Science 2.0

One of the odder disconnects in western culture is people who claim to care about the environment but will only eat fish that is caught in unsustainable ways - in the wild. I suppose I get the appeal of knowing laborers risked their lives for your food and that farmers in $300,000 tractors don't have the same cachet.(1)

Yet those same people are horrified at the thought of hunting game like rabbit and venison, they want those farmed. Insisting on only wild salmon seems irresponsible. What if we did that about lettuce or strawberries? They'd be expensive and our nutrition would suffer.

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As I write these few lines, I am sitting in the nice auditorium at CSIC in Madrid, where I came for a congress that is a bit different to many others that take place around the world at all times. Truth be told, covid-19 took a big hit on the organization of these events, but slowly things are getting back to normality - the only visible sign of something different from 2019 in the auditorium is the fact that about 80 percent of the 180 scientists sitting around me wear a mask.

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In 2015, a group of doctors asked Columbia University to take action against Dr. Oz for his sloppy advocacy of supplements and alternatives to medicine and science while wearing scrubs to give his beliefs an air of authority.

Not only did they refuse, progressives in media rushed to his defense, claiming everyone involved, including Dr. Henry Miller, MD, founding director of the FDA Office of Biotechnology, was part of a right wing cabal. You know. Republicans. out to tear down the Great and Powerful Oz, darling of the left standing up to Big Pharma and the evil corporations trying to block out natural medicine. 

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Environmentalists have spent tens of millions of dollars to raise hundreds of millions of dollars convincing people that bees are in decline and that if you don't pay them to stop science, our food ecosystem will collapse.

It's all nonsense, of course. Bees aren't in decline. They do have blips where some mass die-offs occur, but those have been recorded for as long as bee hive numbers have been recorded, over 1,000 years of mass die-offs.

The top three risks for mass bee deaths are varroa mites, varroa mites, and varroa mites. Number four is travel, since the largest impact of bees on our food system is not natural pollination, but pollination on demand. Like almonds in California. Or apples in Alaska.

That's right, apples in Alaska.

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The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences may have science in its name, but they remain since the earliest part of the last decade a group funded by taxpayers that exists to scare taxpayers about science. 

Their in-house publication Environmental Health Perspectives has a new claim, and this one does not even involve questionnaires or cell studies hoping to "link" some chemical to some effect; it just picked a bunch of papers the authors liked and did a review of them to manufacture 'weight of evidence' about a term activists coined and NIEHS epidemiologists promote every chance they can - "forever chemicals."

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Researchers at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) have realized the superconducting analogue to the semiconducting diode, the

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California has spent decades using taxpayer money to evangelize their beliefs in solar and wind power but this summer those quasi-religious beliefs could wither before scientific and technological reality.

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Conservation in modern times is a misused term that trial lawyers often invoke to win lawsuits against companies before progress can commence but Brunei on the island of Borneo, which is about the size of the state of Delaware, has a great reason for all countries of the world to preserve it. 

The current landscape is similar to what was present during the Pliocene Epoch, 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago.

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The mysteries of the universe are profound but one solution has long been sought; how events at the edge of our solar system, the beginning of the rest of the universe, brought about evolution of earth, the other planets, and even life itself.

A new paper speculates about how the gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — ended up where they are, orbiting the sun like they do. They try to figure an explanation for what happened to gas giants in other solar systems and ours- and try to make an education guess if a fifth gas giant lurks 50 billion miles away. A new planet 9, or a planet 14, or whatever a tiny minority of astronomers in the IAU try to decree.

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You probably know someone who takes an aspirin to reduce chances of a heart attack, just like you may know someone who says wine, containing alcohol, a true class 1 carcinogen, is 'good for you.'

They were never settled science, they were instead epidemiology, statistical correlation, which then got transformed into clinical claims, much like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for COVD-19.

How did that happen?

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Up to 15 percent of women are diagnosed with pregnancy complications and a new paper says that boys are more likely to be the cause than girls.

The authors speculate it may be because boys grow faster in the womb, needing more energy and nutrients from the mother through the placenta but after around 100 billion childbirths in human history that doesn't add up. Maybe it is the case in mice, and that is the caveat with the study. Mice are not little people, though you wouldn't know that from claims made by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC.)

