Science 2.0

Films have been common for over a century and a new paper laments that for much of that time men have been the unhinged scientists with a 'God complex', because by not having more 'mad' women in the 1930s, modern Artificial Intelligence routines are perpetuating gender stereotypes.

When you think of 'mad scientist' you probably do think of a man, and the authors argue that is a symptom of deeper sexism; so AI, which is going to pick a spot in brute force style and converge on answers from there, will perpetuate it. And that is true, except the issue is well-known and easy to work around, even for today's limited unintelligent AI.

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In the past I have talked about the GMO candy I wish they'd make for Halloween, and all of the carcinogens in a 100% Organic Non-GMO Project Thanksgiving Dinner, but today I get to talk about the best pot for Valentine's Day.

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When you think of relaxing, you probably don't think of Washington, DC. Contrary to beliefs by many in the 50 states, Washington, DC employees, overwhelmingly political staffers, are very nice. They hate each other as part of the job, like Sam and Ralph in "Don't Give Up the Sheep", by Chuck Jones for Warner Bros.(1) They then clock out and are lovely, usually to each other but almost always to everyone else.

And they work hard, usually for little money. While career government jobs tend to pay better than the private sector, for Congressional staffers it is somewhere between earning nothing and having a poverty lifestyle in one of America's most wealthy places.

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During the Trump administration, it was discovered that the Obama administration had let Chinese efforts to manipulate US academics go unchecked while highlighting that the Russian government was funding domestic environmental groups in order to subvert US national gas and agriculture - energy and food being Russia's chief exports to Europe.

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For as long as wheat flour has been used for food, a small number of people have been allergic to the gluten in it. These celiac disease sufferers experience stomach pain, nausea and even intestinal damage. More recently, gluten-free food became a new diet craze and while it was ridiculous biologically, it turned gluten-free food into a diverse $4 billion market, which was good for the celiac community.

Flour can now be made from banana peels, almonds and various grains and new work adds sweet potatoes into the mix.

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Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland and dowager Queen of France, returned to Scotland in 1561 a foreigner in the land she ruled. She married again and gave birth to a son, the future James VI, before being implicated in her husband's murder and deposed.

It only got worse after that. She escaped her imprisonment a year later and fled to England seeking help from Queen Elizabeth, but since Mary was the daughter of Henry VIII's sister, she had a claim to the throne of England also. And since Henry VIII had created a competitor to the Catholic church in order to run off with all the women he wanted (he was the head of the Anglican church and could annul anything he liked) Elizabeth was disliked by Catholics.

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A new study found that a cup of coffee with milk may create a combination of proteins and antioxidants that doubles the anti-inflammatory properties in immune cells. 

That doesn't mean you should listen to 'food is medicine' advocates and start putting dairy in everything, this was a cell study, which is even lower than studies in mice on the human relevance scale.

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For decades, the anti-vaccine movement was squarely on the left. Anti-vaccine, anti-cell-phone, anti-everything lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was even on the short list for a cabinet position in the Obama administration before we got Democrats who cared about science and reason to join us in pushing back on that, leaving only over-representation of UFO believers and a guy who thought girls can't do math as part of the concern.

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Thalattosuchians are ancient relatives of the ancestors of modern-day crocodiles, a biological aunt if you will, and part of the head, backbone, and limbs of Turnersuchus hingleyae have been found on what paleontologists call the Jurassic Coast, in Dorset of the United Kingdom.

The name derives from Paul Turner and Lizzie Hingley, who discovered the fossil in 2017. The ending “suchus,” is the Latinized form of “soukhos,” Greek for crocodile. 

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A lot of people went into 2023 hoping to lose some weight. It's no surprise. Putting it on is easy and rich countries make delicious food at affordable prices while our culture has not yet overcome our biological mandate to eat because animals are programmed to be unsure when the next meal will be.

If you went into 2023 trying some miracle diet - keto, gluten-free, Mediterranean, et al. - you have probably already failed. Yet each of those diets has proponents because it worked for them individually. With enough individual anecdotes epidemiologists will find correlation using food frequency questionnaires and claim it's data.

