Science 2.0

France made wine famous - the prominent chemist Louis Pasteur set out to solve the spoilage problem the domestic wine industry faced and his success set off an international craze- but they didn't make it first.

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Frontpage image: Illustration of spherical explosion (kilonova) of two neutron stars (AT2017gfo/GW170817) made by Albert Sneppen.

STRONTIUM is one of those elements that get less coverage in chemistry courses all the way up to undergraduate level.  These days one is most likely to hear of it in the context of archaeology, for example looking to see if the strontium to calcium ratio in the teeth of Neolithic person X was different from that characteristic of the site of burial, suggesting that they might have grown up in a distant place before arriving at their final earthy destination.

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During the Obama administration, the government rightly exposed how Russia was using offshore donor advised funds to send dark money support to American environmental groups and NGOs undermining US science in energy and food, Russia's two biggest exports.

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Hershey is rolling out Reese’s Plant Based Peanut Butter Cups this month, and it is a great idea. Plant-based foods are all the rage - unless the entire market is about to collapse - and people who like vegan stuff are willing to overpay for food they can then annoy everyone at parties by going on and on about.

Weren't peanut butter cups already vegan? No, they contain milk and vegans say any milk produced by an animal is bad. This new thing swaps out the milk for highly-processed oats and continues their efforts to appeal to everyone with money to spend on their belief system.

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An environmental activist switched to an electric car. It cost $50,000, but wealthier people are fine with that if it is saving the planet, and she got a $7,500 rebate overwhelmingly paid for by poor people who can't afford electric cars. She says she did it because flowers are blooming two weeks early.

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A new analysis of energy use involving conventional fuels shows greenhouse gas emissions in the UK went down 3.4 percent. The bulk of that drop came due to coal but above-average temperatures helped. Unfortunately, so did record-high fuel prices, which means quality of life may have declined for the poor.

Certainly there has been no end to protests in the UK about the cost of energy but overall the economy has survived, which is proof that economies and conventional energy can be "decoupled."

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Farms have a lot of open land and that has made them ideal for solar power installations. For example, though it is in defiance of the bucolic imagery sold by food and solar marketing groups, which show lush farms with an old tractor on one side and panels on homes charging an $80,000 Tesla on the other, New York has large-scale solar installations on 40 percent of their farms while up to 84 percent of farms will be great for solar.

Not just because of open land but because farms make solar more efficient also.

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This weekend, 46 University of Massachusetts Amherst students were hospitalized after participating in a drinking game popularized by China's second most dangerous export this century, TikTok. 

The idea behind these "blackout rage gallons" - BRGs, pronounced "borgs" - is that a gallon of water and electrolytes will mitigate the after-effects of drinking 16 shots of a known carcinogenic central nervous system depressant. 

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NIMBY - not in my back yard - is an acronym for those allies who express support for a cause, as long as it is 'somewhere else.' Wind power, for example, is well-liked by people on the coasts of the US and Norway, until government decides to actually put wind power installations there. Then it's time to bring in Greta Thunberg.

In San Francisco, nearly 80 percent of residents say they want to help the homeless but routinely hire private security to patrol their own neighborhoods - to keep out the homeless.

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Muon tomography is an application of particle detectors where we exploit the peculiar properties of muons to create three-dimensional images of the interior of unknown, inaccessible volumes. You might also want to be reminded that muons are unstable elementary particles; they are higher-mass versions of electrons which can be found in cosmic ray showers or produced in particle collisions.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of confusion about what would help mitigate risk and what would not, and when rules seemed arbitrary (e.g. you can go to a tattoo parlor but not get a haircut) it may have caused resentment - and therefore quiet dissent.

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Smallpox is no longer with us, but what gets left out of United Nations history is that smallpox was eradicated in spite of the World Health Organisation saying it could never happen, not due to UN leadership. It was driven by US advocates who went around UN bureaucracy, all while being told it was a waste of time and money.

Polio has long been gone from the US as well, and the efforts that made it possible could help the world, but the challenges in achieving that are both cultural and structural.

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When you think about human evolution, there’s a good chance you’re imagining chimpanzees exploring ancient forests or early humans daubing woolly mammoths on to cave walls. But we humans, along with bears, lizards, hummingbirds and Tyrannosaurus rex, are actually lobe-finned fish.

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In early March of 2020, I was aghast that the newest James Bond film might be postponed due to the pandemic. It seemed an overreaction.

It is not that I denied there was a disease, I noted the death of a Chinese "Wuhan Flu" whistleblower when corporate media still said that concerns and calls to ban travel were racist and xenophobia. It is because I believed the science community had the best interests of the public at heart instead of politics, for once.

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An analysis of the 1.5 million-year-old cranium DAN5/P1, found at the Gona site in Ethiopia, has cranial cranial morphology which indicates that it belongs to the species Homo erectus but near the earliest African stage, where it is sometimes identified using the name H. ergaster.

The fossil is very small for these hominin groups and suggest that its cerebral morphology does not present any traits distinctive to the human genus: its proportions are similar to those of australopiths or species whose evolutionary position, and whether they are from our own lineage, remains to be determined, as is the case with H. habilis.

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DART, NASA’s successful double asteroid redirection test in September 2022, had an impact greater than engineers expected - and that means the ability to more accurately move asteroids on a collision course will be greater in the future.

An analysis of the results found the momentum was significantly enhanced by the recoil created from streams of particles produced by the impact.

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Food and energy are strategic resources and since conventional energy like oil is presumably finite, its extinction first said to be 30 years ago, the rationale has been to subsidize and mandate alternatives like solar and wind schemes.

Food is also subsidized because it is a strategic resource but the curve is going the other way. Instead of being depleted 'real soon' as environmental PR gurus like Jeremy Rifkin successfully convinced journalists to repeat about oil decades ago, we have so much food that for the first time in human history poor people can afford to be fat. And with affordable food, culture improves, as do lives. The world exceeded UN targets for improvement of the poor by nearly half a decade.

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Now that the Biden Department of Energy and his FBI have stated a lab leak in Wuhan is a plausible SARS-CoV-2 scenario, you hear a lot less about such claims being racist and xenophobic.

In 2020, though, such smears were common. I was not the only one to note that researchers had previously been convicted of selling lab animals to the Wuhan wet market and that China had taken down its coronavirus database and scrubbed the Wuhan wet market clean for nine months before letting a Beijing-picked team of UN investigators visit. For just four hours of pre-approved questions under the supervision of Chinese officials.

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In almost every case, someone being called a Nazi or Fascist on Twitter is being called such by someone who never knew any of those, and is probably a second or third generation descendant who didn't know any either. I had one grandfather who went across North Africa and one who occupied Japan but to my knowledge neither had any special claim to knowing about the Axis powers.

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Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects communication, social interaction, and behavior, with a prevalence of one in 54 children in the United States. While there is no cure for autism, there are several therapies that can help children with autism improve their communication, social skills, and behavior. However, autism is often discussed in ways that suggest that autistic people are subjects who cannot actively participate in their own treatment, and this has led to autism treatments that do not benefit autistic people being promoted.
What is Autism?

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