Science 2.0

When your Xbox is a gaming console and a 4K Blu-Ray player, you don't need two devices, and when your phone is a camera and a video recorder, there are two fewer things to buy - and eventually throw away.

As smart devices have become more integrated, and more commodities like a dishwasher than technology events, people own fewer things and keep them longer. That means less electronic waste. Yet the story we get from environmental groups is that e-waste is the fastest growing material pollution and only donations to lawyer-run groups can stop it.

read more

In the not so distant future, checkbooks will take their rightful place in museums alongside answering machines, VCRs and folding paper maps. Online bill-paying and Apple/Google Pay have narrowed the times when it’s necessary to resort to the clunky paper-and-pen based payment method, and many growing up today have never touched one at all. It’s clear the way we handle our finances is changing. So why not bring the concept of money itself into the 21st century?

read more

In the United States, meat substitutes like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are now fixtures in culture. Vegetarians who miss meat want to eat them because they use plants while environmental activists don't want to eat them because they use science. That keeps them in the public eye.

read more

Dolutegravir, the HIV wonder drug and current first-line treatment, is less effective in sub-Saharan Africa, and the reason is as old as evolution itself - mutation. 

As HIV copies itself and replicates, its genetic code (RNA) can change. While a drug may initially be able to suppress or even kill a virus, certain mutations can allow the virus to develop resistance to its effects. If a mutated strain begins to spread within a population, it can mean once-effective drugs are no longer able to treat people.

read more

Antibiotic resistance is a serious problem. Nature constantly evolves new ways to kill, which means pathogens will develop new methods of resistance to current treatments, but pharmaceutical companies also have little incentive to develop new antibiotics. Instead, they have obstructions when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will require a billion dollars in expenses, 10 years of regulatory approval, and then grandstanding politicians will demand it immediately be generic and cost a dollar. 

read more

A new paper finds that widely available retinal imaging techniques may help reveal more about brain disease and monitor treatment efficacy, including a currently untreatable form of childhood-onset dementia, Sanfilippo syndrome.

Sanfilippo syndrome is one of a group of about 70 inherited conditions which collectively affect 1 in 2800 children in Australia, and is more common than cystic fibrosis and better known diseases. Around the world 700,000 children and young people are living with childhood dementia. The researchers studied Sanfilippo syndrome in mouse models, discovering for the first time that advancement of retinal disease parallels that occurring in the brain. 

read more

Early in the pandemic, many researchers feared people who contracted COVID could be reinfected very quickly. This was because several early studies showed antibodies seemed to wane after the first few months post-infection.

It was also partly because normal human coronaviruses, which are one cause of common colds and are cousins of SARS-CoV-2, do not generate long-lasting immunity, so we can get reinfected with them after 12 months.

read more

Over recent weeks and months, we’ve heard of several COVID cases in which people have tested positive after previously clearing the virus.

Scientists are hopeful being infected with COVID-19 confers immunity for a length of time. But some of these instances have raised concerns about reinfection. Although rare, it seems to be possible.

The other thing which could be at play in many of these cases is “prolonged viral shedding”.

read more

Modern science can tell us so much about the hazards of the world that it has become difficult for most people to understand absolute and relative risk. Environmentalists claim they need money to pay lawyers to ban chemicals, even if they are a drop in 160 Olympic-sized swimming pools while epidemiologists can statistically link any common food or product to cancer.

read more

That's right - I finally hit the ground with my creativity, and my jokes are starting to use old material for my post titles. Yet producing a pair of Higgs bosons in a proton-proton collision is seriously cool indeed. The Higgs boson in fact is one of the few particles that does a trick called "self-coupling": in a sort of ermaphroditic act it is capable of giving birth to a pair of objects identical to itself. 

read more

Recently, Pfizer and BioNTech released promising preliminary results of their clinical Phase III trials with 40,000 participants for their RNA vaccine candidate. This report suggests 90% efficacy for protection against SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes the CoVID-19 disease. However, there is no peer-reviewed publication on this yet.