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In 1994, the term “atmospheric river” appeared in a paper to describe narrow amounts of atmospheric water vapor across the mid-latitudes but now a week doesn't go by without a weather forecaster on the local news claiming it is hitting their viewers.

The catchy name was new but the phenomenon was well-known prior to that. Scientists had long known that how moisture is transported through the atmosphere makes a difference in snowpacks and floods. The "Pineapple Express" is a well-known current from Hawaii to California and early analyses of climate changed were criticized for not controlling during those or events like El Nino.

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Sixteen-year-old Karl is seen for the first time in my optometry practice. He was referred to me for a fluctuating vision problem. During his examination, I saw signs suggesting he may have diabetes, which could have explained the fluctuating vision. This suspicion became a reality when his family doctor confirmed the diagnosis. Karl’s world was turned upside down.

As an optometrist, I invite you to dive into a reality that should concern us all.

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An epidemiological look at 1,981 women who reported a positive SARS-CoV-2 test found that those with pre-infection healthy lifestyle had a substantially lower "risk" of the post–COVID-19 condition known as 'long COVID.' 

It is just correlation but it brings to light concerns about how much of an impact co-morbidities and lifestyle had on the effects of SARS-CoV-2 and lingering effects. And how much benefit health care workers would have derived from healthier lifestyles prior to the pandemic.

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As technology continues to advance, it will one day be possible to grow organs and even faces from a patient's own stem cells. Until then there are transplants from donors.

Such donors are often anonymous but in the case of Belgium's first facial transplant, that isn't really possible. A recent "interpretive phenomenological analysis" of the experience of family members of the deceased tissue donor may provide insight for what to expect in the future and how to prepare. 

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Some food grown in the US, especially high-cost luxuries like almonds, are pollinated using bees. Since bees are most often rented and transported for such purposes, keeping them alive is important to owners and growers. As their value for higher-cost foods has grown, so have bee numbers; they are up 85 percent in the last 60 years. You would just never know it if your source is Greenpeace, so when you use verbiage identical to Greenpeace press releases in an academic paper press release your work is going to be suspect. And that is a paper on bee deaths we'll discuss today.

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I am currently spending some time in South America, where I came to join my wife who was performing in Santiago in a contemporary opera (Sun and Sea) featured in the Centro Cultural de la Moneda, in the city center -and in a place that 50 years ago was the theatre of the brutal subversion of democracy by the hands of the fascists led by dictator Augusto Pinochet.

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Most people go into relationships intending to be monogamous, or at least convincing themselves they can remain faithful, but with cheap travel and dating apps, any small problem can become a permanent schism.

A new paper sought to understand if virtual reality can be used to examine the circumstances that will help people in a monogamous relationship resist the temptations of infidelity.

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It is easy to believe ants disperse and walk randomly until they find something they want, but a new paper says they may have a more methodical approach.

At least one species of rock ant, Temnothorax rugatulus, doesn’t walk randomly at all. Instead, their search combines systematic meandering with random walks interspersed. They alternate left and right turns on a relatively regular length scale of roughly three body lengths.

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SIR, shorthand for Susceptible people, Infected people, and Recovered people, modeling is, along with R0, a rule of thumb for disease epidemiology but it failed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with three coronavirus pandemics since 2003 they are the new normal, so the race is on to make better predictive analytics and restore public confidence.

A new model used COVID-19 data for calibration and integrated SIR compartment modeling in time and a point process modeling approach in space–time, while also taking into account age-specific contact patterns. To do this, they used a two-step framework that allowed them to model data on infectious locations over time for different age groups.

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Tom Girardi, the lawyer whose big claim to fame was a game of chicken with Pacific Gas&Electric over a chemical detected in the water of a small town in the Mojave, was long suspected of being ethically challenged, but as long as he was sticking it to corporations it wasn't a concern for journalists.

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