Science 2.0

Wavelengths Of Light Are Why CO2 Cools The Upper Atmosphere But Warms Earth News Account Mon, 05/11/2026 - 04:43 Categories Atmospheric

The Supreme Court recently issued another ruling that seeks to end racial discrimination. most recently in specially-created political districts. What has not been an issue, because it was not obvious like universities and Louisiana politics, is how grants get chosen.

A new study says that there was a component of racial favoritism in science funding as well, and it's only been revealed in the wake of NIH grant cuts.

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We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology laughs at that notion. The next time you go on vacation, a new tool can show you how many places your vacation destination has been. 

Paleolatitude.org can do that, right down to the movements of small tectonic and ‘lost continents’ now called Greater Adria, the Tethys Himalayas or Argoland, which we know as  folded rocks in the mountain ranges of the Mediterranean, the Himalayas, and Indonesia. 

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One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than rolls of dice suggest. A new study of the mimicry of several distantly-related South American rainforest butterfly and moth species with similar wing color patterns that may warn away predators (it's not a costumed bluff, the moths and butterflies are actually toxic to birds) found that they reused the same two genes - ivory and optix - to evolve near identical color patterns.

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of individuals, companies, and NGOs, from California to Minnesota to Massachusetts, have come under investigation for fraud in taking money from the federal government.

Now the Department of Justice is investigating an insider in Dr. David Morens, M.D., a career advisor inside the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which came into controversy when it was learned that they had funded gain of function research in the Wuhan Lab where SARS-CoV-2 may have erupted.

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There are many hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter and one idea to explore how strongly hypothetical dark photons interact with normal photons wouldn't even involve a new and expensive dedicated facility, says Tokyo Metropolitan University Associate Professor Wen Yin.

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Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific determination of what that even means.

There are metrics but standard 0-to-10 scales and questionnaires are subjective and basically only useful for justifying treatments to insurance companies, they are clinically not much help.

Pain patients were demonized by the Obama administration in their war on Big Pharma and "opiods" that many in Congress now claim to support and that may be why both doctors and patients minimize their symptoms on official forms. No patient wants to be told their pain is just recreational desire while doctors are the easy targets for government. That plus general recall bias and confusion about what a pain scale really means clouds the issue.

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An analysis of 6.14 million maternal-child health records  has linked prescription medications to higher rates of Autism Spectrum Disorder in offspring. 

Sterol biosynthesis–inhibiting medications (SBIMs) inhibit the cholesterol synthesis pathway and are include antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, beta-blockers and statins; aripiprazole, atorvastatin, bupropion, buspirone, fluoxetine, haloperidol, metoprolol, nebivolol, pravastatin, propranolol, rosuvastatin, sertraline, simvastatin, cariprazine and trazodone. 

These include some of the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States, accounting for more than 400 million annual prescriptions. 

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As some of the long-time readers of this blog know, in this column I have occasionally discussed probability calculations in the context of gambling and betting. A long time ago I also famously won a $1000 bet on the LHC not discovering any new physics. Below I will mention a similar bet that ended up not being agreed upon by the parties, for the sake of discussing a subtle effect one has to worry about when placing bets: the selection bias. 

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Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is also Lenin's birthday. 

That's not coincidence. The leader of the first Earth Day was not a politician, as the movement has greenwashed Democratic U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson into being, yet credible journalists and an alarming number of commenters will invoke the Earth Day site or some anonymous Snopes blogger or even Wikipedia(!) and claim the primary sources from 56 years ago are wrong. 

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If a lot of the food and health claims you read and hear today seem like things left over from the 1970s, that's because they are. The food activist community, vegetarians and other diet groups, rebranded their beliefs as Make America Health Again (MAHA) after former Natural Resources Defense Council and pillar of the Democratic party Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. switched sides and joined Republicans in the Trump administration, but they are the same claims that were psychological platforms of progressives.

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On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became the first to have his pitch speed measured during a game. Rockwell International experts clocked the ball velocity at 100.8 miles per hour.

That was the fastest pitch ever recorded.

Yet last season over 50 pitchers in Major League Baseball threw 100 MPH and 140 more hit that velocity in the minor leagues. In September of 2010, Aroldis Chapman threw 105.1 MPH. Clearly, pitchers have gotten a lot faster, due to superior training and better scouting identifying athletes who will excel at pitching and getting them to play baseball rather than basketball or something else. 

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Just a few years ago, there were concerns that minorities like blondes and redheads were going extinct. The future belonged to Miss Clairol because they're recessive genes and with just five generations of bad biological rolls, you could have less chance of Scottish hair than Senator Elizabeth Warren has of being Native American.
It may be that scientists just weren't seeing the signals.

Instead of going extinct, a study of 10,016 newer ancient West Eurasian genomes, plus 5,820 existing ancient sequences and 6,438 modern ones finds that red hair and fair skin have become more common over the last 10,000 years, not less. Evolution not only didn't slow down in that time, natural selection could those traits to speed up over the last 4,000 years.

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At what point is enforced identification with what is obviously a collapsing system called out by people on the inside of once-powerful industries?

Steelworkers once believed there was no limit to what they could grab from corporations, even autoworkers made that error. Twinkies went bankrupt to get out of union control and start over. Yet no one on the floor believe that would happen.

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Do you have a master in Science, and want to start a Post-Doc position directly? You can have it, in Padova (Italy), to work with me on the PHINDER project, an EIC-funded Pathfinder grantee.
I am offering a two-year position for research in nanophotonics-powered neuromorphic computing for particle detector development at INFN, Sezione di Padova. The call will open soon, so you should watch this space if you are interested.

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Honeybees get attention in environmental fundraising campaigns because people don't understand pollination.(1)

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A graphic from the Washington Post about motorcycle deaths is making the rounds again on Twitter, and it will set off a lot of comments by people who can't put it in context, so let's go back to the source paper.

Here is what you need to know:

If you ride 15 miles every day on a motorcycle for a year, you have a 1 in 860 chance of dying.

If you fly 500 miles every day on an airplane for a year, you have a 1 in 85,000 chance of dying.

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During the Obama administration, the credibility of the US Centers for Disease Control went into serious decline. Though it only became evident to most how incompetent career government bureaucrats were when COVID-19 hit - they denied it was a pandemic and said the President was being xenophobic for wanting to ban travel from China(1) - those of us inside the system saw that they were long not equipped to help with much at all. If you need six weeks to tell the public lettuce has E. coli, basically five weeks after people had eaten the lettuce, you are not a public health agency, you are just a government job works program.

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Running a pro-science nonprofit is a poor business model. Especially compared to lawyer groups like Environmental Working Group or rich deniers like Greenpeace.

'Your food is safe' is a terrible call to action but 'evil chemical corporations are killing you' gets the money rolling in - even though the former is true and the latter is a paranoid conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.

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Social authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people do with the government assistance they are now reliant upon. It keeps those in control in positions of power. The most recent example is with government funding for food coming attached to strings telling people what they can buy with the money.

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