Science 2.0

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., called the National Rifle Association “a terrorist organization” but now claims to be a “constitutional absolutist” who opposes gun control. He said if you eat steak you're more of a terrorist than Obama Bin Laden but now does photo ops eating McDonald's cheeseburgers, and he claimed that President George W. Bush trouncing his fellow progressive anti-science activist Senator John Kerry was actually Republicans stealing the election but now claims maybe Trump had his win stolen in 2020.

What changed? He is close to finally getting the government legitimacy he has craved, but escaped him in 2008. So he has flipped to things Republicans like. It is all for show. He has not changed.

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The United Kingdom has delays even longer than the United States for routine care but with a fraction of the population, their high costs are a lot more punitive to taxpayers.

Government is always looking for ways to keep costs contained but NHS employees need raises also, so it is a challenge. Needing fewer new employees will help.

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While talking to farmers in Illinois on September 25th, 1956 who were concerned about increased government encroachment and regulations brought on by the descendants of eugenicists who had founded "environmental" groups like Sierra Club to promote their beliefs(1), President Dwight D. Eisenhower told them,  “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field”

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Scientific information has never been more widely accessible than it is today. While this increased availability fosters awareness and collaboration, it has also contributed to a concerning surge in misinformation and disinformation, especially in the United States. Recent Pew Research data indicates a decline in public trust in science, with only 57% of people believing science has had a mostly positive impact on society, down from 73% in 2019. Additionally, 34% of adults now view science’s impact as equally positive and negative.

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Are young people dying off en masse or are predatorts at environmental groups who prey on public gullibility rending their holistic shaman-blessed hemp garments because a wave of improving public health has spread across America?

'People are dying' is just a headline to grab eyeballs. More accurate listing of deaths show more young people are dying from recreational drugs than in recent years, when if you got shot and died from it but had tested positive for COVID-19 within 30 days you might have been listed as a COVID-19 death by the CDC. Yet more people are not dying. Of anything.

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As we approach the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdowns, there has been ample time to look at what went wrong, and perhaps how we didn't learn much from history.

There are many examples and while politicians ignored it, storytellers have not. In "The Division" game, for example, eco-terrorists spread their pathogen using cash. That made sense. If you are a zealot, disease can do what eugenics and population control efforts did not; get rid of a lot of poor and minority people without controversy, and no one can be blamed because disease is both egalitarian and exculpatory.

Unless it isn't.

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The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates about 35 million tons of plastics are generated just in America, and 12.% of that becomes is garbage like plastic containers and bags and even appliances.

Sorry folks, politicians in states like California who insist it's being recycled are lying to you, scientists know better. What really happens to plastic, even if your government is shipping it to China to be "recycled" is landfilling and incineration. A new study finds that measuring how much carbon dioxide a potential chemical looping system would pump out compared to conventional processes to produce synthesis gas could reduce emissions by up to 45.

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As part of the celebrations for 20 years of blogging, I am re-posting articles that in some way were notable for the history of the blog. This time I want to (re)-submit to you four pieces I wrote to explain the unexplainable: the very complicated analysis performed by a group of physicists within the CDF experiment, which led them to claim that there was a subtle new physics process hidden in the data collected in Run 2. There would be a lot to tell about that whole story, but suffices to say here that the signal never got confirmed by independent analyses and by DZERO, the competing experiment at the Tevatron. As mesmerizing and striking the CDF were, they were finally archived as some intrinsic incapability of the experiment to make perfect sense of their muon detector signals.

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Yesterday, the Senate confirmed former Congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Though the Trump administration has promised reform, there will be big challenges in that. Though high-profile jobs are appointees, the nuts-and-bolts work of governance is done by career employees, and nearly 90 percent of them are Democrats.

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Gym Bro, Curl Gurl, Gym Rat if you choose not to identify as any gender - everyone knows what it means, and it can be pretty intimidating if you walk into a fitness center as a new member. Imagine feeling like you have to get in shape before you can join a gym to get in shape.

