Science 2.0

This is another scary headline that doesn’t mean what it seems to mean from the titles. We do not risk a world without the conker tree and there is no way it can go extinct. After all it is easy to cultivate. Here is an example story to debunk:

'Alarming' extinction threat to Europe's trees (BBC)

They say

Ravaged by moths and disease, the horse chestnut is now classified as vulnerable to extinction.

The tree is among more than 400 native European tree species assessed for their risk of extinction by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

About half face disappearing from the natural landscape.

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Award winning wines tend to have high ethanol and sugar levels. according to a recent paper in the Journal of Wine Research that sought to know what characteristics were prevalent in the wines that won the top awards at an international wine competition.

They crunched several years of data from the Mundus Vini Challenge, which is held twice a year in Germany, and found that large wine challenges tend to favor wines with high alcohol and sugar levels. Flavors often associated with sweetness, including exotic fruits in white wines and dried fruit and spiciness in reds, also increase the chances of winning top prizes.

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Rockefeller, Hewitt, Moore, Tides, they've all been funneling money to Canadian environmental activists to halt progress in energy production and if you have heard of that last one, it's because they are well known for taking donations from overseas interests like Russia and acting as a "donor advised" fund for environmentalists who don't want the stigma of taking funds from Russia directly.(1)

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Older people often talk about how they knew they had gone too far with their mothers. While a father might yell more a mother's tone would change into "that voice" and they knew they had gone over an invisible line.

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Two invasive species of mosquitoes that can carry Zika, dengue, yellow fever and other dangerous viruses are spreading in California — and have been found as far north as Sacramento and Placer counties.

There are now 16 counties where Aedes aegypti, commonly known as the yellow fever mosquito, has been detected, according to the state Department of Public Health. Five of those counties have also detected Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito.

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This week's Plot relates to the search of rare decays of the Higgs boson, through the analysis of the large amounts of proton-proton collision data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN's marvelous 27km particle accelerator. The ATLAS collaboration, which is one of the four main scientific equipes looking at LHC collisions, produced an improved bound on the rate at which Higgs bosons may decay to electron-positron pairs (which they are expected to do, although very rarely, in the Standard Model, SM) and to electron-muon pairs (which are forbidden in the SM).

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HILLSBORO, Ore. — On Kimberly Repp’s office wall is a sign in Latin: Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. This is a place where the dead delight in helping the living.

For medical examiners, it’s a mission. Their job is to investigate deaths and learn from them, for the benefit of us all. Repp, however, isn’t a medical examiner; she’s a Ph.D. microbiologist. And as the Washington County epidemiologist, she was most accustomed to studying infectious diseases like flu or norovirus outbreaks among the living.

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More than half of adults and one third of children in Europe are classified as overweight or obese, with the highest proportion coming from lower socio-economic groups where Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is prevalent.

NAFLD is the accumulation of excess fat in the liver and has become the most common cause of liver disease in Europe due to the rapid rise in levels of obesity. It is a major European health burden resulting in liver cirrhosis and liver cancer, as well as big increases in cardiovascular disease and non-liver cancers.

Lack of physical activity and excess calorie intake leads to weight gain and fat deposition, which plays a major role in the development and progression of NAFLD.

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Though a modern naturalism movement has tried to shame mothers who don't, won't, or can't breastfeed, using bottles of animal milk - the prehistoric version of formula - turns out to be an ancient tradition.

Infant feeding vessels made of clay first appear in Europe in the Neolithic and became more commonplace throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. The vessels are small enough to fit in a baby's hands, have a spout, and sometimes even feet and are shaped like imaginary animals. 

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Tiger mom, sure, but don't mess with a walrus either. When a Russian navy landing boat got too close to her calves, a mama walrus sank it for them, CNN reports.  

The Russian navy did their best to salvage their pride, writing, "Serious troubles were avoided thanks to the clear and well-coordinated actions of the Northern Fleet servicemen, who were able to take the boat away from the animals without harming them."

