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Updated: 1 hour 3 min ago

When Told Lower Incomes Mean Less School Funding, College Students Become More Liberal

Feb 07 2025 - 14:02
So many people want to move to the United States of America because virtually anyone who arrives legally can start a business with little problem and get rich.

A lot of people born in the US would rather be born in a place where they can never get rich but more things are free for the poor. They're not wrong, normal human psychological variation means most people would rather not compete if given a choice. That is seen all across the animal kingdom.

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The Earth Beneath Our Feet: How The Zagros Mountains Are Shaping The Middle East

Feb 07 2025 - 09:02

The Zagros Mountains are nestled in Iran, northern Iraq, and southeastern Turkey, and are the scene of an unfolding geological story deep beneath it.

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Yellowstone Wolves: Good For Urban Environmentalists, Bad For Everyone Else

Feb 06 2025 - 16:02
A new analysis claims that crown volume of stream-side shrubs is a key metric for evaluating trophic cascade strength and they attribute the 1,500% increase in a small number of sites to increased numbers of wolves.

The data they used were collected from 20 streams during the years 2001 to 2020 and they note the aboveground biomass increase is due to a lot fewer elk, which was caused by a lot more wolves. "Balance of nature" wins.

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HIms Telehealth Company Under Fire For Super Bowl Ad

Feb 06 2025 - 12:02
Hims Inc., rebranded as Hims  &  Hers Health, Inc. after they went public in 2020, began as a telehealth company for erectile dysfunction and hair loss products.

No real issue there, the products are well-established and a phone call or website consultation is more convenient and far faster than visiting a doctor's office in the modern Obamacare milieu. It's entering the compounded glucagon-like peptide 1 agonists (GLP-1) injections market that got them new scrutiny.

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Bad News For Big Alcohol: Half Of Valentine's Day Celebrants Will Abstain

Feb 06 2025 - 10:02
A new survey created by marketing insights company Tastewise finds that half are not going to drink alcohol on Valentine's Day - for health reasons.

They're not wrong. During the waning days of the Biden administration, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy did something for science and public health that was grounded in science - he issued a report encouraging people to get off alcohol

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Hey AI, Design A Calorimeter For Me

Feb 05 2025 - 06:02
As artificial intelligence tools continue to evolve and improve their performance on more and more general tasks, scientists struggle to make the best use of them. 
The problem is not incompetence - in fact, at least in my field of study (high-energy physics) most of us have grown rather well educated on the use and development of tailored machine learning algorithms. The problem is rather that our problems are enormously complex. Long gone are the years when we started to apply with success deep neural networks to classification and regression problems of data analysis: those were easy tasks. The bar now is set much higher - optimize the design of instruments we use for our scientific research. 

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Lessons, Advice, And Reflections On Editing A Scholarly Book

Feb 05 2025 - 01:02

In 2023, I bit the bullet by signing a book contract with Springer to work on a difficult compilation of scientific misconduct and problematic science publishing practice. It was planned as an edited book that required expert contributors of the field to write chapters on the various topics.

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Birth Control Pill: Less Ovulation Linked To Less Ovarian Cancer

Feb 04 2025 - 18:02
A new Artificial Intelligence analysis of data of ovarian cancer patients links birth control pills to a 26% reduced risk for those had ever used it, and 43% for those who had used the it after the age of 45.

That does not mean you should take it as a way to prevent cancer, it is an endocrine disruptor that binds to estrogen with 20,000X the effect of compounds like BPA that environmentalists tried to claim are too risky in food containers, and this study is EXPLORATORY. With enough data, Australians could link voting for the Liberal Party to lower risk of diseases. Epidemiology can link anything to anything.

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Texas Shows Leadership In Viable Clean Energy

Feb 04 2025 - 14:02
Over 30 years after Democrats achieved their generational goal of ending nuclear energy in America, science is finally back.

Texas A&M University Chancellor John Sharp announced they have provided land nearby to build four nuclear small modular reactors. “Plain and simple: the United States needs more power. And nowhere in the country, other than Texas, is anyone willing to step up and build the power plants we need."


Credit: Texas A&M University

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Kennedy Insistence On Late Term Abortion and Gun Bans Should Be A Republican Turn-Off

Feb 04 2025 - 14:02
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., called the National Rifle Association “a terrorist organization” but now claims to be a “constitutional absolutist” who opposes gun control. He said if you eat steak you're more of a terrorist than Obama Bin Laden but now does photo ops eating McDonald's cheeseburgers, and he claimed that President George W. Bush trouncing his fellow progressive anti-science activist Senator John Kerry was actually Republicans stealing the election but now claims maybe Trump had his win stolen in 2020.

What changed? He is close to finally getting the government legitimacy he has craved, but escaped him in 2008. So he has flipped to things Republicans like. It is all for show. He has not changed.

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EDITH: Lower Health Care Costs Using AI For Breast Cancer Screenings

Feb 04 2025 - 12:02
The United Kingdom has delays even longer than the United States for routine care but with a fraction of the population, their high costs are a lot more punitive to taxpayers.

