Science 2.0

There is a pattern to junk science that borders on disinformation. Lay out all of the things you want gullible science journalists to repeat in the press release but then at the bottom of the actual journal article concede that your statistical link is simply an exploratory results and that associations you found cannot show causation.

Like that trace levels of air pollution cause psychiatric disorders.

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In 2016's "Tom Clancy's The Division", eco-terrorists bioengineer a fast-acting mutation of Smallpox in order to cull humanity by using the greed of people - they placed it on a fomite, dollar bills in Manhattan's largest department store.

Game reviewers at the time were as perplexed by that but to the science community the rationale made perfect sense. Environmental groups that want to cull humanity want the culling to be among regard as less fit, even if they don't admit it. By using dollar bills they would be targeting people who don't have credit cards. The poor, not organic food shoppers that listen to NPR.  So this modern form of eugenicists and social Darwinists could eliminate non-elites and slap consumerism.

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Protein, fat, and sugar are all essential components of a balanced human diet but too many calories of any will cause obesity. And since more and more health care in the U.S. is subsidized by other taxpayers, it has increasingly been argued that the people paying have the right to tell you how to live.

Meanwhile, governments that want more taxes but don't want to risk a vote can simply put a tax on certain foods.

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A new Urban Institute analysis finds that Buprenorphine prescriptions rose substantially in states that expanded Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act, colloquially called Obamacare, after the President who got its legislation pushed through Congress.

That may be a statistical blip exploited by opponents the same way agenda-driven epidemiologists create rows of diseases and columns of foods and chemicals to create the appearance of a harmful link, it may be that patients suffered quietly because they couldn't afford it.

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Very few in the plant juice dairy substitute industry want to go without mentioning milk but they are in a legal and logical pickle; they simultaneously contend that no one is deceived into thinking their products are milk while also claiming it is absolutely essential to their business that they be able to use the word milk in their marketing.

Having never watched any of them milk an almond or a soybean or a kernel of rice, I can't say how close their process is to actual milking but I am skeptical. However, dairy farming also has its own problems with honesty, as a lawsuit against Tillamook hopes to show. An Animal Legal Defense Fund lawsuit in Oregon says they are being deceptive, perhaps like the plant juice trade groups and companies they represent. 

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Trial lawyer Melanie Benesh of Environmental Working Group has created a new top list - this time it's ways the U.S. government (well, only Republicans, it is EWG and they make a lot of money suing and settling when Democrats are in the White House) has “undermined chemical safety,” which includes not banning chlorpyrifos, claiming she has evidence of risk to children.

The attorney did not cite what evidence that was, but lawyers don't need evidence. They will pay activists like Texas A&M Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences Professor Ivan Rusyn to testify that mouse studies and statistical correlation are enough. 

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Another load of sensationalist nonsense from the Daily Express scaring people, and then a tweet from Elon Musk replying to another Daily Express article so promoting it to his many followers, and then Daily Express does his retweet of their article as headline news.

I’ve had many PM’s today asking if Didymos or Apophis are a threat to Earth. No, neither of them are, it’s NONSENSE!

If you click through, and read to the end, the Daily Express even quote ESA saying this:

Luckily, Didymos is not an Earth-crossing asteroid, and there is no possibility that the deflection experiment could create an impact hazard.

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Roopkund Lake is a relatively small body of water 5,000 meters above sea level in the Himalayan Mountains.

It's also home to the skeletal remains of several hundred individuals of unknown origin and that led to a lot of speculation about how it came to be. Were they part of a massacre or sacrifice? A cataclysmic event?

No, people just threw bodies in the lake throughout history, according to analysis of 38 skeletons found there. One group of 23 individuals have ancestry that falls within the range of variation of present-day South Asians, while 14 have ancestry typical of the eastern Mediterranean and one individual with Southeast Asian-related ancestry. 

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In Lviv, Ukraine, tourism is booming. It's a UNESCO world heritage site that today would be considered racist ghettos due to strictly segregated neighborhoods but which have been rebranded as multicultural Polish, Ukrainian, Jewish and Armenian quarters.

Like other tourist places, it has coffee shops and craft beer pubs within walking distance of your AirBnB but not everyone is pleased by this heritage-based urban renewal.

Elderly people who liked and perhaps even thrived under the communist dictatorship of the past feel nostalgic for old tombs. And some younger people who only see the USSR in books may feel the same way, that "museification" - like Williamsburg in Virginia - is the only way to go for heritage conservation.

