Science 2.0

In September, epidemiologists out to scare people about homeopathic - "detectable" - levels of pesticides published a paper hoping to get journalists promoting fear and doubt about agriculture.

Being the opposition to science in academia is a good place to be. They can get a publication to check off that annual box and nothing much will change. They won't get any blame.

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Proposition 65 was a voter referendum that stated if a chemical was correlated to cancer, it needed to have a cancer warning label. Lawyers who were behind the public relations effort to get it passed assured consumers it would not be abused. Yet a few years later, epidemiologists inside the once-credible International Agency for Research on Cancer in France set out to gain "expert witness" contracts from lawyers and began to create more and more "correlations" - no science needed, just a possible link in mice - and now over 80,000 products carry these labels.

Not only will you find warning labels on nearly every product inside a Walmart, a warning label is on the outside, to warn you that the brick and glass has been "linked to" cancer.

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The  Kilometre Cubic Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) collaboration has reported detection of  a neutrino with an estimated energy of about 220 PeV (220 million billion electron volts) by its ARCA detector.

The event, KM3-230213A, is the first evidence that neutrinos of such high energies are produced in the Universe and the most energetic neutrino ever observed. 

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       This column deals with political opposition, resistance, and the future of the nation. It dissects the Trump-Musk financial bromance and the role of VP Vance. Bear with me to its end, then please comment pro, con, or in between.

Shadow action

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Ignore epidemiology claims that chocolate is healthy. It is not, claiming it is requires the same suspect correlation that "suggests" weedkillers causes human cancer and acupuncture prevents COVID-19. No science involved. Mars, Incorporated was funding the Chair in Nutrition at UC Davis when a lot of those claims came out and while it's not the case that academics are creating results-for-hire any more than industry scientists are, it is the case that government and companies only fund people whose work they like.

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Pattern recognition is an altisonant name to a rather common, if complex, activity we perform countless times in our daily lives. Our brain is capable of interpreting successions of sounds, written symbols, or images almost infallibly - so much so that people like me, who have sometimes trouble to recognize a face that should be familiar, get their own disfunctionality term - in this case, prosopagnosia.

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In 2015, nearly every country signed The Paris agreement and agreed to keep global warming to below 2 degrees higher than before humans began emitting industrial levels of CO2 emissions.

Yet very little has changed, because every country gets to arbitrarily decide for itself how it can meet its goal, or if it should have a goal at all.(1) That's how useless the Paris Agreement is.

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So many people want to move to the United States of America because virtually anyone who arrives legally can start a business with little problem and get rich.

A lot of people born in the US would rather be born in a place where they can never get rich but more things are free for the poor. They're not wrong, normal human psychological variation means most people would rather not compete if given a choice. That is seen all across the animal kingdom.

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The Zagros Mountains are nestled in Iran, northern Iraq, and southeastern Turkey, and are the scene of an unfolding geological story deep beneath it.

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A new analysis claims that crown volume of stream-side shrubs is a key metric for evaluating trophic cascade strength and they attribute the 1,500% increase in a small number of sites to increased numbers of wolves.

The data they used were collected from 20 streams during the years 2001 to 2020 and they note the aboveground biomass increase is due to a lot fewer elk, which was caused by a lot more wolves. "Balance of nature" wins.

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Hims Inc., rebranded as Hims  &  Hers Health, Inc. after they went public in 2020, began as a telehealth company for erectile dysfunction and hair loss products.

No real issue there, the products are well-established and a phone call or website consultation is more convenient and far faster than visiting a doctor's office in the modern Obamacare milieu. It's entering the compounded glucagon-like peptide 1 agonists (GLP-1) injections market that got them new scrutiny.

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A new survey created by marketing insights company Tastewise finds that half are not going to drink alcohol on Valentine's Day - for health reasons.

They're not wrong. During the waning days of the Biden administration, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy did something for science and public health that was grounded in science - he issued a report encouraging people to get off alcohol. 

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As artificial intelligence tools continue to evolve and improve their performance on more and more general tasks, scientists struggle to make the best use of them. 
The problem is not incompetence - in fact, at least in my field of study (high-energy physics) most of us have grown rather well educated on the use and development of tailored machine learning algorithms. The problem is rather that our problems are enormously complex. Long gone are the years when we started to apply with success deep neural networks to classification and regression problems of data analysis: those were easy tasks. The bar now is set much higher - optimize the design of instruments we use for our scientific research. 

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In 2023, I bit the bullet by signing a book contract with Springer to work on a difficult compilation of scientific misconduct and problematic science publishing practice. It was planned as an edited book that required expert contributors of the field to write chapters on the various topics.

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A new Artificial Intelligence analysis of data of ovarian cancer patients links birth control pills to a 26% reduced risk for those had ever used it, and 43% for those who had used the it after the age of 45.

That does not mean you should take it as a way to prevent cancer, it is an endocrine disruptor that binds to estrogen with 20,000X the effect of compounds like BPA that environmentalists tried to claim are too risky in food containers, and this study is EXPLORATORY. With enough data, Australians could link voting for the Liberal Party to lower risk of diseases. Epidemiology can link anything to anything.

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Over 30 years after Democrats achieved their generational goal of ending nuclear energy in America, science is finally back.

Texas A&M University Chancellor John Sharp announced they have provided land nearby to build four nuclear small modular reactors. “Plain and simple: the United States needs more power. And nowhere in the country, other than Texas, is anyone willing to step up and build the power plants we need."


Credit: Texas A&M University

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., called the National Rifle Association “a terrorist organization” but now claims to be a “constitutional absolutist” who opposes gun control. He said if you eat steak you're more of a terrorist than Obama Bin Laden but now does photo ops eating McDonald's cheeseburgers, and he claimed that President George W. Bush trouncing his fellow progressive anti-science activist Senator John Kerry was actually Republicans stealing the election but now claims maybe Trump had his win stolen in 2020.

What changed? He is close to finally getting the government legitimacy he has craved, but escaped him in 2008. So he has flipped to things Republicans like. It is all for show. He has not changed.

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The United Kingdom has delays even longer than the United States for routine care but with a fraction of the population, their high costs are a lot more punitive to taxpayers.

Government is always looking for ways to keep costs contained but NHS employees need raises also, so it is a challenge. Needing fewer new employees will help.

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While talking to farmers in Illinois on September 25th, 1956 who were concerned about increased government encroachment and regulations brought on by the descendants of eugenicists who had founded "environmental" groups like Sierra Club to promote their beliefs(1), President Dwight D. Eisenhower told them,  “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field”

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Scientific information has never been more widely accessible than it is today. While this increased availability fosters awareness and collaboration, it has also contributed to a concerning surge in misinformation and disinformation, especially in the United States. Recent Pew Research data indicates a decline in public trust in science, with only 57% of people believing science has had a mostly positive impact on society, down from 73% in 2019. Additionally, 34% of adults now view science’s impact as equally positive and negative.

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