordable Care Act public exchanges subsidized by government, were more likely to be given inappropriate antibiotic prescribing in cases of upper respiratory tract infections and opioids and benzodiazepines for patients with pain symptoms. 

The reason is that doctors may be unable to spend enough time with them.

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If you don't trust medicine but you do believe in psychics, astrology, and organic food, you are likely to do a lot of stuff that makes no sense, especially not to actual scientists at FDA who probably wish President Clinton had never legitimized that kind of garbage, but how goofy does it have to be when even Gwyneth Paltrow, Guru To The Alternative World, says it's pretty weird.

Apparently sticking ozone in your anus.

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A new study reports abnormalities in functional neural networks of dogs diagnosed with anxiety. Compared with healthy dogs, those with anxiety exhibit stronger connections between the amygdala and other regions of the anxiety network.

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Venus is similar to Earth in size and mass but does not have plate tectonics, which are the primary locations of volcanic activity. A lingering question has always been if there is volcanic activity anyway.

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A new small molecule may help people with benzodiazepine-resistant epilepsy. Epilepsy affects an estimated 3.4 million people in the U.S. and millions more worldwide and drugs work for most, but for the rest, Uncontrolled epilepsy and resulting frequent and prolonged seizures lasting five minutes or more that can cause brain cell damage and even death.

Epilepsy occurs when the intricate, delicate balance of signaling by neurons in the brain malfunctions, causing neurons to fire too much and trigger seizures. Benzodiazepines slow down the messages traveling between neurons. Yet up to 30 percent develop drug-resistance after a period of time.

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A recent op-ed argues that the way to curb climate change is to invoke Malthus, or at least 20th century progressives like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and economist John Maynard Keynes and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who all believed that retreating to the past was the only way to protect the future - well, the future for white elites, anyway.

The ultimate state control of culture in the name of progress was not the National Socialists in Germany or the Fascists of Italy, it was the Soviet Union under communism. Communists fought to gain ground everywhere, Mussolini fought them in Italy and won, Hitler fought them in Spain and won(1) but they succeeded in a lot of other countries, which ultimately meant failure.

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The World Health Organisation, fresh off nodding along while China claimed SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from American frozen food rather than their fake BSL rating at a Wuhan lab, is getting back to business as usual; manufacturing problems using suspect epidemiology.

They are claiming salt is killing millions per year, and Washington Post is readily repeating it (look for 'women, minorities impacted most' to appear soon) despite there being no scientific evidence it is true.

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For decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging, looking at changes in the brain's blood oxygen, has over-promised and under-delivered, which made it a punching bag in the science community. People in the field tried to claim changes in pretty pictures meant more neurons working and suggested that meant X part of the brain controls Y behavior. It was never a valid link.

By 2009, a paper even showed how easy it was to use a dead fish to make interpretations about emotion, and achieve the sought-after "statistical significance." Gone was the promise of clinical information that might help with depression, cognitive decline, and brain disorders, and the reason was humans.(1)

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Do you want protection from changes that would increase competition and threaten your profits? Who wouldn't? 

That does not make it better for everyone else. 

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In the 1980s, "transhumanism" had an air of truthiness because digital became all the rage. Left out of that inconvenient math was that in order to digitize a human brain you'd need CDs as tall as a skyscraper.

This never stopped Ray Kurzweil from saying the singularity was just around the corner. The corner being 25 years from whenever he was speaking. 

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