Government is always looking for ways to keep costs contained but NHS employees need raises also, so it is a challenge. Needing fewer new employees will help.

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In Finland, Farmers Are Now Forced To Yell At Geese To Try And Keep Crops From Being Ruined

Feb 04 2025 - 11:02
While talking to farmers in Illinois on September 25th, 1956 who were concerned about increased government encroachment and regulations brought on by the descendants of eugenicists who had founded "environmental" groups like Sierra Club to promote their beliefs(1), President Dwight D. Eisenhower told them,  “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field”

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Overcoming Misinformation And Reconnecting With Science Deniers

Feb 03 2025 - 23:02

Scientific information has never been more widely accessible than it is today. While this increased availability fosters awareness and collaboration, it has also contributed to a concerning surge in misinformation and disinformation, especially in the United States. Recent Pew Research data indicates a decline in public trust in science, with only 57% of people believing science has had a mostly positive impact on society, down from 73% in 2019. Additionally, 34% of adults now view science’s impact as equally positive and negative.

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Corporate Media - 'Young People Are Dying' But People Are Actually Healthier Than Ever

Feb 03 2025 - 16:02
Are young people dying off en masse or are predatorts at environmental groups who prey on public gullibility rending their holistic shaman-blessed hemp garments because a wave of improving public health has spread across America?

'People are dying' is just a headline to grab eyeballs. More accurate listing of deaths show more young people are dying from recreational drugs than in recent years, when if you got shot and died from it but had tested positive for COVID-19 within 30 days you might have been listed as a COVID-19 death by the CDC. Yet more people are not dying. Of anything.

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Are Infectious Diseases A Social Justice Issue? A History Of The World In Six Plagues Has Answers

Feb 02 2025 - 17:02
As we approach the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdowns, there has been ample time to look at what went wrong, and perhaps how we didn't learn much from history.

There are many examples and while politicians ignored it, storytellers have not. In "The Division" game, for example, eco-terrorists spread their pathogen using cash. That made sense. If you are a zealot, disease can do what eugenics and population control efforts did not; get rid of a lot of poor and minority people without controversy, and no one can be blamed because disease is both egalitarian and exculpatory.

Unless it isn't.

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Chemical Looping Plastic And CO2: Science Even Environmental Groups Can't Hate

Jan 31 2025 - 14:01
The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates about 35 million tons of plastics are generated just in America, and 12.% of that becomes is garbage like plastic containers and bags and even appliances.

Sorry folks, politicians in states like California who insist it's being recycled are lying to you, scientists know better. What really happens to plastic, even if your government is shipping it to China to be "recycled" is landfilling and incineration. A new study finds that measuring how much carbon dioxide a potential chemical looping system would pump out compared to conventional processes to produce synthesis gas could reduce emissions by up to 45.

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The Multi-Muon Analysis - A Recollection

Jan 31 2025 - 12:01
As part of the celebrations for 20 years of blogging, I am re-posting articles that in some way were notable for the history of the blog. This time I want to (re)-submit to you four pieces I wrote to explain the unexplainable: the very complicated analysis performed by a group of physicists within the CDF experiment, which led them to claim that there was a subtle new physics process hidden in the data collected in Run 2. There would be a lot to tell about that whole story, but suffices to say here that the signal never got confirmed by independent analyses and by DZERO, the competing experiment at the Tevatron. As mesmerizing and striking the CDF were, they were finally archived as some intrinsic incapability of the experiment to make perfect sense of their muon detector signals.

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3 Pro-Science Action Items For EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin

Jan 30 2025 - 14:01
Yesterday, the Senate confirmed former Congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Though the Trump administration has promised reform, there will be big challenges in that. Though high-profile jobs are appointees, the nuts-and-bolts work of governance is done by career employees, and nearly 90 percent of them are Democrats.

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Gym Paradox: People Want To Get Healthier But Until They're Healthier Don't Feel Comfortable

Jan 29 2025 - 16:01
Gym Bro, Curl Gurl, Gym Rat if you choose not to identify as any gender - everyone knows what it means, and it can be pretty intimidating if you walk into a fitness center as a new member. Imagine feeling like you have to get in shape before you can join a gym to get in shape.

Fitness executives don't want that but store managers know not to alienate their best customers for someone who will join on a special deal, go for a month, and then cancel the first time they download RocketMoney and remember they have a gym membership.

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Warming Up Cars Before Driving In The Winter: Combustion No, Electric Yes

Jan 28 2025 - 15:01
Though the American Automobile Association (AAA) says you should, thanks to fuel-injection engines common for the last 40 years, you don't need to 'warm up' your car, letting it idle before driving, now even though in the past it made sense.

Like America inventing pre-diabetes, which no other nation accepts because only 5% of people in the CDC 'warning' range will ever develop type 2 diabetes in their lifetime, warming up your car is a solution without a problem.

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