Fitness executives don't want that but store managers know not to alienate their best customers for someone who will join on a special deal, go for a month, and then cancel the first time they download RocketMoney and remember they have a gym membership.

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Though the American Automobile Association (AAA) says you should, thanks to fuel-injection engines common for the last 40 years, you don't need to 'warm up' your car, letting it idle before driving, now even though in the past it made sense.

Like America inventing pre-diabetes, which no other nation accepts because only 5% of people in the CDC 'warning' range will ever develop type 2 diabetes in their lifetime, warming up your car is a solution without a problem.

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A new study examined the effects of marijuana use of 1,003 adults aged 22 to 36 from the Human Connectome Project collected between August 2012 and 2015 and found that 63% of heavy lifetime cannabis users exhibited reduced brain activity during a working memory task, while 68% of recent users also demonstrated a similar impact.

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While off-label uses of medication may be controversial in political media, in science and health they lead to important gains. A new example is  the cardiac disease drug digoxin used at a low and safe dosage for one week for nine patients with metastatic breast cancer.

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An analysis of 300 million United Kingdom Ministry of Transport test records, which tries to estimate the ‘health’ of every vehicle on UK roads between 2005 and 2022 and determine potential vehicle longevity (basically survival rates for different powertrains) has concluded that electric vehicles now match the lifespans of conventional counterparts and may even be more reliable.

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When people see labels or menus listing the calories in their food, it doesn't change their consumption in any way beyond what experts call "statistical wobble." About two fewer almonds worth of calories per meal. But two almonds over time can add up to a lot.

That's the conclusion in the data of a systematic review by The Cochrane Collaboration. The team of academics reviewed 25 papers which discussed the impact of calorie labeling on consumption and found a minute reduction in the foods selected - about 11 calories.

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"Long Covid", the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted in Wuhan, China in 2019 and spread worldwide, causing millions of deaths, is difficult to pin down.

Pediatricians report it affects on average 0.5% of children who got the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that caused COVID-19. It has a few names, like Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, but Long Covid is the common term, and is generally characterized as persistence of COVID-19 symptoms 12 weeks or more weeks after the disease. 

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Science is always looking for new ways to protect plants and the environment. In Hawaii, for example, when their staple papaya was under attack by aphids that transferred the "papaya ringspot virus" to plants, legacy breeding and pesticides did not work. A gene gun sending in a GMO did.(1) In the Wall Street Journal, I discussed how a non-corporate, free modification by academics could save the American Chestnut from the natural blight that had devastated billions of trees.(2)

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With Burns Night this weekend,  Scotland will celebrate its heritage. In the First Among Equals country to the south that controls them, Scottish accents used to mean trouble. Now, it is the sound of safety for both English men and women.

A new study finds that the English, even some Welsh and Scottish, associate a "working-class" accent with criminal behavior. In a jury trial, that could have serious ramifications, but it likely also matters before that. Arrests and voice identification, for example. You're more likely to be one of The Usual Suspects(1) if your accent is criminal.

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Doctors who would never tell a patient to smoke cigarettes in moderation, they are a legitimate class 1 carcinogen, oddly say just that about an identical class 1 carcinogen, alcohol, and as recreational marijuana has become legal they have given it the same umbrella.

Legal or not, marijuana is a drug just like alcohol, and it includes the toxic smoke of cigarettes.

I am not a social authoritarian progressive so I won't tell you how to behave just because my health insurance premiums went up so 50,000,000 others could get it cheaper, but you absolutely should not be smoking marijuana around kids. It ain't the 1980s, hippie.

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PFAS, called "forever chemicals” by activists, are about 12,000 compounds, 11,993 of them found in nature, yet environmentalists in their Forever War On Science have been targeting them based on epidemiological correlation. You know, that same "science" that claimed chocolate is health food, butter is bad and trans fats are good, and that a parasite medication cured COVID-19.

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