Science 2.0

Anxiety-prone people can blame serotonin cleanup proteins gone awry in their amygdala, according to research in marmosets recently published in JNeurosci. Targeting the amygdala with anti-anxiety medication could provide quicker relief.

The same event or set of life circumstances could send one person into the depths of anxiety or despair while leaving another unaffected. This distinction, called trait anxiety, arises from the proteins involved in serotonin signaling, a neurotransmitter implicated in anxiety and depression.

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A person with Type 2 diabetes is three times more likely to break a bone than a nondiabetic. Since the number of people with diabetes is increasing rapidly in the United States, skeletal fragility in patients with Type 2 diabetes is a growing, but little-known, public health issue.

Usually poor bone density is the culprit behind fragile bones, but that is not the case with Type 2 diabetics, who tend to have normal to high bone density. Yet, they still suffer from fractures at an alarming rate. Nobody knows why.

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The offer of Ph.D. positions in Physics at the University of Padova has opened just a few days ago, and I wish to advertise it here, giving some background on the matter for those of you who are interested in the call or know somebody who could be.

The Ph.D. in Italy In Italy, Ph. D.s last three years (the duration can be extended but this is not recommended). Courses start with the first academic semester, so the calls typically open in the spring, and admission tests are run in the summer. The system is not too different from that of other countries, but there are peculiarities of which you might want to be aware.

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The text below is the third part of what could have become "Chapter 13" of the book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab", which I published in 2016. For part 1 see here; for part 2 see here.

Giromini joins Run 2

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In 2000, vaccines led to the measles virus being declared eliminated from the United States yet in 2019 there were 1,282 confirmed cases in 31 states - the greatest number reported since 1992.

Unsurprisingly, nearly three-fourths originated from New York which, along with the west coast, has long been a hotbed for vaccine denial. And the cases occurred in people not vaccinated against measles. 

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There is a popular saying in statistics - "Everyone believes the data except the collector. No one believes the model except the modeler."

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When President Trump said he was going to restrict travel from China earlier this year due to coronavirus, I didn't engage in the reflexive politics of corporate journalists and call him a racist, I just though it an overreaction. After all, the Whole Health Organisation did not consider it a pandemic and they usually hyperventilate about everything. They had even assured us it could not be transmitted human to human.

Their source for both; the communist party in China. 

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A homeopath, an economist, and a psychologist walk into a homeopathic ER...

That is not the start of a joke, in Stockholm those three did start a homeopathic Emergency Room, as I was reminded by a 2014 Debunking Denialism post, so I went to see if they are still around, and sure enough and it still exists. 

They claim homeopathy "strengthens the immune system" whatever that means, and for people who believe Science Is A Vast Corporate Conspiracy, that promises to get them off the treadmill of actual medicine.

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Journalist Chris Cuomo and his spouse were criticized after endorsing a variety of nonsense products recommended by their "naturopath" to treat his COVID-19 - claims that involved light energy, tinctures and a variety of useless placebos.

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Fire breaks and responsible logging are overwhelmingly considered positives for forest management. Every native culture practiced removal of trees and controlled burns to mitigate risk of uncontrolled ones.

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The last group most of the world wants to hear from right now is a lab in Wuhan, but if their microwave air plasma thruster is more real than their claims of having a certified BSL-2 lab studying coronavirus, there could be a great deal of interest in the future. 

Like solids, gases, and liquids, plasma is fourth state of matter found naturally in places like the sun's surface and Earth's lightning. The Institute of Technological Sciences at Wuhan University
say they have created a plasma jet by compressing air into high pressures and using a microwave to ionize the pressurized air stream.

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If you had a choice, would you rather set your own hours or work around your schedule around family needs, or would you prefer being forced to go into an office where a corporate manager applies constant pressure to do more in the same amount of time and you have to pay for babysitting?

Many people opt for the former, and the "gig economy", where you set your own schedule, has been a boon for them. But fewer employees mean less payroll taxes and California has $500,000,000 in unfunded liabilities, primarily for government pensions and debt, so if a company is not paying payroll taxes to the state, California's recent policy actions have shown they have to go.

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A year-long Genetic Literacy Project investigation culminating in the rollout of the Anti-GMO Funding Tracker has found that despite claims that the agro-chemical industry, led by Monsanto, is a financial and political juggernaut flooding the media with propaganda and pulling political levers to maintain support for GMOs despite public skepticism, the opposite true.

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The text below is the second part of what could have become "Chapter 13" of the book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab", which I published in 2016. For part 1 see here.

Collaboration membership from CDF to CDF II

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A new series of experiments by an Alphabet (the parent company Google created) group shows lab-bred mosquitoes that cannot successfully reproduce might be able to stop malaria and other mosquito-spread diseases in countries where those are still endemic - two billion people per year.

Malaria is not endemic to the U.S. any more and we can thank DDT for that but we still face risk of numerous diseases from mosquitoes.  Other countries where diseases like dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever are common barely blink at the coronavirus pandemic that has paralyzed the U.S. after only causing as many deaths as a bad flu year. But infectious diseases can always spread. How would we manage dengue and malaria today?

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When I wrote the final version of the book "Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab", four years ago, I had to get rid of a lot of material which would not fit within the strict page limit requested by my prospective publisher. The discarded material was not yet at book quality level - I had intended to interview more colleagues and collect more material to finalize those extra chapters - so I never bothered to do anything with them, and they rested until now in a subdirectory of my book project folder.

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Anti-science activists should be on the ropes due to COVID-19 because it reaffirms that nature is out to kill us and that alternatives to chemicals and medicine are useless.

Instead, they have doubled down on their rhetoric. Go-to conspiracy site Guardian is claiming modern science (post-1998) has made us more susceptible to disease while progressive stalwarts such as attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claim it is due to 5G cell phone service.

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Though slavery is still invoked in the United States of America, it is ironically because it was relatively rare compared to the rest of the continent. Only 4 percent of African slaves brought by Europeans and other Africans were brought to what is now the U.S, and importation was banned by President Thomas Jefferson in 1808. The remaining 96 percent went to Latin America and there is no benefit to invoking slavery when so many have not only slaves as ancestors, but also the colonizers who brought them.

Bringing in a huge population of slaves left behind a science story, and that story is filled out a little by three individuals found within a mass burial site from the 16th century at San José de los Naturales Royal Hospital in Mexico City.

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Collective layoffs of large groups of workers have been common during the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020.

A new paper might inform possible impacts because it analyzed 556 collective layoffs announced between December 2018 and November 2019 across different industries that involved more than 250,000 employees. They wanted to see what collective layoff decisions had on the firms that initiated them.

The termination of employment, particularly of large numbers of people, typically evokes negative connotations. While the effect on individuals is obvious they found that layoff announcements have negative effects on companies.

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The coronavirus pandemic must be over because the Guardian's war on science has resumed.

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