Science 2.0

IN 1994, President Bill Clinton and Senator Tom Harkin set off a supplement boom - by decreeing that supplements could be exempt from real FDA oversight as long as they didn't claim to cure cancer or kill anyone (which companies in that market continued to do anyway) and placed in small print that their supernatural claims were not validated by FDA.

That, plus wasting taxpayer money at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine(1) that could have gone to real research created a boom, to where woo and mysticism that claims it is sticking it to Big Pharma is a $40 billion per year industry.

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Do you think hot tea causes cancer? A common weedkiller? Do you think red wine is good for you?

If so, you have been duped by scientific-sounding epidemiology that has long been finding a correlation between a product and an effect and then "suggesting" causation in press releases. And far too often is set off by anecdotes, as happened with monosodium glutamate - MSG.

If you decided you should take horse dewormer for COVID-19, that was epidemiology. If you decided flipping a mask up and down between bites of food prevented anyone from getting COVID-19, that was also epidemiology. Both are as wrong as low-fat milk, which was also epidemiology.

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Too often mental health problems are dismissed as being “all in your head”. With scientific and medical advancements showing mental illness can cause physical changes to the body, we now know the devastating impact mental health has on physical health.

One system that is greatly affected by mental health is the cardiovascular system. Unfortunately, not only is there a link between mental illness and cardiovascular disease, it’s a connection that runs both ways.

Mental Health is Heart Health

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Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is a diagnosis of exclusion, a general term for death during the first year of life that lacks an obvious cause.

Though it is a leading cause of death, its etiology is complex and remains largely unknown so assumptions are things like sleeping in a dangerous position, a general failure during the critical development period, or an unknown underlying biological vulnerability.

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Many parents say they are worried about the negative effects of screen time on children. Too much of anything can have negative effects, from books to music to TV, but the solution is to impose diversity so they eventually enjoy different activities.

The screen time problem got even worse due to government lockdowns imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than wear masks in a park, it generally led to more screen time and less outdoor time for children. 

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Empathy is critical to having supportive conversations about mental health. But this skill can be tricky to learn, especially in the moment when a person is sharing something hard. 

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Yesterday I visited a high school in Venice to deliver a lecture on particle physics, and to invite the participating students to take part in an art and science contest. This is part of the INFN "Art and Science across Italy" project, which has reached its fourth edition, organizes art exhibits with the students' creations in several cities across Italy. The best works are then selected for a final exhibit in Naples, and the 24 winners are offered a week-long visit to the CERN laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Antibiotics are popular in America among everyone but pharmaceutical companies. Part of the reason is cultural; everyone wants antibiotics to be cheap, but want to be able to sue companies if anything new causes a side effect. Meanwhile, the government has doubled the cost and red tape to put anything on the market this century (COVID-19 vaccines and a few other products exempted) and research for new molecules is costly. That adds up to little interest.

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Do you believe bacon causes diabetes? Cancer? If not, you may be an apostate in 2023, when we've just exited a period during which any skepticism of epidemiology(1) is met with the 2020s equivalent of 'Do you even Science, Bro?'

There is just one problem. Epidemiology isn't science. It is instead, in the best circumstance, a statistical effort to point scientists in the right direction. That is not the same thing, and in the worst circumstance it can be a weapon for social engineering, as epidemiologists placed within the International Agency for Research on Cancer to get classifications on products for trial lawyers showed.

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In engineering, an old joke goes that customers want cheap, accurate, and fast - but can only have two of those.

Business is about compromise. In food, the USDA says all farmers are farmers so they turn a blind eye to the sleazy marketing tactics of the organic segment, like paying trade groups to defame conventional food and scientists who defend agriculture while the companies themselves make advertising catering to the whitest, richest people imaginable.

Yet their customers already hate science, they think everything is a conspiracy by Monsanto, Exxon, or someone named Sackler. It does no harm to promote conspiracy theories and feel-good fallacies among True Believers. Yet it's bad if you want to appeal to normal people.

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It could be the opening for an adventure film but give the world since December of 2019 (March 2020 if you believed the World Health Organisation's oft-repeated claims from China that there was no COVID-19 pandemic) I would suggest we go ahead and re-bury the world's oldest runestone. I don't want to know who "Idibera" was, much less still could be, and neither should you.

The early Iron Age sandstone, now called the Svingerud stone, was found in a cremation pit near Tyrifjord and were inscribed between 1 and 250 A.D.


Photo: Alexis Pantos/KHM, UiO.

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Coffee of any kind requires beans and those beans contain caffeine. If you don't want caffeine your choice to remove it is a chemical or...a chemical. Yes, I know some companies claim they use only water but they really use water and “supercritical carbon dioxide”, which is like claiming the chemical that creates banana flavor is different if it's grown in nature or in a building, despite being identical.

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I just finished reading a very nice piece on the Guardian, written by my friend and ex colleague Eleni Petrakou, who collaborated with me in the CMS experiment at CERN and is now a scientific writer. The topic is the disruptive effect that the war in Ukraine has caused to scientific collaboration. I urge you to read it if the matter is of any interest to you.

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Video games are big business, far larger than movies and music - combined. Yet you never see video game developers being interrupted at lunch so fans can take a selfie. More money plus more privacy is a good industry to be in.

For the 190 million gamers in the US, it can be a little trickier. Complaints of bullying in games are common, and women complain about it more than men.

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The Abu Dhabi enirate is a religious dictatorship and may be tired of western countries noting that women may suffer from legalized domestic violence, among other contradictions in a state that says women are equal, because a new analysis says that the western world is sexist too. At least when it comes to how many female editors at science journals there are.

Since scientific editors shape the content of academic journals and set standards for their fields, gender disparity can influence opportunities for women to publish in these journals, receive recognition for their research, and advance their careers.

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Legal marijuana has meant a boost for government accountants, and ended the need for fake "medical" marijuana claims, but it is often still dangerous in both the short and long term.

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California gives free medical care to a lot of people but that doesn't mean they are getting access. Many doctors won't accept new patients at all due to the increased number of patients, while an alarming number of offices ask what kind of insurance people have before declaring someone can't get an appointment for six months if it's California state insurance.

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The war on vaping peaked during the Obama administration and though the names behind it were groups you expect to be promoting public health - the U.S. CDC, American Lung Association and more - the funding behind many of those efforts may be two groups that are more interested in promoting nicotine patches and gums for Big Pharma than saving the lives of smokers.

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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding basic research on non-genetic drugs that can temporarily enhance the human body’s ability to endure extreme cold exposure.

The human body’s response to cold involves two biological processes known as thermogenesis. Shivering is something everyone has experienced, it raises your body temperature in a direct fashion, with movement. The second uses brown adipose tissue, brown fat, which regulates body temperature by breaking down blood sugar and other fat molecules  The first is physical and the second chemical, but the second happens first. It just doesn't generate as much heat.

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It rarely happens to play a regular chess game with no clear mistakes. When the game is a blitz one, though, this is exceedingly rare. A blitz game is one where both players have 5 minutes to make all their moves, and the first who runs out of time automatically loses (provided the opponent realizes it).
Because of the very short time to make decisions, blitz chess games are an adrenaline-producing, intense brain activity. So much so that when people talk to me during a blitz game I simply do not record the words they speak, for the whole duration of the game; after the end, I often find myself reckoning with a buffer of words that by then have no meaning anymore. 

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