Science 2.0

Though activists try to portray farmers as slathering pesticides and fertilizer on land, anyone who has farmed know it is just the opposite; land is their greatest asset and given price competition they need to control costs and inputs as much as possible.

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A new paper says Generation X adults in the United States are more likely to have a greater number of chronic health conditions than those that preceded them, which will please environmental groups who claim that everything from pesticides to natural gas to cell phones is killing us, but is not science.

There are two issues to think about. One is that diagnoses don't mean much. If you get a diagnosis of chronic lyme disease, it does not mean that is suddenly a real disease, and life expectancy is basically meaningless.

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It's difficult to imagine that a simple dietary intervention could mean less Alzheimer’s disease but that is why observational studies and epidemiology claims are placed into the exploratory pile until science can take a look.

A new paper correlates people with a higher  red blood cell (RBC) docosahexaenoic acid (DHA levels as 49% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease vs. those with lower levels, especially for those carrying the ApoE4 gene, which is also a risk factor for Alzheimer's. You know that correlation is not causation so modifying two risk factors with unclear biological meaning may or not be better than doing nothing and hoping for the best. 

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A new study correlates SARS-CoV-2 specific T cells to lung function and those who suffer from long-term COVID symptoms, which impacts an unclear number of people.

The study found that patients suffering from long COVID symptoms had virus-specific T cell levels more than 100 times higher than those who recovered from the disease.

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When I explain to the public (in this blog, or at public conferences or schools) how the Large Hadron Collider operates, I have to gloss over a lot of detail that is unnecessary to grasp the important concepts, which enable other discussions on interesting subnuclear physics. This is good practice, and it also saves me from having to study details I have forgotten along the way - they say that what you are left with when you forget everything is culture, and I tend to agree. I have a good culture in particle physics and that's all I need to do some science popularization ;-)

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About 94 percent of the universe is not detectable matter and the universe is expanding. Those two facts alone are how scientists recognize that gravity as we know it does not work at the very large scale.

It also does not work at the very small. Various bits of speculation, hypothesis, and science-fiction have tried to account for macro effects and they get lumped under generic blanket terms like 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' but experimental physics leads the charge in turning science from fantasy into reality. A new paper has made a step closer to understanding the quantum excitation known as the axial Higgs mode, which unlike the Higgs Boson has a magnetic moment. There is no end to theoretical claims about an axial Higgs mode but reality has been more elusive. 

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It is difficult to imagine the motivation of Russia in attacking Ukraine yet again. Thanks to European reliance in Russian natural gas and food, they probably felt untouchable.

If so, it was a reasonable gamble. After the last fight in Ukraine, Germany and Europe so desperately wanted to avoid conflict with Russia they ignored their own environmental laws and promised to fast-track a pipeline that went from Russia to Germany, bypassing Ukraine entirely. They were already buying a large percentage of their food from the east because, with a wave of the pen, a large amount of Russian food became "certified" organic - and Europe does no surprise spot testing to see if food really only uses ancient pesticides and genetic engineering techniques.

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What does it mean when you have rectal cancer that can no longer be detected by PET scans, MRI, or endoscopy? It means you no longer have cancer.

And that is the case in a small study (n=18) in New England Journal of Medicine which detailed results of  the checkpoint inhibitor dostarlimab. Eight doses over six months at $11,000 per dose means not only sparing patients chemo, radiation, and surgery, it means saving the health care system millions per patient.

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One thing electric car owners who have lost the mystique tell you is that you live your life around them. Some report going to a store like Costco to charge their cars, they need new service panels at their house, and one owner famously blew up his Tesla with dynamite rather than pay $22,000 to replace the batteries when they wore out. An article in the Wall Street Journal was by someone excited to rent an electric car for a trip, only to find they spent more time charging it than sleeping.

