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Win A MSCA Post-Doctoral Fellowship!

Science 2.0 - Jun 08 2025 - 12:06
Applications for MSCA Post-doctoral fellowships are on, and will be so until September 10 this year. What that means is that if you have less than 8 years of experience after your Ph.D., you can pair up with a research institute in Europe to present a research plan, and the European Commission may decide to fund it for two years (plus 6 months in industry in some cases).

In order for your application to have a chance to win funding, you need to: 
  1. have a great research topic in mind, 
  2. be ready to invest some time in writing a great application, and 
  3. pair up with an outstanding supervisor at a renowned research institute. 

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Soft Robot With Inflatable Actuators And Kirigami Skin Debuts

Science 2.0 - Jun 07 2025 - 05:06
University of Southern Denmark recently demonstrated a soft robot capable of navigating complex terrains using a combination of inflatable actuators and a patterned "kirigami" skin, all moving via rectilinear motion.

You probably think it looks like a worm and it can certainly go places only small things could go.

It's not very fast, only 11 millimeters per second, but it can twist, turn, and navigate through tight spots thanks to its anisotropic anchoring and flexible skin.


Credit: SDU Soft Robotics

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Decline In Male Fertility Linked To Male Paternity Leave

Science 2.0 - Jun 06 2025 - 13:06
After Spain instituted paternity leave reform on 2007 - what the Spanish needed to help their highest unemployment in Europe was even fewer people working - male fertility went down, according to an analysis of birth records before and after the switch.

This is in contrast to some claims that maternity leave can boost fertility

Uptake of the new paternity leave was very high among new dads. Then something strange happened. 

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Hurricanes: Water, Not Wind, Is Deadliest

Science 2.0 - Jun 06 2025 - 10:06
When most people think of hurricanes, they imagine winds gusting over 100 miler per hour, but water has been responsible for 86 percent of all direct hurricane and tropical storm fatalities in the United States for almost this entire century.

Floods, rip currents, and storm surges are the big risk, with freshwater flooding inland accounting for over half of drownings. To help with real-time, the Southeast Atlantic (SEA) Econet network of atmospheric and hydrological monitoring stations provide the real-time data used by the National Weather Service.

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Taurine’s Anti-Aging Hype Takes A Hit In Rigorous New Study

Science 2.0 - Jun 06 2025 - 00:06
Aging Biomarker Hopes Dashed by New Findings

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Lemons To Lemonade Is Like Soda Cans To Hydrogen

Science 2.0 - Jun 05 2025 - 05:06
An old adage goes that 'if life gives you lemons, make lemonade', which basically means turn something negative into something positive. 

Pollution is bad but a new study shows that it may some day be a net win for energy.

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While Western Progressives Block Nuclear, China Builds 2 Coal Plants Per Week

Science 2.0 - Jun 04 2025 - 10:06
On this day in 1989, protesters learned what American sympathizers refuse to realize - a communist dictatorship is not just American politics in a different language. They do what they want and you will comply or else. Violently.

That is why China exempts itself from all climate treaties, claiming developing nation status, and western countries, and certainly the so-called United Nations, refuse to criticize them. 

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WISEcode: Psychologist Proposes A New Way To Exempt Processed Foods From Harm Claims

Science 2.0 - Jun 04 2025 - 05:06
Processed and Ultra-Processed™  foods have been heavy-rotation buzzwords in the food activist community since the Obama administration but gained increased attention once the Trump administration came into power and a chief evangelist against modern food, former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was placed in charge of the world's most important government science agency, the National Institutes of Health.

Now, epidemiology has become a Supreme Court over science and instead of evidence-based decision-making, the default has become that if a harm or benefit can be suggested using food or chemical surveys, government will ban it and then tell scientists to figure out why.

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Phytosterols In Vegetarian Diets Linked To Lower Risk Of Diabetes

Science 2.0 - Jun 03 2025 - 11:06
Diets high in phytosterols, such as vegetarian diets, have long been linked to lower risk of heart disease and diabetes by lowering low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol but food surveys, questionnaires, and diaries are not reliable enough to make clinical determinations while in mouse experiments the doses were too human to be relevant in the real world.

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The Way To Finally Make Organic Farming Sustainable Is To Allow Modern Gene Editing

Science 2.0 - Jun 03 2025 - 05:06
The organic process is neither viable nor sustainable but a new paper would like to change that. By allowing modern gene editing. The only way Europe can reach the goal of 25% Organic™ farmland that its government-funded environmental groups demand, a 250% increase, is by moving into the 21st century, they argue.

