Science 2.0

Bad things come in threes, it is said, and nothing shows that more than The Carnian Age; the first stage of three in the mass extinction era of the Late Triassic Epoch 228 to 217 million years ago.

It had three features; dramatic climate change with much higher humidity, the first dinosaurs appeared, and gigantic volcanic eruptions called the Wrangellia large igneous province spewed out greenhouse gases.

For dinosaurs, climate change was a good thing because plant life grew, thanks to the humid conditions and higher carbon dioxide. That event, now called the Carnian Pluvial Episode, may have been caused by the Wrangellia volcanic eruptions. The confluence of events seems to have spurred the early diversification of dinosaurs.

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Bring on the tanning lotion and cigarettes! No? Well, coronavirus has made the past cool again so it could be a matter of time. 

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By Gurkiran Dhuga and Glen Pyle

Throughout the last few decades health concerns related to air pollution have been rising. Despite this focus there has been little research on the impact of air pollution on specific health conditions and mortality, even though there is a strong association between air pollution and overall life expectancy. A global study lead by researchers in Germany outlines the detrimental changes air pollution can have on human life expectancy. One surprising finding of the study was that cardiovascular disease, and not respiratory conditions, are the primary cause of early death from air pollution.

How Bad is Air Pollution?

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Social justice warriors in the feminist movement often fail to advocate for the rights of black women, according to new research, and it's for a reason that highlights hidden bias problems in modern performative activism - social justice for the Instagram photo - movement. Social justice warriors see black women as less like white women and more like black men.

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A theorized particle process, called neutrinoless double-beta decay, could revise our understanding of ghostly particles called neutrinos, and of their role in the formation of the universe. But there is no evidence it actually exists.

The CUPID-Mo experiment is among a field of experiments trying to see if it does and preliminary results based on data collected from March 2019 to April 2020 set a new limit for the neutrinoless double-beta decay process in an isotope of molybdenum known as Mo-100. But not a single event was detected in CUPID-Mo after one year of data-taking.

Isotopes are forms of an element that carry a different number of uncharged particles called neutrons in their atomic nuclei.

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One symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is intrusive visual reminders of a traumatic event. New research in Current Biology finds that the brain uses similar visual areas for mental imagery and vision, but it uses low-level visual areas less precisely with mental imagery than with vision.

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Some people would not or said they could not socially distance effectively during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2019 coronavirus mutation that originated in Wuhan, China and spread worldwide. Is there scientific truth to why?

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In an open letter published in Harper’s Magazine, 152 writers, including JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood, claim that a climate of “censoriousness” is pervading liberal culture, the latest contribution to an ongoing debate about freedom of speech online.

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The American Gastroenterology Association is paid to advocate for its members, so it's reasonable to assume they'll endorse anything that will make gastroenterologists more relevant.  But there are limits; they won't endorse fraud.

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The American Academy of Pediatrics is a rather reflexive group much of the time, so it seems bold for Pediatrics, the in-house journal for a group that tried to argue kids should not be allowed to even walk to school until they are age 10, to take the position that children infrequently transmit COVID-19 to each other or to adults and that most schools can and should reopen in August.

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If we could start 2020 all over again, the world would be satisfied if the big worry was wildfires and whether or not cat litter had a Non-GMO Project label.

Instead, we got a coronavirus from Wuha, China, and a COVID-19 disease that isn't stopping any time soon. But science marches on, and we also have machine learning helping to grow artificial organs.

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One of the glaring errors in the controversial United Nations IPCC report critical of agriculture was that it used the Greenhouse Gas Protocol yet ignored the carbon sequestration of crops. A politically neutral examination of the science shows that agriculture is nowhere near as big a problem in emissions as activists have claimed.

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Panic-stricken headlines about “murder hornets” are thankfully mostly behind us. The nickname may have staying power, but it is certainly unearned.

First spotted in British Columbia in August 2019, the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) poses little threat to humans. In its native range in East Asia, the giant hornet is chiefly a menace to the livelihoods of beekeepers, provoking concern that it could cause similar problems in North America.

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The origin of carbon in the Milky Way is a mystery but one source of many elements is not: Dying white dwarfs. As those dying stars pass into oblivion, they sprinkle their ashes into the cosmos. These ashes, spread via stellar winds, are enriched with many different chemical elements, including carbon.

The origin of carbon, an element essential to life on Earth, in the Milky Way galaxy is primarily speculation: some are in favor of the idea that low-mass stars blew off their carbon-rich envelopes by stellar winds became white dwarfs, while others place the major site of carbon's synthesis in the winds of massive stars that eventually exploded as supernovae.

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Is citizen science a luxury for wealthy countries? Pastimes like bird watching, which require very little wealth to start, are more common in developed lands, but it would help fill the gaps in science elsewhere.

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Surveys are not behavior but if surveys are any indication, elderly people are not willing to self-isolate, even knowing they are at greatest risk of getting COVID-19, the newest mutation of the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, and and spread worldwide.

Survey results from 27 countries find that elderly people are not more compliant with COVID-19 preventive measures and  not more willing to isolate when asked, even though it is established that older adults appear are far more likely to be hospitalized or die from the disease. 

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Though we've learned a lot about evolution in the last 150 years, when it comes to the details, some fundamental questions remain unanswered. Such as when and how extremely diverse groups of animals such as reptiles first evolved. For seventy-five years, adaptive radiation, the relatively fast evolution of many species from a single common ancestor, has been considered a major cause of biological diversity.

This has even been for the origins of major body plans (structural and developmental characteristics that identify a group of animals) and new lineages. Yet examining these rapid rates of evolution has been constrained by the methods used and the amount of data available.

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Angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor (ACE-i) or angiotensin II receptor blocker (ARB) medications are prescribed for conditions such as heart failure, high blood pressure or heart disease. They inhibit or block angiotensin, a chemical that causes arteries to become narrow, so are commonly prescribed for people with high blood pressure to relax and open blood vessels, lowering blood pressure.

They may also lower risk of colorectal cancer risk, the third most common cancer and second leading cause of cancer death worldwide.

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Though old age, respiratory issues, blood clots, and obesity are risk factors for likelihood and severity of COVID-19, one group in the respiratory section needn't worry more; asthmatics.

Asthma does not appear to increase the risk for a person contracting COVID-19 or influence its severity.

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Coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease it brings does not discriminate on race, creed, or color, but it does target people with pre-existing conditions. Like age, respiratory issues, and obesity, which are risk factors for nearly everything. And that can translate into cultural disparity.

Obese European minorities are up to two times higher the risk of contracting COVID-19 than white Europeans, a study has found. The study used body mass index (BMI), a controversial metric with numerous confounders, so caution is warranted, and cardiometabolic health. The researchers wanted to see if they could statistically link a person's weight to the relative risk of COVID-19 across ethnic groups.

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