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As the twentythree regular readers of this blog know [(c) A.Manzoni], in recent times I have moved the main focus of my research to advanced applications of deep learning to fundamental science. That does not mean that I am not continuing to participate in the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider - that remains the main focus of my research; but it does mean that what remains of my brain functionalities is mostly invested in thinking about future applications of today's and tomorrow's computer science innovations. 

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When people from more normal states ask me about living in California, I tell them all the good things and the weird things people here are true.
When it comes to science, though, it's all weird. We charge more for cars that help nothing in emissions, we have 100,000 cancer warning labels on everything from coffee to corkboards, and we have to get exemptions from EPA to have unlimited natural gas pollution because we mandate and subsidize solar that doesn't work, and we can't allow rich people in Malibu to have brownouts.

But legally declaring that bees are fish is next level kooky, even for America's most anti-science state.

When people from more normal states ask me about living in California, I tell them all the good things and the weird things people here are true.
When it comes to science, though, it's all weird. We charge more for cars that help nothing in emissions, we have 100,000 cancer warning labels on everything from coffee to corkboards, and we have to get exemptions from EPA to have unlimited natural gas pollution because we mandate and subsidize solar that doesn't work, and we can't allow rich people in Malibu to have brownouts.

But legally declaring that bees are fish is next level kooky, even for America's most anti-science state.

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The birth and ultimate fate of the 13.7 billion year old universe is a subject that has intrigued scientists since the dawn of civilization.

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There is some produce advice coming from the activist camp yet again, but what they are selling is rotten.

A recent paper senior author'ed by famed organic industry proponent Dr. Michael N. Antoniou raised an alarm about insecticide and herbicide residues found in the fecal microbiome of 65 twins in the United Kingdom. The big problem with it is that it preys on modern science journalists not knowing that dose matters. Any detection of any chemical that can kill a rat at high doses is correlated to pathology in humans, despite that being nothing close to reality.

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Smoking is a legitimate class 1 carcinogen, determined by the International Agency for Research on Cancer before they were hijacked by activist epidemiologists out to scare people about the modern world.

Yet it is not a magic bullet. Only 10 percent of smokers will get lung cancer, which does not sound like a lot, but it is actually a high amount - greater than alcohol or obesity. Yet it is so obviously toxic it seems like the cancer rates should be much higher. 

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The general public sees terms like 'endangered', 'rare', and even 'extinct' used so interchangeably it's easy to believe there is little science involved. There isn't. While most of the science community has used a percentage of its range lost for being endangered, more activist academics placed on committees during political allied administrations - 70 percent of all endangered species listings were done by just two presidents - have now declared species should be endangered if a computer simulation says their habitat may become impacted during the next century.

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Antivirals, such as Merck’s molnupiravir and Pfizer’s nirmatrelvir, are given to people infected with COVID-19 when prescribed by a doctor or as part of a clinical trial. Yet entire websites exist that sell it without prescription anyway.

COVID-19 caused numerous parts of culture to flip. In the United States, the left abandoned their historical anti-vaccine camp while the right took up the old 'needs more testing' position of their opposition. The poor began to feel like the rich were given early access to treatments and even that some treatments were being casually dismissed by epidemiologists without being tested enough. That has led to a black market. In England, a website for molnupiravir offers patients generic versions online without medical supervision.

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Sweden is often lauded for its gender equality. The gender gap in unpaid (house)work is narrow.

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The downside to political mandates and subsidies for alternative energy is they place consumers in peril; and when a power grid does go down adjuvant energy sources like solar and wind can't "blackstart" without short circuits and faults.

With conventional energy, grid failures are not only far less a concern, they are readily recoverable. The normal step-by-step recovery process takes time but is all relatively easy to control. Start up the turbines, use them to spin generators and watch the electrons flow steadily and predictably to re-energize a grid and withstand short circuits and other faults.

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On June 17, 1972, Washington, D.C., police arrested five men for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Although the administration’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, dismissed the crime as a “third-rate burglary,” its scope would grow to consume Richard Nixon’s presidency and then bring it to an end 26 months later.

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