Science 2.0

If your child is allergic to milk, flavored plant juice alternatives like rice and soy, when fortified, can fill in some gaps, but outside necessity, they are not nutritionally equal to dairy, no matter what marketing departments claim.

Once upon a time, the US government protected consumers with Standards of Identity, they sued a cheese company for putting how much milk was in a slice of its cheese because of even the inference it had as much calcium as milk. 

No more. Squeeze any plant and add some vanilla flavor and you can call it milk and Washington, DC does not think that is deceptive.

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In wealthy western breadbaskets like France and the United States, environmental groups who get donations from the $130 billion organic food industry claim it is viable everywhere else too. It's not just that they don't understand agriculture or science, though that is most of it. It is that they don't realize their modern White Savior Colonialism puts Africans at risk.

There is a reason that as Kenya has gotten better about feeding itself, none of it is using the "organic" process - that whole market is just 0.69% and is mostly people who wish they had the money for pesticides. The reasons organic food don't work outside places where food is easy to grow involve climate, poor soil, limited water, and pests and diseases that ruin crops.

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Pew has announced they will no longer use 'generational labels' and instead use age cohorts. It makes sense demographically but it never made sense that anyone used them in the first place. 

When I was born, the Baby Boom was an event - a post-World War II increase in births due to soldiers returning home. But when they grew up they were reading the works of people who felt 'lost' because they hadn't been in World War II or the Depression, and dreary mopes like Kerouac and Ginsberg infected a whole lot of teenagers who wants to feel cheated too.

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Losing weight is challenging. But as anyone who has ever successfully lost weight knows, it’s avoiding weight re-gain that’s the real challenge.

This is true no matter what method you follow to lose weight. For example, studies show that people who follow very low calorie diets (between 800-1,200 calories per day) regain between 26% and 121% of their lost weight five years after treatment. People who follow behavioural weight management programs (such as WW, formerly Weight Watchers) regain between 30-35% of their lost weight after one year.

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The first investigation of the genomic diversity of individuals buried at Machu Picchu and adjacent places around Cusco, the Inca capital finds that the mitmas - slaves - and members of the empire who were forced to serve elites and lived, worked, and died at Machu Picchu, the renowned 15th century Inca palace in southern Peru, were a diverse community representing many different ethnic groups.

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Although researchers in fundamental science have a tendency to "stick to what works" and avoid disruptive innovations until they are shown to be well-tested and robust, the recent advances in computer science leading to the diffusion of deep neural networks, ultimately stemming from the large increases in performance of computers of the past few decades (Moore's law), cannot be ignored. And they haven't - the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, for instance, heavily used machine learning techniques to improve the sensitivity of the acquired particle signals in the ATLAS and CMS detectors.

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Unless you hate movies, you know this weekend was "Barbenheimer" - two highly regarded, very different films were on track to smash some records. And they did. "Barbie" did over $150 million while "Oppenheimer" did $80 million, a combined total unmatched for two competing opening weekends and "Oppenheimer was the first time a movie had exceeded $50 million when another opening went past $100 million.

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Summer is supposedly a period where people take it a tad easier, spend some vacation time away from anything that is work-related, and "tune out" of the deadlines and rythms of daily work activities that dominate their existence at other times of the year. 

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Predatory lawyers love trials by jury because they are almost certain to win. It won't help their clients much. There are some instances where they do get some money. The so-called "Erin Brockovich case" led to a settlement even though the company could easily show that the water was not harmful. Yet nearly three decades later the people who say their stories won the case lament they didn't receive much.

Meanwhile, one of the attorneys from the winning side is in jail for fraud. 

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Espresso is a coffee extraction process where hot water is forced through finely ground coffee at a barometric pressure of nine - which means nine times the usual pressure you feel at sea level, which translates to about 130 pounds per square inch, about 400 percent of your car tires.

Some people drink it diluted with water, an Americano, or with milk, as a latte. In modern times, some people even drink it cold. If an in vitro (cell culture) study holds up, people may even drink it to help ward off Alzheimer's disease. 

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With allied epidemiologists placed inside the US Environmental Protection Agency, and scientists pushed to the side, environmentalists feel like they are about to get a win when it comes to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that have been common for 80 years.

