Science 2.0

The wine industry has been on a tear for two decades. Where once Napa wines were so second-rate they had to pay Orson Welles to try and gain credibility, the California landscape is now dotted with vineyards.

That may be coming to an end due to demographics; the same people drinking wine then are drinking it now, but they are 20 years older. The recession has not impacted the Boomer crowd much yet, older people who drink wine have IRAs, but the median age for them is now 66, and younger people are not taking it up as much. Costs are showing no signs of slowing down and everyone thinks wages should be higher - until their indulgences get more expensive.

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The Biden administration has made a number of political and economic missteps - e.g. an Inflation Reduction Act that has nothing to do with inflation and won't reduce it - but its science and health gaffes get less press.

When Scott Gottlieb, MD, was in charge, FDA was on the road to becoming more nimble, but it took the COVID-19 pandemic, and watching other agencies like the CDC run in circles and demonstrate true incompetence, for FDA to really understand they are not protecting anyone by being bureaucratic roadblocks. No one is safer if a company needs 18 months and a room full of lawyers just to get permission to change the color of a font on a drug label, but that was what FDA had become.

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Is there an addiction that primarily affects one gender in one age demographic in rich countries? Survey data using the National Poll on Healthy Aging says there may be. 

The results were that about 13 percent of people from ages 50 to 80 responded in ways that could be interpreted as addiction to foods and beverages in the past year. Prevalence was much higher among women than men – older Generation X and younger Baby Boomer women.

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Yesterday I profited of the kindness of Cesar Ocampo, the site manager of the Parque Astronomico near San Pedro de Atacama, in northern Chile, to visit a couple of places that the SWGO collaboration is considering as the site of a large array of particle detectors meant to study ultra-high-energy gamma rays from the sky. 

SWGO and cosmic ray showers

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If you fish you know that catching a muskie (muskellunge), the “fish of 10,000 casts”, is like hitting a hole-in-one in golf. You will talk about it a lot.

But it doesn't need 10,000 casts because that would mean having one strike is random. Instead, it helps to learn how they behave. A recent experiment evaluated behavioral traits – activity, aggression, boldness, and exploration – for 68 young muskies in laboratory tanks before transferring the fish to an outdoor pond. Then they fished the pond every day for 35 days.

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Government lockdowns may have been terrible for diagnosing disease and the mental health of kids but it reduced terrorism, according to a new paper. If no one can travel, government agents helping fifth columnists do their damage are useless. When the pandemic struck, terrorists vowed to increase their attacks and create a tipping point but that did not happen.

Instead, government-imposed curfews and travel bans instituted to protect public health in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt were significantly associated with a reduction in ISIS attacks, especially in urban areas and locations near their bases of operations. It likely meant fewer attacks by al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram also.

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Superionic materials, needed for solid-state electrolytes that could replace the liquid organic electrolytes in current electric car batteries and make them safe for mass usage, face challenges in going from conception to production.

Lithium ions are very mobile at ambient temperatures in solid-state ionic conductors, and that means atoms do not simply vibrate around their equilibrium positions. Disorder is bad in production systems. 

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Small micron particulate matter, commonly called PM2.5, needs an electron microscope to be visible to you but once real smog, PM10, declined by the 1990s, air pollution activists began to tout this new killer. Since it is 1/4th the size of real pollution air quality maps could often be red, or at least yellow, and that is good business for trial lawyers.

The problem quickly became that no one ever died from it, humans would've been extinct 50,000 years ago if that were even possible, so they pivoted from deaths to hidden effects that can be claimed using statistics. 

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Until Alfred the Great managed to isolate and contain invaders from Scandinavia, Lyminge, a monastery in Kent, was on the front line of long-running Viking hostility.

Lyminge endured repeated attacks for almost a century through effective defensive strategies, University of Reading archaeologists now say. Despite being in a region of Kent which bore the full brunt of Viking raids in the later 8th and early 9th centuries, they survived. rebuilt, and recovered more completely than historians previously thought. 


The excavation at Lyminge, Kent. Credit: Dr. Gabor Thomas

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Stimuli-responsive polymers will bring next-generation small-scale, wirelessly controlled soft-bodied robots.

