Science 2.0

Want to lose 16% of your retirement just like that? Run a computer simulation where the worst thing you fear is true.

A new paper sounds the alarm over a crash in virtual climate wealth. It isn't science, it is just a computer simulation and therefore more like dystopian 1960s fiction than science. 

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Though organic™ farmers sell bucolic imagery of hoeing by hand and sunsets over fields of corn, it is just marketing to the gullible. All farmers who make more than enough money to pay their real estate taxes(1) are high-tech gurus. They use real-time data on the health of their land and their crops, they want to use just enough product to get the most food with the least environmental strain.

It's a long way from the $3 billion environmental imagery of farmers with leaky backpacks drenching plants in science and cackling like Scrooge McDuck on a pile of coins about it.

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With former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dictating a lot of science policy for the Trump administration, anti-science activists have been quietly cheering even though they uniformly voted for his opposition.

They need a win. Claims that bees are dying off have been met with a resounding thud, we have more bees than at any time since records have been kept. Concerns about GMOs have fared as poorly. Trillions of animals have been fed using GMOs and neither any of them or the billions of people who ate food grown using them have gotten so much as a stomachache. Food activism likes to gloss over how often organic lettuce gives consumers E. coli.

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In wealthy countries, the richest and the aspirational well-off can afford to pay extra for food only grown using toxic pesticides they are assured are healthy for the planet, but the 99.99999% have to think about affordability.

Every time a chemical is removed due to manufactured outrage by environmental groups and the fifth columnists they get implanted inside presidential administrations, it is the poor that pay the price. Cereal crops are a staple for those worried about food security, and are the earliest victims of pathogens and pests. And then the first target for activists in a $3 billion industry devoted to scaring people about science solutions. 

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In 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration an Alzheimer’s therapy shown in clinical trials to modestly slow disease progression but side effects, brain swelling and bleeding, occurred in some.

Though clinical trials have taken twice as long and cost twice as much due to government regulations, they can't  cover everything and a successful doesn't mean broader demographics won't show different effects. Lawyers are gleeful at the opportunity to sue but they will be disappointed in the latest results for lecanemab. Adverse events associated with lecanemab treatment in clinic patients were rare and manageable.

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You've heard that you should get eight hours of sleep per night, a whole industry has built up trying to help people who can't do that, but like BMI, organic food, and 'alcohol in moderation is okay', there is no science to it.

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The human race has made huge progress in the past few thousand years, gradually improving the living condition of human beings by learning how to cure illness; improving farming; harvesting, storing, and using energy in several forms; and countless other activities. Progress is measured over long time scales, and on metrics related to the access to innovations by all, as Ford once noted. So it is natural for us to consider ourselves lucky to have lived "in the best of times". Why, if you were born 400 years ago, e.g., you would probably never even learn what a hot shower is! And even only 100 years ago you could have been watching powerless as your children died of diseases that today elicit little worry.

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Almost 2,000 years ago in modern-day Uttar Pradesh, India, someone deposited a cache of gems inside a reliquary (a container for holy relics), along with some bone fragments and ash. The gems were precious, but the bones and ash even more so, for according to an inscription on the reliquary, they belonged to Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.

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A Fallen Spacefarer Returns to Earth

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A few drops of saliva can now reveal what used to require a scalpel, a syringe or a scan.

Scientists have developed ways to analyze spit for the tiniest traces of illness – from mouth cancer to diabetes, and even brain diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Unlike blood tests or biopsies, saliva is easy to collect, painless and inexpensive. During the COVID pandemic, some countries used saliva-based testing for rapid screening.

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Humans are the only species on earth that uses language, combining sounds into words and words into sentence with infinite meanings.

We do this using linguistic rules for calls and sentence structure. "A dog eats" tells us one thing while "a big dog" means another while "you're such a dog" from a friend at the bar means something else completely.

Humans have mastered syntax.

