Science 2.0

       The book is author Alex Hannaford’s lament about changes in Austin, Texas, since his initial visit to the city in 1999. This at first spurred your reviewer, who moved to Austin in 1969, to think, “1999? Well, isn’t that just too precious?”

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The only real way to wipe out H5N1, the bird flu that has been ruining egg prices since last year, is to kill off all the wild birds. That is not practical but what we can do is stop buying raw pet food. All of it. Now. And never start again. You will kill your cat if it is transmitted in that food. And stop buying raw milk. All of it. Now. And never start again.

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Imagine if I put out a claim that I had prevented teens from playing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II" and therefore saving billions in dollars in future mental health care costs.

Well, I can, because COD:MWII has dropped a lot in usage from a few years ago. Sure, critics might claim it is an older game and new games come along and people switch to those, but if I am at FDA, none of that matters.

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When a tourist visits California, the first thing they notice getting off of the airplane is a warning sign that the material they are near will give them cancer. Then another one. Then another. Soon, they become invisible but not before people do searches to see how much more cancer Californians develop than everyone else.(1)


Not only will most things in Walmart have a cancer warning, the building itself can give you cancer. Photo: Hank Campbell

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After a decade of being thrown out by the courts and being slightly modified and enacted again, changes drastically expanding the definition of Waters of the United States (WOTUS) to include man-made ponds on family farms may finally be ending.

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The Trump administration announced a major milestone for the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory with the installation of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera on the telescope.

Next up is the final phase of testing before capturing "first look" images and then the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time will begin.

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Today, the best way to prevent malaria remains DDT. Though banned in the US by a politician over the objections of scientists, it is still recommended by the United Nations for use where malaria has not been wiped out. Our FDA even wrote the book on how to spray it in homes.

Despite 70 years of effort, viable affordable replacements remain elusive but a new program hopes LLMs could help find one. The  National Institutes of Health funded a proposal to use machine learning techniques combined with cheminformatics to help generate new mosquito repellents.

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 St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, founded by Catholic nuns in 1857, reports implant of Australia’s first BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart. Invented by Dr. Daniel Timms, it is a single moving part, no valves, and a no-contact suspension system, which means no mechanical wear, and the patient lasted over 100 days while waiting for an artificial heart. He even went home with it installed.

The work was led by Dr. Paul Jansz and the anonymous patient was sent home in February. He then received a donor heart early in March.

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