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Everyone knows droughts are bad. They increase risk of wildfires and damage life in the affected region. They are not always predictable, when I lived in Pennsylvania in the early 1990s there was a drought with no known mechanism involved, but they are often cyclical, which makes them at least broadly predictable.

The Dry 2 Dry program at Ghent University believes droughts are not only predictable and cyclical, they can propagate in a kind of feedback loop; instead of being local, evaporated water is moved to other areas, so less of it is taking drought with them.

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The "Learning to Discover" workshops and "AI and Physics" conference are taking place at Institut Pascal, a centre set on the top of a hill surrounded by woods near Orsay, France. The event focuses on new artificial intelligence techniques to improve the discovery potential of fundamental science experiments.
Below you can see a summary of the event agenda: 

- Apr 19-20 Representation learning workshop
- Apr 21-22 Dealing with uncertainties workshop
- Apr 25-26 Generative models workshop

- Apr 27-29 AI and Physics Conference

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The world’s largest particle accelerator is back in business. Today, two beams of protons circulated in opposite directions around the Large Hadron Collider’s 27-kilometer ring at their injection energy of 450 billion electronvolts (450 GeV), marking the conclusion of a three year hiatus for maintenance, consolidation and upgrade work.

The work was done so that it can operate at an even higher energy and deliver significantly more data to the upgraded LHC experiments but high-energy collisions still months away. The beams circulated today were a test at injection energy and contained a small number of protons.

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When a judge declared the Biden administration's attempt to extend the mandate of masks on airplanes unlawful, the Biden administration walked away from that effort. That, to me, was a sign that they knew the science was not on their side but they were placating their constituents who do not really trust vaccines.

Wait, aren't the Republicans the ones who don't trust vaccines? Only for the last year, and only for political reasons. California, which once had more vaccine deniers than the entire rest of the US combined, suddenly claimed to be pro-vaccine. Except weird places like San Francisco told people they needed four shots. And to wear masks outside. 

That is not pro-science, it means you don't trust it at all. Just as always.

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The last time the Russians went to war in Europe, it was the Cold War.  After World War II ended, the USSR wanted Germany to remain relatively weak. The US instead believed that part of the reason behind World War II was a Germany that had been too heavily penalized by other European countries after World War I. 

After defeat, Germany had been divided into four sectors, controlled by America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union and three of those sectors 'united' so that there could be a common currency, a new German mark, and goods supplied by the US under the Marshall Plan would bring stability. But the former capital, Berlin, was in the USSR sector, and the USSR wanted its section of Germany to be Soviet, and communism. 

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Does the CDC dictate property law in the United States? The Biden administration claimed it did, and that was only one of the bizarre efforts to use government agencies to legislate around Congress.

The White House hoped to stretch "Chevron deference", a flawed Supreme Court interpretation which found that government agencies could create rules that act like laws without needing Congress as long as it was in their regulatory mandate, beyond recognition.

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A new report says that the alternative meat industry, plant-based products designed to look and taste like meat, raised $8 billion even during the pandemic. That's a big success.

They want more but oddly lament that most of their money comes from the private sector. They want the trillions of dollars in subsidies that solar and wind have gotten, claiming it will fight climate change. That's a big problem.

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Many are the sci-fi encounters with races that have transcended their physical bodies, having moved on to dwell on some energetic or spiritual plane. The tales skip the backstories, so we wonder: Did these aliens get where they are via Darwinian evolution? Did they get disgusted with the physical world and devise a technological means of transitioning? Do their planets of origin still exist, or were they destroyed? Always in sci-fi, we are given to assume that these aliens enjoy their non-material existence and don’t miss the meat world.

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During the almost two years of on-again off-again COVID lockdowns, we heard lots of concern from many different corners about the mental health effects of forcing people to stay home and keep away from friends and family.

Many research projects were undertaken to attempt to measure the scale of the impacts on mental health.

However, the speed with which research was generated meant in some cases, research quality was sacrificed, and some research found evidence of an effect on mental health, and some didn’t.

To make sense of the very mixed findings, my colleagues and I conducted a review of all of the studies on mental health conducted during the first year of the pandemic.

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