A new paper looked at farm workers in Hawaii and found that before 1999 some of them had more heart attacks than non-farm workers and concluded the reason must be safe levels of pesticide exposure creating "subtle effects" over time.

Epidemiology can achieve anything, like show that autism is linked to organic food, if the correlates are tortured enough. 

The confounders are obvious, like that the level of exposure to pesticides made no difference, but the authors declare their correlation is probably valid because a similar link was created in Taiwanese men who were exposed to high levels of pesticides.

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A new study worries that teabags containing plastic come with a dose of micro- and nano-sized plastics.

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Opposing views on e-cigarettes, witnesses interrupting members of Congress and even a wink. A hearing Tuesday on the epidemic of respiratory injuries linked to vaping was one unusual show.

Since the spring, hundreds of reports have surfaced about severe lung injuries associated with vaping and using e-cigarettes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified at least 530 cases, including at least seven deaths, and states have reported two others.

In recent weeks, as the news crept wider into the headlines, it galvanized state and federal public health officials to warn people against vaping until the crisis is better understood.

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Everyone is a mutant but some are prone to diverge more than others. The difference is largely based on two influences. One is the age of a child's parents. A child born to a father who is 35 years old will likely have more mutations than a sibling born to the same father at 25. 

The second is that the effects of parental age on mutation rates differ considerably among families -- much more than had been previously appreciated. In one family, a child may have two additional mutations compared to a sibling born when their parents were ten years younger. Two siblings born ten years apart to a different set of parents may vary by more than 30 mutations.

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At a House hearing on vaping this week, there was one lone advocate for smoking cessation and harm reduction products, a huge decline from a year ago when even I testified at FDA to support a new product. Everyone else was solidly against it, and the reason is JUUL.

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A recent analysis of Board of Director's political makeup of S&P 1500 firms found that in 276 cases of financial misconduct, that those whose members donated to conservative politicians (a reasonable proxy for their own proclivities) were 3X more likely to dismiss a CEO than liberal Boards.

The implication is that, at least when it comes to financial matters, the primary reason companies exist, conservatives will demand more ethical conduct.  They believe they have addressed sample‐induced endogeneity and alternative explanations with additional analyses.

If this holds up, how else might the ideology of board members influence critical actions companies take?

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You might not think the somber, sacred nature of medieval Catholic rites has much in common with the ornate, secular pomp of Hollywood films, but they do - everything from "Star Wars" to "It's A Wonderful Life" uses a particular four notes to get serious points across.

Nothing would be more ridiculous than an evangelical doing an exorcism in a possession movie, you need to have Latin to get the cultural power flowing, even though no one speaks Latin (unless you have a really old priest, since when Vatican II decided to become hip and use local languages for mass no one doesn't understand Mass equally any more), and it helps to go old school in cinema as well.

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Given a choice between eating brown rice or white rice, many people pick brown, citing the clean, natural, healthy brown rice as a way to be healthier while white rice has been marketed as unhealthy because it is more "processed."

That's a meaningless marketing designation, though not as dumb as "ultra-processed." All food is processed. If you have ever tried eating rice or wheat out of the ground, you know that.

When it comes to calorie, protein, carb, fat, and fiber content, they are nearly identical and the difference between them is almost as biologically meaningless as eating non-GMO pumpkin whatever (there is no GMO pumpkin.)

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Impostor syndrome is where people feel like frauds even if they are actually capable and well-qualified. A new group of interviews finds that impostor syndrome is quite common and uncovers one of the best -- and worst -- ways to cope with such feelings.

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If human beings go to Mars, they need food - and that means macaroni and cheese. 

Currently, plastic packaging can keep food safe at room temperature for up to twelve months but a new paper in the journal Food and Bioprocess Technology could keep ready-to-eat macaroni and cheese safe and edible with nutrients for up to three years. It's proof-of-concept but they may have time to get it right, if delays and development of the James Webb Space Telescope are an indication of the glacial timescale that NASA will need to send humans back to space.

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