Science 2.0

Light is the most famous thing that is two distinct entities at once - a wave and a particle - but glass is nearly as mysterious. And not well understood.

We think of glass as being transparent and rigid, is a complex and intriguing material but that is only when cooled and its dynamics slow down significantly. This process, known as “glass transition”, is due to "dynamical heterogeneities," where the dynamics become increasingly correlated and intermittent as the liquid cools down and approaches the glass transition temperature.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, chewing gum had a bit of a resurgence. Though gum companies disavow any health benefits - they like being in the candy aisle - people have always used it off-label for various benefits and did so to generate a response against possible virus exposures.  People have always had habits they like. If have a cold, for example, I like to eat a cheese sandwich. If I get nausea, I chew gum.

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The Victorian government, like many governments around the world, has announced new regulations on short-stay accommodation. The government says Victoria has more than 36,000 short-stay places, which are reducing the number of homes available for long-term rental.

Other states have capped the number of nights a dwelling can be used for short-stay accommodation. The Victorian response has been to introduce a levy set at 7.5% of the short-stay platform’s revenue.

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Polish Grandmaster Jan-Krzysztof Duda won the 2023 Armageddon Championship Series in convincing fashion but the intriguing science story is his biology while doing so.

Armageddon Chess is often used as a tie-breaker, and in it, black plays second but is the winner if the game is a draw - and has a shorter clock. The Armageddon Championship Series compresses time and uses a double-elimination format once the regional finalists are obtained.

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Astronomers have speculated that black holes eat slowly. A recent paper argues that their computer simulation shows just the opposite. 

Don't get too excited, this is still a computer simulation about theoretical physics, which isn't out there with science-fiction but is limited by the fact that we know very little about black holes - including how fast they consume the universe around them. The new estimate is that a black hole can tear apart space-time and consume the accretion disk of material around it in months, rather than the hundreds of years that some believe.

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These days I am in Paris, for a short vacation - for once, I am following my wife in a work trip; she performs at the grand Halle at la Villette (she is a soprano singer), and I exploit the occasion to have some pleasant time in one of the cities I like the most.


This morning I took the metro to go downtown, and found myself standing up in a wagon full of people. When my eyes wandered to the pavement, I saw that the plastic sheet had circular bumps, presumably reducing the chance of slips. And the pattern immediately reminded me of the Monte Carlo method, as it betrayed the effect of physical sampling of the ground by the passengers' feet:

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The trial lawyer outfit Environmental Working Group paid to publish a claim that a for-fee group paid by them 'detected' chemicals that a few fringe epidemiologists correlate to cancer - in animals - and therefore humans are at risk.
Newsweek doesn't have any science journalists so they dutifully repeated it, but if you want an answer you can trust, rather than corporate media, here are the facts. 

1. Any chemical at high enough dose can harm you. That includes H2O. 'The dose makes the poison.' 

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Epidemiologists correlate eating more fish to better health and while skepticism is warranted - we're talking about what people claim on food surveys and taking it as scientific truth - there is no question its economic impact is real.

Yet food activists then piled out to an environmental strain problem by claiming that farmed salmon is somehow worse. It resonated without any skepticism because many weealthy elites want to go to restaurants and know blue collar workers risked their lives for expensive fish. 

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In the future, people in need of an organ transplant will have one grown using their own stem cells. That means no immunosuppressive drugs, no risk of failure, no hoping someone compatible dies. Until then, the best solution to get rid of waiting lists is donor animals.

A new study completed the longest-documented case of a genetically engineered pig kidney functioning in a human body; 61 days. It used a GalSafe pig, an animal engineered by Revivicor Inc., and approved in 2020 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a potential source for human therapeutics, as well as a food source for people with alpha-gal syndrome, a meat allergy caused by a tick bite.

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When a pandemic is happening in real time, it's only possible to know in hindsight what was a successful mitigation strategy, what was hype to help a presidential candidate, or even what was suppressed for geopolitical interests.

There is no question mitigation was good, but political and corporate media pressure to keep the world locked down and terrified into 2022 was always immunologically suspect. Many lives their lost due to the pandemic, some lost their lives because it was suggested people should not seek medical care due to imagery of COVID bodies stacked in parking lots, but a whole lot of damage won't be known for a decade or more.

