Science 2.0

The world of elementary particles has something in common with our own: there are large inequalities in the properties of particles, as in the properties of human beings. The heaviest particle, the top quark, with its estimated mass of 172 GeV is five orders of magnitude heavier than the most common matter constituents, the up and down quarks and the electron. Along with the top quark there are three other heavyweight particles that we currently call elementary -perhaps only a label we have to use because we haven't been able to split them further into smaller bits: the Higgs boson (125 GeV), the Z boson (91 GeV), and the W boson (80 GeV).

read more

A traditional endoscopy, while valuable for detecting high-risk legions, is an expensive, invasive procedure. There are ingestible cameras but are not controlled by physicians, they are just swallowed and the body does the rest.

read more

We hear a lot about German atrocities during World War II but in some ways Japan was just as bad. The Nanjing massacre in December 1937 is well-known but the Japanese army's organized use of typhoid, cholera, and plague gets less press. They didn't get as much attention because during the Japanese occupation, China was also fighting a civil war between communists and nationalists.

read more

In the early days of changes in laws to products like alcohol, some people below the new legal threshold were still able to get it. It was impossible to arrest everyone selling illegally, and there was a certain freedom argument many made, i.e. why can I shoot a Nazi in Europe but not buy a beer in the US?

read more

Two cases of Yersinia pestis in human remains found in a mass burial in Charterhouse Warren in Somerset and one in a ring cairn monument in Levens in Cumbria show that the Plague may have erupted a few times in severe form across Europe, and it was even in England as far back as 2000 B.C.

In the 1960s, coronavirus was discovered as distinct from the common cold so future analyses may also find pandemics that occurred long before 2003, 2012, and 2019. 'The plague', as it became known in the Middle Ages, has previously been identified in Eurasia between during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age, so we now know it was easily transmitted. 

Even to an island. 

read more

Calories cause obesity and while everyone wants a magic solution to eating too much for a prolonged period of time, those with the means can make it reality in the form of surgery.

COVID-19 set off a panic in much of culture. Schools were closed, people were ostracized if they didn't think flipping masks up and down between sips of water was clinically valid, but decisions were being made in real-time so a lot of things that once again seem silly in hindsight were the Precautionary Principle in all its glorious flawed reasoning.

read more

Volunteering often makes us feel good but does it mean better health? Epidemiologists in a new paper argue it does, but the confounders are obvious; parents who take their kids to volunteer are often wealthier and in better health and on surveys about their kids claim better outcomes.

The work originated from parent-reported survey data of 22,126 children (6 to 11 years) and 29,769 adolescents (12 to 17 years) in the 2019 to 2020 National Survey of Children’s Health. The authors adjusted and weighted the data to reflect their beliefs about the demographic composition of youths in each state. 

read more

A phrase like 'spring in your step' is usually meant to evoke enthusiasm or happiness but a new study finds that its mechanism, the spring-like arch in our feet, did help us walk on two feet. Just in a different way than previously believed.

Most believe that the raised arch of the foot helps us walk by acting as a lever which helps to lift the body into the next step by propelling the body forward but the new work argues that the recoil of the flexible arch repositions the ankle upright for more effective walking - and the effects in running are even greater.

read more

Astronomers at the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have

read more

New food surveys show what you probably knew; if you eat too much, you will get fat, and obesity is a risk factor for numerous health issues.

read more

For the third time, expansions of the poorly named Waters of the United States regulations have been struck down, this time in SACKETT ET UX. v. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY ET AL., the Environmental Protection Agency cited the Clean Water Act and said a family could not build a home on land they owned - because the house was near a ditch and that ditch led to a creek and that creek led to Prairie Lake. Which is a 'navigable' water.

read more

There were 93 school shootings in the US in a recent two-year period but they were rarely committed by students. Sometimes they were former students of the school but new a survey analysis say their mental health issues may have been aggravated by memories of bullying.

read more

A wearable, pocket-sized, automated insulin delivery device has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The company calls is the iLet Bionic Pancreas but it's obviously not bionic any more than String Theory is a scientific theory. However, it is now available in this universe for the almost two million Americans with type 1 diabetes.

read more

Sepsis causes 11 million deaths annually so preventing that requires prompt recognition, source control, antibiotics, fluids and vasopressors.

Sometimes adjunctive therapies such as orticosteroids help but the science is inconclusive. A recent study was designed to evaluate the role of corticosteroids in the management of patients with septic shock and the contradictory effects on mortality as recorded in past research and treatment.

read more

The recent developments in artificial intelligence, most notably the demonstration of the weird power of GPT4 and other large language models, have brought the scientific community to ponder on some very foundational questions - What is conscience? What is intelligence? Can machines really think? Can machines really become conscient? 
(Below, the answer of ChatGPT to my silly question on self-awareness.)

read more

In the 19th century, charlatans traveled around selling magic potions, tonics, and salves but to stop them no one decided to ban actual medical research.

The issue facing "AI", which is short for Artificial Intelligence, is that the only people who will feel bound by top-down control were never going to be a problem in the first place. Large Language Models, termed Generative AI, can be a huge positive in health care, but because it is misunderstood and there is a lot of exploitative media coverage there are ongoing efforts to kill it before it really gets going.

read more

In recent geological history, 90,000 of every 100,000 years have been ice ages. It's been 12,000 years since the last one so we may be due.

Or not. Climate science has a few rules but a lot of exceptions and 700,000 years ago a big exception occurred. At that time the planet experienced a “warm ice age” and it permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth. Though it became warmer and with more rain, the polar glaciers also expanded. Geological data in combination with computer simulations published in Nature Communications hopes to lend insight into this paradox.

read more

Saturn’s rings are one of the jewels of the solar system, but it seems that their time is short and their existence fleeting.

A new study suggests the rings are between 400 million and 100 million years old – a fraction of the age of the solar system. This means we are just lucky to be living in an age when the giant planet has its magnificent rings. Research also reveals that they could be gone in another 100 million years.

The rings were first observed in 1610 by the astronomer Galileo Galilei who, owing to the resolution limits of his telescope, initially described them as two smaller planets on each side of Saturn’s main orb, apparently in physical contact with it.

read more

Four years ago California voters passed Proposition 12, which goes around the often do-nothing legislature in Sacramento, which banned any sales of pork in the stare if the processor did not use California standards.

California also does this to companies in things like light bulbs and cars and even gasoline, which leads to higher costs. The state imports nearly all of its pork so the the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation sued on Constitutional grounds, saying that under the Commerce Clause one state could not dictate to all the others how it would occur. 

read more

Results of a small BioNTech pancreatic cancer vaccine with 16 patients showed that half remained free of the cancer after 18 months. It's an intriguing milestone because it is a deadly cancer due to many being asymptomatic until it has spread - and 88% mortality.

The patients had a vaccine tailored to them individually, which shows the promise of using messenger RNA (mRNA) to get the patient's immune system to destroy cancer cells. If this holds up in larger trial it would mean true personalized medicine.

read more