Science 2.0

Do you believe bees are dying, that GMOs 'need more study', modern pesticides cause impotence?

If so, I know how you vote, and that you would be a great fit as a humanities academic claiming to be an expert about science. Like historian Dr. Naomi Oreskes, who sees conspiracies everywhere except in her tribe, even if a domestic front group for her political party got a gigantic mysterious off-shore anonymous donation through a donor-advised fund because they routinely promoted Russia Today and Sputnik and oppose American science in Russia's two largest exports, energy and food.

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What plausible biological mechanism can explain how sticking tiny needs in your neck helps you get pregnant?

There is none, and yet Traditional Chinese "Medicine", also known as acupuncture but under a variety of terms such as folk medicine, traditional medicine, alternative medicine, complementary medicine...and then whatever new rebrand needs to be done when people stop paying for the old one. Mumbo-jumbo about Yin And Yang and Dao and Modalities and Mindfulness are fine, as long as you consult a real doctor. If you went to a legitimate specialist and got treatment but are convinced "music therapy" helped you get pregnant, okay, but don't pretend you should write a book about it.

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Like all countries with a plan, China regards food as a strategic resource, so while western nations dither about new foods that require fewer pesticides and less water on less land, the communist dictatorship is moving ahead.

This time with genetically engineered wheat. The product that eco-terrorists in the US wouldn't even allowed to be grown in a contained field without engaging in destruction. Environmentalists hate science that much.

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It will be up to science history to try and gain insight into the reasons the federal government engaged in "Reefer Madness" narratives about marijuana, and then backed off that yet did the same to smoking cessation and harm reduction tools like vaping.

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The social sciences, "science" only in that way that something like military science is, a proper name, are instead in the humanities camp, and overwhelmingly biased against non-progressives, so it is no surprise that censorship, self-censorship, deplatforming, and suppression of anyone who deviates from the majority is common.

Psychology is driven by surveys, most often undergraduates at their school, commonly undergraduates in psychology classes, and if there is budget including people who get paid to take surveys. To the real world the results are 'a social science of undergraduates' and nothing more, so no one takes it too seriously. Except other psychologists.

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If you are in an environmental group, you need to replenish your targets in order to keep that $3 billion in revenue per year. People need to be mobilized and afraid and believe your legal group will 'hold corporations accountable' - by agreeing to a settlement where environmental lawyers get paid.

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Online supplement marketers prey on consumers by exploiting the margins of President Bill Clinton's 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which exempts supplements from FDA oversight if they state in fine print, "This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease" right after making claims that read like they replace medicine.

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Homeopathic StellaLife Oral Care Products manufactured in 2024 have been recalled due to FDA finding microbial contamination. 

The two placebos by HomeoCare Laboratories with unsage total aerobic microbial counts are the StellaLife Advanced Formula Peppermint Vega Oral Care Rinse and StellaLife Vega Oral Spray, Unflavored.

If they are in your possession, throw them out and change your anti-science ways and never buy a pretend alternative to medicine debunked 200 years ago. If your dentist is the moron who recommends homeopathy, he either thinks you are a moron also, or you should find a new dentist.

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Monkeypox (Mpox) is an infection transmitted by skin-to-skin contact and causes fever and painful skin blisters. It is in the Orthopoxvirus genus of viruses, which includes smallpox, so those vaccinated against it have cross-protection, smallpox vaccines also work for monkeypox.

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There is populist rhetoric about Buy Local but what few in the public realize is that the definition is subjective. Restaurants in Manhattan often claim they buy local, but in the fine print it reads 'when available', and they don't tell you when it was not locally available, and local to them may be up to 500 miles away.

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Yesterday I gladly attended a symposium in honor of Giorgio Bellettini, who just turned 90. The italian physicist, who had a very big impact in particle physics in his long and illustrious career, is still very active -e.g. he makes all the hard questions at the conferences he attends, as he has always done. The symposium included recollections of Giorgio's career and achievements by colleagues who collaborated with him and/or shared a part of his path. Among them there were talks by Samuel Ting, Paul Grannis, Michelangelo Mangano, Hans Grasmann, Mario Greco.
I also was allowed to give a short recollection of a couple of episodes, that underline the exceptional disposition of Giorgio with students. Here is a quick-and-dirty English translation of my speech (it was in Italian).

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A new analysis finds that after the pandemic ended, deaths are still elevated and the authors suggest that vaccines may be part of the problem.

It is a European paper by European authors and anyone who has covered science in Europe for the last 25 years, from vaccines to food to energy, know that they will often conflate one thing with a mass issue.  They could be just getting correlation arrows wrong and COVID-19 damaged a lot of people and the effects are still being felt. This happens all of the time and Europe is the worst about it, perhaps because France is the home of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which declared pickly juice and aloe vera carcinogens.

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In 2020, it was a bad idea to note that, for most people, COVID-19, a coronavirus in the same family as the common cold only known to be distinct from the cold since the 1960s, was just a bad cold, or that wiping down everything with Clorox was doing no good, or that the lab next door to Wuhan with such poor safety protocol that a researcher had been jailed for selling lab animals to the nearby wet market might have accidentally leaked one of the 16,000 coronavirus samples they were doing gain-of-function experiments on.

You were called anti-science or, worse, a Republican.

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Only a few years ago, American colleges used a "secret sauce" of race in admissions that voided test scores and replaced those with arbitrary demographic selection. Due to such clear racism, and despite being a minority with less than 5 percent of the population, Asians were least likely to be admitted to elite colleges if the alternatives were a more-favored minority with lower scores or qualifications. Asians were even less likely to be admitted than white students.

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... if you are a researcher in physics or astrophysics and you are working with machine learning, that is.

Between September 23 and 25 - just when summer is over - we will meet in Valencia, Spain, to discuss the latest developments in deep learning applications to optimization of experiments in fundamental science. This is the fourth workshop of the MODE Collaboration, which focuses on a new frontier of application of deep learning: co-design and high-level optimization, and the tools to pull it off.

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Once upon a time, young Baby Boomers ridiculed television programs that showed married couples in separate beds. They used terms like 'prudish' and 'Victorian' and 'repressed.'

Actually, those shows were representative of culture for most of human history. Humans have rarely shared a bed with a spouse or relative if they had a choice. Only in the 1950s did sharing a bed in larger rooms in larger houses become common. By the 1980s, California took the concept of a King-Sized bed (invented in 1890 to sleep 15) and marketed it for wealthy elites on the coasts; a California King, 7 feet long.

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Artificial Intelligence - AI - isn't really AI at all, which may be why it has been so disappointing to companies that aren't trying to sell you a new leaf blower. Instead of doing something practical, like the dishes or laundry so you have more time to do art or music, AI is doing music and art for you.

Basically, it's an over-hyped grift.

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GMOs began their chain of success with human insulin, then saved the papaya from extinction in Hawaii, and have since fed billions of humans and trillions of animals without so much as a stomach-ache.

That hasn't stopped competitors, $135 billion in the organic food industry, from funding activist groups to undermine the food supply.

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Is glyphosate damaging essential microbes in soil? A multi-year study sought to answer the question using real-world conditions.

Glyphosate (e.g Roundup) is the most popular weedkiller in the world, and that has made it a target for some disreputable competitors, primarily those in the organic food segment, who promote their own chemicals as alternatives. Their chemicals, they claim, don't harm soil but glyphosate does.

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The world is aging. After centuries of relentless growth, many advanced economies are getting older, and even in poorer nations, the share of elderly people is rising. Larger and older populations are creating historic pressures on health care systems across the world.

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