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White environmentalists in rich European countries still maintain a kind of benevolent colonialism over Africa, telling those countries Europe won't buy their food unless they use no science in its production - while ignoring that organic farming for thousands of years in Africa showed why it is such a failure for anyone not born into a natural 'breadbasket' region.

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A new study finds that while antidepressants reduce negative memories in individuals suffering from depression they may also be improving overall memory function.

But don't go all Ozempic and rush to find a boutique physician willing to prescribe them for you, no one knows how antidepressants work, even after 70 years in existence. Though they outperform placebos like supplements in GNC or other alternatives to medicine, alternative medicine is such a scam because the threshold for placebo is high. Antidepressants are far better than supplement alternatives even though they only work 50 percent of the time. That is why patients routinely have to try a few.

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In the past, you may have seen various 'we detected X in urine' papers endorsed by suspect names like homeopathy believer Phil Landrigan and endorsed by organic industry apologist Chuck Benbrook.

What do such claims even mean? In science, nothing. We can detect anything in anything now, but groups like Heartland Health Research Alliance Ltd are prized by litigators who sue "at the drop of a rat" and need any detection in humans - bonus points if they can claim pregnant women - of any chemical that can kill a mouse at 10,000 times a real-world dose. Any reason to send a teary press release sent to the New York Times.(1)

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In July of 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, on their way around the world, missed a planned stop at Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean.

You may not even have known Noonan was on the flight, it's always been a better narrative to suggest she was solo, but one thing is well-documented. No one knows what happened to them.


Uncredited 

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The International Agency for Research on Cancer(IARC) was once so heralded in a field so rigorous and methodologically conservative that epidemiologists were last to accept a hereditary aspect of cancer. That's right, they didn't see enough evidence to think family history of cancer mattered, and only agreed when overwhelming data were found. They were so thorough that when they declared smoking caused cancer, Big Tobacco was doomed.

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A recent analys if of primary care patients at Kaiser in Washington state, where recreational cannabis use is legal, found that addiction was common among patients who used it.

Moderate and severe cases were more prevalent among patients who reported recreational use. 

The cross-sectional study was 108,950 adult patients who completed routine cannabis screening from March 2019 to September 2019. Of those, 5,000 were selected for a confidential marijuana use survey using stratified random sampling for frequency of past-year use and race and ethnicity. Among 1,688 respondents, 1,463 reporting past 30-day cannabis use were included in the study.

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The Indian Center for Theoretical Sciences is located in a rural area a few kilometers north of Bangalore, in southern India. Bangalore is a mid-sized city that saw a very big expansion in the past few years due to having become a center for the information technology in the country - with most of the big multinationals opening sections there. The rapid expansion increased the wealth of the middle class there (but remember, the middle class is the top 5% in India), but it also created stress to the traffic in the city, which is notoriously a plague there.
The campus of ICTS is very nice from an architectonic point of view, embedding nature in its buildings and trying to integrate the two realities. Below is a picture.

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What if nearly everything that’s been written about this month’s Intergenerational Report is wrong?

I’ll explain. But first, here’s a sample of the headlines: “Young Australians at risk of a poorer future”, “Fewer workers to shoulder soaring income tax”, “Ageing population driving $140 billion blowout in spending”, and so on.

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I have often felt that "The Economist" is one of the best-edited publications around. Since it primarily involves economics, and there is no scientific basis to it beyond supply and demand, it is easy to appreciate writing and editing, the same way I could be impressed if the world had a great magazine devoted to astrology.

Sometimes "The Economist" forgets its wheelhouse and ends up looking more ridiculous than Javier Baez swinging at something so far off the plate the catcher was lucky to grab it.

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If you go to social media, you can see a lot of suspect claims about fad diets, unapproved medical devices, therapies, and conspiracy theories. Many of them have names with "Dr." attached.

How is the public to know a "Dr." may be a PhD or an EdD or an osteropath or someone else who didn't go to medical school and become an M.D.? How should physicians respond? From the years 1998 to 2021, coastal states in the US led America in vaccine denial, were doctors supposed to tell their patients they were stupid for believing vaccines cause autism?(1) 

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