Science 2.0

Rather than encourage smoking cessation and harm reduction, the US Centers for Disease Control have spent over a decade undermining products that were not Big Pharma. That has been and remains a mistake. Smoking kills, and anything that helps reduce or eliminate it, from patches to gums to vaping to hypnosis, should be available.

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If you have spent any time on social media, you have a different kind of bystander effect in action. Psychologists say if many people are around, the bystander effect is why everyone is less likely to help. They believe someone else will be more competent or know something you don't. If you walk by a person laying unconscious in New York City, based on experience they did not have a heart attack and are in peril. They are on drugs or alcohol.

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Colors trigger unique brain responses, the subjective nature of our brains and eyes, not to mention different media, is why a famous blue dress experiment took countries by storm.

To try and help determine how different people have the same brain responses to colors, researchers measured color-induced brain responses from one set of participants. Next, they predicted what colors other participants were observing by comparing each individual’s visual cortex brain activity to color-induced responses of the first set of observers. 

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One of my institute’s projects is gaining too little traction with its target city. No surprise: The project is expensive, heavy on newer smart infrastructure, and this U.S. city is in the middle of a budgeting round. It’s evident to all, though, that the new infrastructure is critical to maintaining the city’s status as an innovative, ecological role model for other metros.

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One key hallmark of being human is walking on two legs. It was a seismic shift seen in no other primates. Like much of evolution, it happened in fits and starts. The 4.4 million year-old Ardipithecus of Ethiopia was a tree climber with a grasping toe that would walk upright 3.2 million year old Lucy had a pelvis brought upright walking closer, with flaring hip blades for bipedal muscles.

Some of that legacy remains in our closest relatives, the African apee, e.g. chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, have upper hipbones (ilia) that are tall, narrow, and oriented flat front to back which anchor large muscles for climbing.

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I recently ran into a description of the Mu3e experiment, and got curious about it and the physics it studies. So after giving it a look, I am able to explain that shortly here - I think it is a great example of how deep our studies of particle physics are getting; or, on the negative side, how deep our frustration has gotten with the unassailable agreement of our experiments with Standard Model predictions.

Matter stable and unstable in the Standard Model

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A guest on NPR’s Morning Edition (August 26) mis-characterized pioneering economist Adam Smith as a pure transactionalist. Smith’s metaphorical “invisible hand,” the guest asserted, suggested self-interest drives our every action. It’s a big deal – in fact, a revelation! – she continued, that Smith lived with his mother, and that Mom cooked Adam’s meals and washed his laundry for him, unpaid and with Adam oblivious to her role in his theory. The invisible hand, she concluded, ignored familial love as a motive for action.

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Health care is expensive. If you are convinced that donating blood is a community service and do it for free, the Red Cross sells it for up to $200 per pint. If you need a transfusion, each pint will cost $1,000 and up. That is paid for by insurance. What isn't covered by insurance will be passed along to you in the form of an out-of-pocket cost. If you have a medical emergency and an ambulance you did not request takes you to a hospital outside your network, you could be bankrupt. All due to federal government poiicies that began to create the health care problem in the 1940s and have only added on to it since.

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