When the organic process was the only thing available, the food-rich were rich and the poor were poor and the only difference was being born into a natural breadbasket. Cycles of famine were common.

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NEW: Infuzide Shows Promise Against Multidrug Resistant Pathogens

Science 2.0 - Jun 02 2025 - 10:06
There is no balance of nature and never has been, the universe is always looking for new ways to kill and create, which is why pathogens evolve resistance to drugs over time. It is estimated that antimicrobial resistance causes over 1,000,000 deaths each year and is involved in 35,000,000 more, if estimates by the United Nations World Health Organisation are accurate. Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus sp., two gram-positive pathogens highly likely to develop resistance to known treatments, can cause dangerous hospital-acquired and community-acquired infections.

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A Decline In Financial Skills May Be A Harbinger Of Alzheimer’s

Science 2.0 - Jun 02 2025 - 10:06
It is a time-honored tradition for the young to ridicule the old and vice-versa but some warning signs in the elderly may be serious. Elderly people are often financially savvy, and get more so with age - unless Alzheimer’s begins to set in, according to a new paper.

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Egyptian Blue, The World's Oldest Synthetic Pigment, Gets Recreated

Science 2.0 - Jun 02 2025 - 09:06
Anti-science activists have been in a war on food coloring for decades, and with one of their own having power in the new presidential administration, have even banned some, but artificial dyes have been used in many products for millennia.

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The Anomaly That Wasn't: An Example Of Shifting Consensus In Science

Science 2.0 - May 31 2025 - 04:05
Time is a gentleman - it waits patiently. And in physics, as in all exact sciences, problems and mysteries eventually get resolved, if we give it enough time. That is how science works, after all: the consensus on our explanation of reality changes as we acquire more information on the latter.

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Cancer Is Killing Fewer Americans Than Ever

Science 2.0 - May 30 2025 - 10:05
The science and medical response to activists claims that drinking water, weedkillers, and food coloring are killing people is to ask, where are the dead bodies?

They were there because those don't cause cancer, any more than manufacturing a PM2.5 air quality standard 30 years ago saves any lives, because they were never causing deaths.

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Remote Health Care Messaging Is Increasing Physician Burnout

Science 2.0 - May 30 2025 - 10:05
Telehealth, replies to messages or a quick video consulation with a health care provider, are designed to save time for everyone and reduce costs.
It may also be causing greater rates of physician burnout, according to a recent paper. 
Female physicians seem to be impacted most, according to the survey results. They spend more time on them, but get more messages they feel are negative or demeaning , and more frequently list messages as a source of burnout.

Greta Branford, M.D., and colleagues looked at data from a year’s worth of patient portal messages handled by University of Michigan primary care physicians, and survey results.

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Climate Change Implicated In Teen Pregnancy

Science 2.0 - May 28 2025 - 12:05
Young women are at at increased risk of school dropout, transactional sex, gender-based violence, and early pregnancy, leading authors of a new paper to declare climate change a public health emergency rather than just an environmental issue.

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Protein Is Key To Helping Older People Prevent Muscle Injuries

Science 2.0 - May 28 2025 - 10:05

More and more people over the age of 50 are taking up physical exercise. Medical associations resoundingly agree that this is a good thing. Physical exercise is not only key to disease prevention, it is also a recommended part of treatment for many illnesses.

However, starting to move at this stage of life requires some care. This is especially true for those who have not previously been physically active, or for people who are overweight or obese.

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For World No Tobacco Day, NFL Biosciences Wants You To Buy Their Tobacco Product

Science 2.0 - May 26 2025 - 16:05
NFL Biosciences is has a Marketing Authorization Application for a smoking cessation technique derived from an allergen treatment in the 1970s that has been quietly used as an unauthorized smoking cessation tool for 10 years. A lot like vaping pens were before the Obama administration tried to claim all tobacco was as harmful as cigarette smoking, an actual carcinogen.

And it works better than placebo, just like vaping, but lots of people have quit using hypnosis and we know that isn't science. This helps due to off-target effects from its original purpose, preventing allergic reactions in workers who used tobacco plants, thanks to how it modifies glucose metabolism.

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The 'Still Explosions' Of Lichens On Stone

Science 2.0 - May 24 2025 - 05:05

Lichens on stone, those “still explosions” as the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop named them, remain unseen to most, which is remarkable when you consider how commonplace they are. It seems these ecologically and culturally significant whatever-they-ares unfairly fall victim to something akin to plant blindness, a known phenomenon and tendency of people to overlook plants, which many of us – when we first encounter lichens – identify them as, even though that’s not what they are at all.

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