Science 2.0

A new study is actively recruiting men and women of African ancestry who were diagnosed with prostate or breast cancer to build a database from which researchers hope to identify genetic factors that may influence cancer risk among these groups.

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A decade ago surveys showed that Millennials were less concerned about environmental claims than Baby Boomers or Generation X. The reason was speculated to be environmental fatigue. Millennials saw that government recycling was only making China rich and Americans pay higher taxes, that being miserable at home while Al Gore got rich selling carbon credits made no sense, and assurances that weather were not climate during a snowstorm but were climate during a heatwave made little sense.

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The discovery of new biomarkers is important for detecting ovarian cancer, as the disease is difficult to detect in its early stages where it can most easily be treated.

One approach to detecting cancer is to look for extracellular vesicles (EVs), especially small proteins released from the tumor called exosomes. As these proteins are found outside the cancer cell, they can be isolated from body fluids, such as blood, urine, and saliva. However, the use of these biomarkers is hindered by the lack of reliable ones for the detection of ovarian cancer.

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One of the things that keeps me busy these days is the organization of a collective publication by a number of experts in artificial intelligence and top researchers in all areas of scientific investigation. I will tell you more of that project at another time, but today I wish to share with you the first draft of a short introduction I wrote for it. I am confident that it will withstand a number of revisions and additions, so by the time we will eventually publish our work, the text will be no doubt quite different from what you get to read here, which makes me comfortable about pre-publishing it.

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Everyone knows a 'day' - one rotation of Earth - is around 24 hours long and lengthening at a rate of some 1.7 milliseconds every century. Yet 2 billion years ago it was 19.5 hours and at that rate we should have days lasting 60 hours.

Yet we don't. Instead, the tidal pull of the moon was halted for over a billion years. For that, we can thank the pull of the sun. This tidal stalemate between the sun and moon has been linked to the atmosphere’s temperature and Earth’s rotational rate.

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A new paper suggests that Spotify is creating a de facto slave labor market, e.g. how England had residents of cities like Manchester working for basically nothing in the early 1800s so they could ban actual slavery.

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Environmental Working Group's annual organic food public relations piece, its 'Dirty Dozen' list, is out, and blueberries are the new target for their clients.

EWG produces the Dirty Dozen list by looking at USDA data on pesticides and suggesting detection of a pesticide will give you cancer.

Forget their non-existent command of science, this annual fraud is egregious because they don't list the pesticides used by their clients. Organic pesticides, which can be up to 600 percent higher than conventional, are not included. If they were, the entire Dirty Dozen list would be organic produce.

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Epidemiologists looked at data from from 1999 to 2020 and noted that death rates due to poisonings, firearms, and all other injuries increased substantially in the U.S., many of them due to suicide attempts.

The demography analysis of 3,813,894 deaths collated by the National Center for Health Statistics due to non-natural causes was simplistic - age, sex, race, ethnicity, and belief about intent, then separating out criminal acts for things like gun deaths and if there was no clear intent of suicide, listing drug overdoses as accidental, while parsing motor vehicle injuries and falls as well.

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In 1998, a neuroscientist, Christof Koch,

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Most of the world relies on a 113-year-old chemical reaction used every day. It is the Haber (or Haber-Bosch) process and while its contribution to energy usage and emissions is negligible compared to its benefits, the private sector is always looking for ways to keep things affordable. That means trying to come up with a fundamentally better way to fix nitrogen than the one invented before The Great War.

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After spending thousands of years converging on the perfect beers, this century culture went crazy and overdid hops, tinkered with grains, and generally made niche beers at high cost. Yet there is no question craft beers are big business, a growing segment when balanced lagers are in decline.

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If are in the humanities and want to win a case of wine in the future, bet against someone in the information theory space. Neither of you can ever really be correct but the one with at least the pretense of the scientific method will have to admit they have fallen prey to someone like a post-modernist, who can never be wrong. On anything. Ever. Because truth is just a cultural reflex and can't be grounded epidemiologically.

That is what happened to Christof Koch, PhD, when he was young enough to believe he was in a science field and that the Truth Is Out There. Some 25 years he argued in a debate with David Chalmers that by 2023 the 'mechanism' in neurons that produce consciousness would be found.

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Even tech experts have been astonished by the recent, rapid growth of AI technology, able to hold human-like conversations in multiple languages, create music and pass medical exams. While the potential benefits of AI in fields such as healthcare are indeed inspiring, the pace of change is rapid, and there is still lots of uncertainty about the future.

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Nearly 3 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, and for half that time they were butchering each other - a new paper says 1.45 million years of killing each other for food.

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If you believed Monsanto controlled 500,000 biologists who accepted GMOs and weedkillers worldwide while Whole Foods, with more revenue, was standing alone selling organic food that made you healthier, you are a conspiracy theorist. 

You're not alone, even if the demographics changed. A few years ago, conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his claims that cell phones cause cancer and vaccines cause autism were embraced by the crazy fringe of the Democratic Party, like Organic Consumers Association and their puppet attack groups such as US Right To Know and SourceWatch. Now he is embraced by the crazy fringe of the Republican party, who think the COVID-19 vaccine is a Big Pharma effort to control our brains.

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The brain and the digestive tract are in constant communication, relaying signals that help to control feeding, and the implication that this communication network may also influence our mental state - as if "hangry" is science any more than a child getting hyperactive if they eat a piece of candy is - means it has been linked to everything from autism to Parkinson's disease.

Because there is very little science, it is mostly suggestion used to sell supplements and yogurt that makes you poop. A new technology hopes to introduce data to brain-gut mysticism. 

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Blitz games on the internet are a lot of fun, if you love chess as I do. Perhaps a good share of the fun is due to the complete chaos that may arise, when you have few seconds left on the clock and decisions have to be taken instantly. But sometimes you may happen to play correct chess, too. It is exceedingly rare, and when it happens it is a good indication that you have been able to hold on to clear strategic ideas leading your play into the correct decisions.

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A crippling flaw in much epidemiology is that it takes survey results as truthful and then seeks to correlate that to some benefit or harm. It's why epidemiologists said butter was bad and trans fats were good, until butter was good and trans fats were bad. If you were gullible enough to buy quinoa, teff, or any other superfood, some influencer you believed had an epidemiology paper on their side.

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A colloquium with a former thesis intern yesterday brought me to ponder again over the important question of determining whether a student should choose an experimental or rather a theoretical curriculum of studies. It is a problem that arises at a variable point of the student's trajectory depending on the way the university courses offer is structured, but the issue is universal as it revolves around the skills of the students rather than anything else.

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Stars die in lots of ways. Most low-mass stars like our Sun shed their outer layers and eventually fade to white dwarf stars. Larger ones prefer to burn out rather than fade away so they go supernova and create ultradense objects like neutron stars and black holes. When two stellar remnants form a binary system, they also can collide. 

Yet a new paper shows there may be a fourth way - a collision where non-binary stars in dense regions can be forced together. The work used a long-duration gamma-ray burst with the Gemini South telescope in Chile.

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