How did that evolve? The comparative approach, comparing the vocal production of other primates, with that of humans, provides some answers. Other primates typically use a single call type while some species combine calls, it is mostly as an alarm. All those known are too limited to be a precursor to the complex, open-ended combinatorial system that is human language.

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U.S. policy when it comes to science can be a little confusing. Over 20 years ago, one political party demanded that drugs and devices undergo far more testing before approval. It was a common belief among the more conspiracy-minded that FDA was colluding with right-wing corporations to get products passed.

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As the Trump administration continues to make significant cuts to NIH budgets and personnel and to freeze billions of dollars of funding to major research universities – citing ideological concerns – there’s more being threatened than just progress in science and medicine. Something valuable but often overlooked is also being hit hard: preventing research abuse.

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Anecdotal stories claim U.S. tourism has plummeted due to Republican tariffs and enforcing immigration the way Europe and Asia do, and it will ruin the American economy. 

If that was true, lawmakers in America's most Democratic state, Hawaii, wouldn't have added another tariff. This one aimed solely at tourists. 

SB 1396 added a whopping 11% tariff for cruise ships that dock in a Hawaiian port and increased the hotel tariff to 19% of the room rate. The Governor has already said he would sign it once his supermajority passes it. Tourists also pay a 5% extra tariff on everything just for breathing Hawaiian are.

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Homeopathic levels of plastic are the latest environmental scaremongering fad (Nanoplastics! Microplastics!) dominating partisan corporate media when they are not suddenly simping for Trickle Down Economics, Vaccines, and Capitalism they distrusted just a short while ago.

Naturally, companies are rushing to keep you safe from plastic which can be detected in everything. If you want to detect it in your home and annoy your family talking about how much virtual cancer you want to avoid, A McGill team fired up the 3-D printer and made the hollow-laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (HoLDI-MS) test platform.

That's right, a plastic detector made from...plastic.

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Last year, companies began to pull back from promoting their Diversity Equity Inclusion efforts and social justice activists blamed the incoming Trump administration. It has been a violation of federal law to discriminate for 60 years so to moderates it seemed odd to add a layer of discrimination in hiring, even one deemed positive. And they never considered it may have instead been done at all due to pressure from the previous administration.

The backlash was entirely predictable, but in both cases it was on the fringes. For no benefit, corporate CEOs were ignoring the 'stay out of it unless your customers are dominated by it' mantra.

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Some psychologists believe our brains and bodies don’t just understand music, we become it. We physically resonate with it. They call their belief Neural Resonance Theory (NRT). 

They use Theory is in the name, but it is not a theory like gravity or evolution, the proper name means it is more like String Theory. An idea that needs scientific rigor to be shown true. 

NRT maintains that rather than relying on learned expectations or prediction, musical experiences arise from the brain’s natural oscillations that sync with rhythm, melody and harmony.

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Nature is out to kill everything, it is the circle of life, and that is why replanting rainforest without including some termites is counter-intuitively bad, finds a new paper.

The balance of nature doesn't exist and believing that plant diversity alone will work is in defiance of how ecosystems work. That may mean introducing termites. There is a certainly NIMBYism that will occur, just like wealthy elites who oppose nuclear energy and claim wind power is viable hire a phalanx of lawyers to block wind projects near their homes. A company or agency spending money on new trees isn't going to like giving those over to termites either. It would require convincing.

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A new simulation claims small-micron particulate matter, so small you need an electron microscope to see it, is killing 250,000 people each year. PM10, 10 microns in size, is a well-known killer. That is wildfires and smog but after smog was drastically reduced in the 1990s, the target went down 400%, to 2.5. Suddenly air quality maps could be orange and red again, even though the air is cleaner in wealthier countries than it has been since the 1980s.

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Early in 2020, the President of the United States said America should cut travel from China due to COVID-19 concerns. This was dismissed as xenophobia by states like New York and California, because the World Health Organisation had not declared it a pandemic.(1)

In Europe, 18 countries knew better than to wait for WHO to ignore claims from China that it was not a pandemic and closed their borders.

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