read more

The 10+ Wheat Genomes Project, led by University of Saskatchewan Professor Curtis Pozniak, and the International Barley Pan Genome Sequencing Consortium, led by Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research Professor Nils Stein, have sequenced a suite of genomes of wheat and barley, opening up genetic variations for both.

read more

Alternative Chinese medicine harms endangered species like pangolins, tigers and rhinos, but deniers of evidence-based medicine are often part of the same political tribe as professional conservationists. That confirmation bias about alternative medicine has limited conservation gains.

The use of endangered species in traditional Chinese medicine threatens species' survival. Noting inefficacy and providing various forms of scientific evidence are not influencing decisions and behaviors. Especially because environmentalists often use the same anti-corporate tropes that convince deniers of vaccines that science is a conspiracy.

read more

Most of Ireland’s rocks are the wrong age for dinosaur fossils, either too old or too young. That doesn't mean dinosaurs weren't there, it means fossilization is a true anomaly and finding fossils makes it even more challenging to have hard evidence.

That has now been achieved. Two fossil bones found by the late citizen scientist Roger Byrne, and donated along with many other fossils to Ulster Museum, have been confirmed as early Jurassic rocks found in Islandmagee, on the east coast of County Antrim.

read more

In 2013, the U.S. government told the World Bank they would not help fund centralized energy in developing nations unless it used their pet projects, wind and solar. Which developing nations could not use much less afford.

We set back sanitation and hygiene in places that need it most and forced them to continue doing what they had been doing; burning wood and dung for energy, including in home for cooking. Billions of people still do that because they lack centralized energy and the environmental costs are enormous. Even if those people had been allowed to switch to coal, emissions would plummet and they would be healthier.

read more

After originating in Wuhan, China in late 2019, the latest form of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and its third pandemic of the last 17 years, has spread COVID-19 across the globe. Some countries claim fewer cases, like China, while some can't know figures, like Brazil, but one thing is clear; the half the world that interacts with China even indirectly has it, and it has mutated along the way. The California version which came from Asia is different than the New York version that came from Europe.

Fortunately, none of the mutations have increased transmissibility, according to a new paper which looked at virus genomes from over 46,000 people with COVID-19 from 99 countries.

read more

Fifth generation (5G) wireless communication networks are being deployed worldwide and promise mass connectivity, ultra-reliability, and guaranteed low latency.

It sounds great for 2020 but people of 2030 are likely to want that, plus enhanced spectral/energy/cost efficiency, better intelligence level, and security - all over the world.

For that, they will need 6G air interface and transmission technologies and novel network architecture, such as waveform design, multiple access, channel coding schemes, multi-antenna technologies, network slicing, cell-free architecture, and cloud/fog/edge computing. 

read more

The WHO and the CDC are using the exact same safety protocol for mRNA as for any vaccine - they have speeded development up by risking money not lives.

The mRNA vaccines are very clean vaccines. They don't do anything to the cell DNA. They are instructions to make the spike of the protein, your body then fights off the spike and then the mRNA and the spike are gone and all that is left is the memory of how to fight the disease.

The spikes can't harm you as they can't infect by themselves, they need the virus attached to them- they don't have instructions needed to tell a cell to make more spikes. So once the original mRNA is gone and the spikes are gone there is nothing left except the memory of how to fight them.

read more

In humans, if we spend time beneath the ocean and then travel to the surface, we can suffer decompression sickness, known as "the bends" - when the nitrogen in compressed air that dissolved into our blood during a dive does not have time to clear and forms bubbles in tissues. 

read more

There is a saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

So, it should come as no surprise that vaccine skeptics worldwide are sounding the alarm about the flu shot as a real danger in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Confused? Well, it turns out the anti-vaccine activists are too.

In the Beginning, There was Misunderstanding: The Genesis of a Myth

read more