Science 2.0

First, this is totally harmless. Tiny and far away, shrouded with dust and gas. They can only see it using radio waves that go through the dust. And the photo of course changes nothing, we've know it is there for a long time away. This is a screenshot from the press conference:

And over four separate days:

Short summary here

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Using records pediatric health clinics, specialized programs for children with developmental disabilities, and special education records along with a review of the abstracted evaluations by trained clinicians using a standardized case definition and method (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) diagnostic criteria) a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis has found that diagnoses in the sites they used were up 27 percent from 2010 to 2014.

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Consumer hand sanitizers are popular, and they became more popular when brands started advertising they used the same chemicals hospitals use. FDA allowed it starting in 1994 (1994 Health Care Antiseptic TFM (June 17, 1994, 59 FR 31402)), the same year they gave supplements exemption from real FDA oversight.

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Taste is a complex phenomenon. We do not experience the sensation through a single sense (as we would when we see something using our sense of sight, for example) but rather it is made up of the five senses working together to allow us to appreciate and enjoy food and drink. Initial visual inspection of food indicates if we would consider consuming it. Then, when eating, smell and flavor combine to allow us to perceive a taste. Meanwhile, the mix of ingredients, texture and temperature can further impact how we experience it.

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If you've swum in the ocean you know it requires a lot of energy, and for ships it is no different. Adding to that are the problems of friction, corrosion, and biofilms, all of which cause marine traveler to drag.

Science is on the case. New types of ship coatings that permanently retain an air layer under water and reduce the three problems have been granted the Validation Award by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in Germany.

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Supplements are a huge industry that ballooned after President Bill Clinton turned the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 into law and took control of the controversial industry away from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in return for a weak disclaimer that the FDA had not evaluated their claims - "This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease" all while suggesting they do exactly that.

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It is a bit embarrassing to post here a graph of boring elementary particle signals, when the rest of the blogosphere is buzzing after the release of the first real black hole image from the Event Horizon collaboration. So okay, before going into pentaquarks, below is the image of the black hole at the center of M87, a big elliptical galaxy 54 million light years away.

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Published in 1979 in Astronomy and Astrophysics, it had a worldwide impact, especially since this type of object was still highly theoretical. It is not an artist's view but an image based on the then supposed physical properties of a black hole and its gas disc, such as its rotation rate and temperature, and on Einstein's general theory of relativity. Luminet envisioned it as a black circle, which had not yet become known as the shadow of the black hole, in the centre of a luminous accretion disc, with one side clearly brighter than the other.

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An international team of over 200 scientists has captured the first direct images of a black hole.

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The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole.

Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution.

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Am debunking this page because it makes a scary prediction of a 10 °C rise by 2026. It is very very silly. By far the silliest post I’ve seen on climate change, and that’s saying something, I’ve seen some ridiculous posts, but this takes the biscuit. I can’t find out anything about Sam Carana who runs this blog, but he would flunk high school maths and physics if he gave material like this in answer to exam questions.

This is not about the IPCC report which is often misunderstood as saying something similar. For the journalistic misunderstandings of the 2017 IPCC report see my

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Approximately a million people in the U.S. are living with HIV and up to 15 percent may not even know they are infected. In Februrary, the U.S. Department of Health and Humans Services announced a new initiative, Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America, to reduce new infections by 75 percent in the next five years and by 90 percent in the next ten years, averting more than 250,000 HIV infections in that span.

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In the movie "Erin Brockovich", actress Julia Roberts portrayed a clerk who got energy company PG&E worried enough about a jury being scared of science they wrote her boss a giant check. Because Hollywood is in California, the state government was motivated to declare the compound harmful and put in tighter restrictions.

The concern from the science community was that no one was being harmed. It's a slippery slope from demonizing a scary sounding chemical in water to doing the same thing to vaccines or weedkillers. Which is exactly what has happened, and California has led the way in both cases.

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Every regulatory body in the world has found that the weedkiller glyphosate is only harmful for plants. And huge studies of over 50,000 farmers have found the same.

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With a tricky disease like multiple sclerosis, where symptoms and MRI testing results can look like other conditions, such as stroke, migraines and vitamin B12 deficiency, it's common to be misdiagnosed with other things first. A new analysis of patients diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before being referred to two major Los Angeles medical centers flipped the script; it found that 18 percent didn't have the autoimmune disease at all.  

The results showed that nearly 18 percent of patients diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before being referred to two major Los Angeles medical centers for treatment actually had been misdiagnosed with the autoimmune disease. The patients spent an average of four years being treated for MS before receiving a correct diagnosis.

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Yes, this is supposedly a particle physics blog, not a machine learning one - and yet, I have been finding myself blogging a lot more about machine learning than particle physics as of late. Why is that? 
Well, of course the topic of algorithms that may dramatically improve our statistical inference from collider data is of course dear to my heart, and has been so since at least two decades (my first invention, the "inverse bagging" algorithm, is dated 1992, when nobody even knew what bagging was). But the more incidental reason is that now _everybody_ is interested in the topic, and that means all of my particle physics and astroparticle physics colleagues. 

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University of Bonn environmentalists and economists say Peru's National Forest Conservation Program needs to do more ro protect the rainforest.

Peru, on the other hand, is navigating the shackled man problem(1); that developed countries want the rest of the world to limit progress now that rich economies are already doing well. So in 2010 they launched a program to protect the rainforest but Europeans criticize that its effect is still too small. Further, they want Peru to enact three more stringent measures and if governments in Europe agree Peru has to at least consider it because they are held hostage by international governments funding the program.

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Canine leishmaniosis is a potentially fatal infection caused by the parasite Leishmania infantum, carried by the female sand fly and transmitted in its bite. It is zoonotic, so can be passed on to people but dogs have been known to pick up the infection after being bitten or wounded by another infected dog.

That's rare, and in the UK cases to-date have only been associated with blood transfusion, breeding programs, or overseas travel but a 3 year old neutered male shih tzu cross, which had been with its owner since a puppy and had none of the known risk factors for infection, was recently diagnosed with leishmaniosis in Hertfordshire.

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Blood pressure and stroke risk increase steadily with sedentary lifestyle, obesity and of course the biggest risk is age. Many want to optimize their time living to prevent debilitating injuries and epidemiologists are happy to find a statistical correlation for everything; that is why some embrace supplements, some embrace organic food, and some embrace alcohol use.

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For a recent paper, researchers examined monthly data on U.S. background checks for gun purchases and permits from November 1998 through April 2016, looking for purchasing trends after shootings during that time. 

When media coverage highlighted shootings, they found there were increases in handgun purchases. Only after high-fatality shootings were there decreases. The authors segmented results by the shooter’s race/ethnicity, the region where the shooting occurred, if a shooting was school related, fatalities, if it was a handgun or rifle, automatic or semiautomatic, the extent of media coverage level, and state political affiliation.

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