Science 2.0

If you insist you will only eat berries picked by hand near a stream, you are virtue signaling to other wealthy people that you have more money than than they do, while masking it in a halo of claiming to care about taste or renewability or other nature.

No one is fooled. That is why restaurants and consumers who fetish-ize wild caught fight while claiming it is more nutritious or tastes better are so cloying. Sure, there can be differences in taste, just like if you give a chicken different feed, but that is easily solvable, and has been, like in the chicken industry.

read more

The world is producing more food using fewer pesticides than ever, thanks to modern science. The gap between modern pesticide usage and organic food pesticides needed per calorie of food got so large, up to 600% more organic pesticides used, that California stopped itemizing organic pesticides separately to improve the optics of the organic industry.

read more

Perhaps the most important thing to get right from the start, in most statistical problems, is to understand what is the probability distribution function (PDF) of your data. If you know it exactly -something that is theoretically possible but only rarely achieved in practice- you are in statistical heaven: you can use the maximum likelihood method for parameter estimation, and you can get to understand a lot about the whole problem. 

read more

It's no secret that cats have the same α2,3-linked (SAα2,3) sialic acid receptor as birds, which means their mortality from bird flu which acts via that receptor is 50%. Or that raw pet food, raw milk, and organic chickens that refuse medicine are key transmitters of the disease outside the wild.

Why are you still buying that stuff? Why did you ever? 

read more

Environmental lawyers, especially lawyers at Natural Resources Defense Council, exist to sue companies and to have casus belli they need to suggest corporations are killing us all. It is no surprise that NRDC has hired lots of lawyers who are anti-vaccine, anti-cell-phone, anti-food (ingredients, colors, the type of seed), anti-nuclear, etc.

If you don't know any scientists or Republicans, and NRDC employs neither, it is easy to demonize them because you never have them looking at you over lunch.(1)

NRDC knows a Republican insider now. Their former lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is part of the Trump administration and the "mainstream" positions they prize, that food science is evil, medicine is evil, technology is evil, are becoming government policy.

read more

       The book is author Alex Hannaford’s lament about changes in Austin, Texas, since his initial visit to the city in 1999. This at first spurred your reviewer, who moved to Austin in 1969, to think, “1999? Well, isn’t that just too precious?”

read more

The only real way to wipe out H5N1, the bird flu that has been ruining egg prices since last year, is to kill off all the wild birds. That is not practical but what we can do is stop buying raw pet food. All of it. Now. And never start again. You will kill your cat if it is transmitted in that food. And stop buying raw milk. All of it. Now. And never start again.

read more

Imagine if I put out a claim that I had prevented teens from playing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II" and therefore saving billions in dollars in future mental health care costs.

Well, I can, because COD:MWII has dropped a lot in usage from a few years ago. Sure, critics might claim it is an older game and new games come along and people switch to those, but if I am at FDA, none of that matters.

read more

When a tourist visits California, the first thing they notice getting off of the airplane is a warning sign that the material they are near will give them cancer. Then another one. Then another. Soon, they become invisible but not before people do searches to see how much more cancer Californians develop than everyone else.(1)


Not only will most things in Walmart have a cancer warning, the building itself can give you cancer. Photo: Hank Campbell

read more

After a decade of being thrown out by the courts and being slightly modified and enacted again, changes drastically expanding the definition of Waters of the United States (WOTUS) to include man-made ponds on family farms may finally be ending.

read more

The Trump administration announced a major milestone for the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory with the installation of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera on the telescope.

Next up is the final phase of testing before capturing "first look" images and then the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time will begin.

read more

Today, the best way to prevent malaria remains DDT. Though banned in the US by a politician over the objections of scientists, it is still recommended by the United Nations for use where malaria has not been wiped out. Our FDA even wrote the book on how to spray it in homes.

Despite 70 years of effort, viable affordable replacements remain elusive but a new program hopes LLMs could help find one. The  National Institutes of Health funded a proposal to use machine learning techniques combined with cheminformatics to help generate new mosquito repellents.

read more

 St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, founded by Catholic nuns in 1857, reports implant of Australia’s first BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart. Invented by Dr. Daniel Timms, it is a single moving part, no valves, and a no-contact suspension system, which means no mechanical wear, and the patient lasted over 100 days while waiting for an artificial heart. He even went home with it installed.

The work was led by Dr. Paul Jansz and the anonymous patient was sent home in February. He then received a donor heart early in March.

read more

Claims about occupational hazards, chemicals correlated to disease, occur every week, from non-stick spatulas to flame-retardant couches, and the group targeted more by those efforts than pregnant women are first responders like firefighters.

A new paper links gliomas in the brain or spinal cords to a specific mutation and then using epidemiological correlation to "suggest" cause from haloalkene, a common chemical in use for 600 years and in the 20th century in nearly every home with fire extinguishers, but then denying they are trying to suggest cause down at the bottom.

read more

(Image by Henry Reich)       

One thing, singular. Two or more things, plural.

Subjects must agree with verbs in number: It is, they are.

read more

I have a trans flag flying from my house but I completely understand concerns by women that they're being set back 60 years if someone born a biological man starts setting female swimming or boxing records. Women have their own sports because we turned scientific differences into policy. It created fairness.

If you're in a binary world you may have decided one thing about my beliefs in the first eight words of that paragraph and then something else after the rest of it. If you insist there is no binary in biological sex, I hope you at least consider the existence of irony in making sweeping generalizations about the psychology of people based on one issue.

read more

Winter is not over yet, but I am already busy fixing the details of some conferences, schools, and lectures I will give around Europe this summer. Here I wish to summarize them, in the hope of arising the interest of some of you in the relevant events I will attend to.

read more

The right-wing may have co-opted anti-vaccine beliefs from the left and changed Science Is a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy hysteria into Science Is A Vast Big Pharma Conspiracy but luckily most of the wealthy people are still in states like California, so the right hasn't taken up overspending on chickens that never had medicine and never will, or raw milk, or raw pet food.

Those are three giant preventable disease vectors for and the west coast is still doing all of them. The latest disease spreader for wealthy progressive elites is Wild Coast Raw of Olympia frozen Boneless Free Range Chicken Formula raw pet food for cats. It is probably contaminated with Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 also known as bird flu.  

read more

Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a molecule that provides blueprints for cells to make a protein that may be needed by the body. Though around for nearly 60 years before COVID-19 erupted from Wuhan, China, it didn't get a lot of attention from government-funding agencies, where the grant system most often means experiments likely to work rather than anything revolutionary,(1)

That all changed when Moderna said they could make a COVID-19 vaccine fast, they just needed the bloated federal government and its need to make companies spend 18 months getting approval for a font color on a product label to instead get out of the way. The Trump administration did just that and by the end of 2020 it was being rushed to those on the medical front lines.(2)

read more

For convenience, let’s say it started with Photoshop. That program made it obvious not only that we couldn’t believe our eyes any more, but that photographic evidence could no longer be admissible in court. Socioeconomic implications were even wider, as new industries popped up with products purporting to tell unretouched photos from photoshopped ones. (And the trademarked noun gave rise to a verb!)

read more