And it will be a win - for the yacht payments of their lawyers. For the public, we will be no safer, we're not being harmed now, but the costs to 'clean up' a problem we don't have will be onerous. And we're all going to be harmed by that.

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In recent years, there have been efforts to reconsider cancers of the uterine cervix oropharyngeal, penile, vulvar and anal as sexually transmitted diseases.

The reason is because of their link to human papillomavirus (HPV). HPV is everywhere and has been longer than is even known, there are over 100 types, and most of the time if anything happens it is benign lesions such as warts and condyloma. But a few thousand times per year it is more serious and subtypes like HPV16 can lead to malignant transformed cells which may develop into precancerous lesions or even cancer. In about a third of cases those cancers are linked to HPV and an HPV infection can be transmitted during sexual activity.

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Environmental Working Group, the Extinction Rebellion of affordable produce, is always in a war on strawberries - unless they only contain pesticides their organic industry corporate donors use or sell.

For the scientifically literate, those with at least the intellect of 17th century peasants who understood 'the dose makes the poison', strawberries are healthy and safe. as is the rest of the EWG Dirty Dozen list that just happens to never include organic food sprayed with toxic chemicals the day it's shipped to Whole Foods.

This year, strawberries will be even better than usual. There are two reasons: rain and a cooler spring. Those mean larger fruit, and also extended shelf life, which means less waste. That is a win on every level.

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There is a lot of concern about the ability of ChatGPT to replace lower-skilled workers but it will probably make them better. In the 19th century a phrase went, "God man but Sam Colt made them equal" and ChatGPT could give those without inherent gifts that same leg up soon.

The days when you could seem smart by having a good memory and confident delivery style may be over, which means greater equity for all.

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Atherosclerosis, a condition that causes arteries to thicken, is a risk factor for a number of diseases that as a group are the leading cause of death in the U.S. What it really means, why it happens, and why it matters is unclear, since nearly half of Americans are told they have it.

Understanding its progression and possible impact of fatty buildup in the arteries is important, as is calcification. A new pilot is geared toward learning where that calcification comes from, and if perhaps its origin is inside the arteries.

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The US FDA has approved Opill (norgestrel) for oral contraception as an OTC product, the first daily oral contraceptive approved for use without a prescription. That means as soon as the company can get it in drug stores, convenience stores, grocery stores, and online, they will.

According to surveys, half of pregnancies each year are unwanted, but in the modern health care system it can be difficult to get an appointment for a prescription, so this will make contraception readily available without waiting months. 

Norgestrel is well-established, it has been available for prescription use since 1973, so the company just had to show consumers would use it without as doctor telling them what was on the label. 

A new case study sounds the alarm that per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are detectable in Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The authors say the levels are alarmingly high.

What does that mean? No studies have shown health issues related to PFAS yet and if they were a health concern, it would be known after 100 years. Yet cancer is not up, no environmental or lifestyle health issues are up except obesity, and that is due to an abundance of affordable food even for the world's poor.

PFAS are so ubiquitous they are detectable in the Ittoqqortoormiit villagers of East Greenland, which means if they are harmful people should be dropping left and right, yet the only casualties so far are mice who get 10,000 times the exposure humans will get in their lives.

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A survey of over one thousand Tinder users found that were not interested in meeting anyone, and nearly two-thirds were already married or "in a relationship."

Instead of being used to find dates, people instead it has a similar appeal as social media - a source of entertainment, distraction and self-esteem.

The data were 1,387 English-speaking Tinder users, ages 17 to 84, asking about their motivations for using the app; the number of matches and offline dates they had; their relationship status; their selectiveness in choosing partners; and, among other factors, psychological measures like impulsivity, depression, loneliness and self-esteem.

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Food waste is a major problem in the developed world. People new to buying organic food are annoyed at how quickly it spoils but what if that wilted brown lettuce could be converted into energy?

Anaerobic digestion hasn't been done on a large scale, the numbers don't work, but academics say it could. In a numerical model. The authors looked at supply chain logistics - potential sites, transportation, production, and facility costs, as well as revenue and return on investments.

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A new paper laments fine particulate matter in Asia. which is like worrying about third-hand smoke when actual smoking is still killing people there.

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