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The U.S. Department of Education has opened more than two dozen investigations into universities such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, Yale, Princeton, Rice and more because they offer female-only scholarships, awards, and professional development workshops.  But they are not alone. A new analysis claims 84 percent of schools discriminate on awards when it comes to sex.

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Viking 1, an unmanned U.S. probe headed for Mars, was launched on this day in 1975 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, which is Brevard county on the Atlantic Ocean and across the Banana River east of Merritt Island where Kennedy Space Center is which is itself east Titusville across the Indian River.

Yet even though Viking 1 took off from Cape Canaveral, formerly called Cape Kennedy, it did not take off from its more famous adjacent site, Kennedy Space Center, formerly called NASA Launch Operations Center. It instead took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station headquartered at Patrick Air Force Base, actual Cape Canaveral, not Merritt Island, which had once been renamed Cape Kennedy Air Force Station. 

Sound confusing? 

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The Chandrayaan 2 lunar mission by India, set to visit the Moon's south polar region, has entered lunar orbit. It was launched aboard their own GSLV Mk-III rocket.

The lunar South Pole is especially interesting because of the lunar surface area here that remains in shadow is much larger than that at the North Pole. There is a possibility of the presence of water in permanently shadowed areas around it. In addition, South Pole region has craters that are cold traps and contain a fossil record of the early Solar System.

Chandrayaan-2 will attempt to soft land the lander -Vikram and rover- Pragyan in a high plain between two craters, Manzinus C and Simpelius N, at a latitude of about 70° south.

Mars may seem hospitable only for cute robots now, but 3 to 4 billion years ago it was warm enough to have rainstorms and flowing water, followed by a longer cold period where the water froze - a lot like earth. 

Scientists have long known that water was abundant on ancient Mars, but there has been no consensus on whether liquid water was common, or whether it was largely frozen in ice. Was the temperature high enough to allow the water to flow? Did this happen over an extended period, or just occasionally? Was the surface a desert or frozen? Warm conditions make it much more likely that life would have developed independently on the surface of ancient Mars.

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If you read English newspaper The Guardian, you will be convinced farming is killing us all. Instead of being the negative they persistently insist, food is a basic resource, we will literally die without it, and the modern world is creating more food at affordable cost with less environmental strain and less energy than once even dreamed possible. Actual data show all land use combined, types of farming, forestry, etc. are only 23 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and not all greenhouse gases are equal.

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It's never easy to joke about people in face masks inciting violence to prevent violence they claim will happen due to other people, so I won't make fun of the Antifa group that says they oppose racism while engaging in a whole lot of "isms" of their own, like fascism, when I make fun of Extinction Rebellion for pretending to promote science when really they are the equivalent of rioters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention who claimed they were all about the Summer of Love.

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Secular modernity requires the weeding out of all the baloney. Yet it’s not clear that we are any less credulous than before, notes Emily Ogden. an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, in Aeon magazine.

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If you want to claim bacon is as hazardous to your health as plutonium and mustard gas, go to the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, Ramazzini Institute, or just go right to the trial lawyers many of them are either consulting for already or at least hope to soon.

But even they are not going to rush to defend this paper claiming preventing cavities leads to lower IQ. Oh wait, they will, some of this stuff even comes from NIEHS.(1)

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In 2006, when Science 2.0 began, it felt like the world was ready for a writing network composed of scientists. There had already been two attempts, one failed and one wildly successful, albeit more focused on cultural issues than science.

The reason it felt time was because the public didn't trust journalists, who were (and are) often overtly partisan while scientists didn't trust journalists because they were (and are) often wrong. Why not make scientists the journalists?

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An archaeological excavation on Mount Zion in Jerusalem has found clear evidence of the Babylonian conquest from 587/586 B.C. 

The discovery is of a deposit including layers of ash, arrowheads dating from the period, as well as Iron Age potsherds, lamps and a significant piece of period jewelry - a gold and silver tassel or earring. There are also signs of a significant Iron Age structure in the associated area, but the building, beneath layers from later periods, has yet to be excavated.

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The use of social media is ubiquitous in today's culture. A recent Pew Research report found that, among 18 to 29-year-olds, over 90 percent use some form of social media while essentially 100 percent of young Americans (ages 18-29) have mobile phones, 94 percent of which are smartphones. 

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