Even now, these materials have made robots that can walk, swim and jump. Now, a FAIRY can even fly. FAIRY is the nickname of the Flying Aero-robots based on Light Responsive Materials Assembly program at Tampere University. It flies by wind and is controlled by light, using a soft actuator.

"The actuator is made of light-responsive liquid crystalline elastomer, which induces opening or closing actions of the bristles upon visible light excitation,” explains Hao Zeng, group leader of the project.

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Since the 1960s, antioxidant supplements have been promoted as a miracle cure and that has never been true - preventing oxidation too much would be as bad as not preventing enough - but luckily few supplements make coenzyme Q bioavailable at all. Evolution created a way for the energy factories of our cells, mitochondria, to be thrown out of balance by pills.

Yet they can be thrown out of balance by nature. Coenzyme Q is entirely natural, and a lack of it leads to mitochondrial diseases like Leigh syndrome. But short of experimentally replacing mitochondrial DNA, it is hard to modify. For anything to change it must pass through the watery cell interior called cytoplasm to the surface of the cells in order to neutralize oxidized lipid species. 

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The booster dose of either the BNT162b2 mRNA (Fosun-BioNTech, equivalent to Pfizer-BioNTech outside China) or CoronaVac (Sinovac) COVID-19 vaccine was correlated to a 90 percent reduction in death in people with multiple co-morbidities compared to 2 doses, according to a new study.

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A new exploratory paper links sleeping pills to dementia but while the press release uses the term risk frequently, it minimizes a giant confounder; older people sleep less and people who have not yet received a dementia diagnosis may go on sleeping medication to try and mitigate restlessness.

Another confounder is that they only find a higher correlation in white people. Science does not work that way, but epidemiology and statistics can do anything.

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One thing Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming share in common is getting water from the Colorado River - and being frustrated that California, which takes the most, refuses to join their plan to cut water consumption before it's too late.

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The Biden administration has not been shy about reorganizing science and health until it does what they want, and a new move to block a mine in Alaska will probably not pass legal challenges, but is he right on the science this time?(1)

First, it is important to know politicians are rarely correct. There is no 'party of science' and no 'scientist in chief'. that is just an intellectual halo elected officials wrap their constituents in to feel good. Name a president you think is pro-science and I can tell you how they were the opposite.

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Thanks to the fall armyworm, nearly all of Africa's maize crop is in jeopardy, finds a new study. 

The new projection was made using 3,175 geo-tagged occurrences and factoring in physiological and climatological requirements to geographically assess its range. They showed that almost 92 percent of Africa’s maize growing areas can mean year-round growth of fall armyworm while 95 percent are suitable for that plus pests like the maize stalk borer, Western corn rootworm and Asiatic witchweed.

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Despite apparent beliefs on social media today, the modern anti-vaccine movement did not begin with the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. For decades prior to that, wealthy elites who believed that supplements and organic food were medicine led the world in denying their children vaccines.

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Starting in 1970s America, Democrats began to wage total war on nuclear energy. The risks were exaggerated but emotion sells, especially when it was promoted by their allies in media.

In 1994, they got their wish. Senator John Kerry and Bill Clinton congratulated each other on finally strangling U.S. nuclear science, and therefore nuclear energy, into a coma.

What happened next is well-known. The war on nuclear had meant an increase in coal. Environmentalists who hated nuclear more than coal had touted biofuels and natural gas. Then natural gas took off and they hated that. Then they hated the biofuels they had lobbied to turn into law.

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Reducing the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV from blood donations is important for public health and the U.S. currently uses time-based deferrals to assess donor eligibility. Now the FDA is proposing individual risk-based questions to reduce the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV similar to policies in place in countries like the United Kingdom and Canada.

Blood donations are important and FDA believes the implementation of the proposed individual risk-based questions will not compromise the safety or availability of the blood supply. The new draft recommendations are based on data from other countries with similar HIV epidemiology that have instituted this approach, as well as ongoing surveillance of the U.S. blood supply.

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Food is not medicine, anyone claiming it is medicine is selling you something, like a diet plan, but nutrients can impact cancer cells.

How that applies consistently is unknown so a new tool hopes to create an exploratory method using mice. Mice don't translate well to humans, they are not little people, but they can exclude effects in humans and that has value also. 

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