Science 2.0

Yellowstone was the first national park designated in the United States and is a popular tourist destination, but there is a lot going on underneath that people never feel.

A new analysis of 15 years of historical earthquake data from the Yellowstone caldera used machine learning and found an order of magnitude more seismic events than previously acknowledged. 

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In early 2025, the Trump administration began to place tariffs on countries that already had them on the U.S., like China, Brazil, and many in Europe. China has already begun to experience deflation but a new book reveals that the business sector likely to be impacted most is the $500,000,000,000 counterfeiting business there.

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Real world data show that the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine rolled out for pregnant women in the UK last year has already resulted in a 72 percent drop in babies being admitted to the hospital among women who took it. 

Experts predict that as more women take it, England is the home of both the modern anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements so change takes time, it will further reduce the number of needlessly sick babies each year and therefore the burden on the overtaxed National Health Service system.

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In the 1980s, the majority party in Congress saw demography claims that people with college educations made more money than those without.  Universities began to lobby for student loan changes. Many smaller private schools were facing funding crunches and people going to college would fix that.

The drumbeat for equitable treatment for the poor got louder and as part of other governance, Congress included changes that made so student loans, which originated thanks to President Johnson in 1965, were now unlimited. Because governance is governance, a Republican president signed it over the objections of those who said it was turning a Bachelor's degree into the new high school diploma. Nearly everyone would have one, except with debt.(1)

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Gen X is getting its own Captain America. This is a big deal. Culturally, Boomers as cultural majority gave way to the next large demographic, Millennials, while Gen X got slighted. Even though we had the best music since the 1940s.

On the plus side, being a minority means we don't get hate. Gen Z dislikes millennials for being cringe, millennials dislike Gen Z for being so Puritan, and everyone dislikes Boomers because they won't stop talking about Woodstock and Kennedy. Some argue that instead of being too small to matter we are the coolest but that's subjective.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has sent seven recent letters sent to companies selling products containing 7-hydroxymitragynine, also known as 7-OH.1, an illegal opioid.

It became popular because it is found in the dangerous supplement kratom, illegal even in the country that exports it to the United States, and supplement grifters also began selling the compound in gummies, drink mixes, and shots.

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It's always easy to be critical of government, but while the new administration cut grants for sociologists who want to "study" why people still play Everquest 2, it also boosted funding for the National Animal Health Laboratory Network, and programs like the National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program and the National Animal Vaccine and Veterinary Countermeasures Bank.

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Every day we read a new headline warning us that American leadership is about to erode because of budget cuts to 'science.'

We have been told tuberculosis was about to be cured but a grant got cut and, gosh darn it, now Republicans ruined it. We have been told we'll be set back for generations.

If you don't want to spend a lot of time reading more, I can tell you plainly that after two decades of covering science in a way 'post whatever is new every day to sell advertising' corporate media will not; government is never why America leads in science. Government is barely even why America leads in Nobel Prizes.

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Tumors can destroy the blood vessels of muscles even when the muscles are nowhere close to the tumor. That is the key finding of a new study that my colleagues and I recently published in the journal Nature Cancer.

Muscle loss in cancer patients is a major health problem, but the exact causes of how precisely tumors affect muscles remain an active area of research.

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Imagine walking into your doctor’s office feeling sick – and rather than flipping through pages of your medical history or running tests that take days, your doctor instantly pulls together data from your health records, genetic profile and wearable devices to help decipher what’s wrong.

This kind of rapid diagnosis is one of the big promises of artificial intelligence for use in health care. Proponents of the technology say that over the coming decades, AI has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, even millions of lives.

What’s more, a 2023 study found that if the health care industry significantly increased its use of AI, up to US$360 billion annually could be saved.

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Flash floods like the one that swept down the Guadalupe River in Texas on July 4, 2025, can be highly unpredictable. While there are sophisticated flood prediction models and different types of warning systems in some places, effective flood protection requires extensive preparedness and awareness.

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