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In early 2018, colleagues and I released The Next Plague and How Science Will Stop It and coronavirus was in there, because there had already been two coronavirus pandemics, SARS and MERS, this century.

No one anticipated that SARS-CoV-2 would erupt in Wuhan, China, and be the worst pandemic since the 1950s but one thing I had long been concerned about was how unprepared the CDC was. Thanks to government becoming more overlords and less public servants - sorry, George Soros and friends, 'no kings' was a problem decades before President Trump was elected - and government employees spent their days grasping for more money rather than helping anyone.(1)

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A National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences paper(1) is sounding the alarm about detectable per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in blood samples of Delaware residents.

It sounds scary, but scientifically there are two things to keep in mind:

1. We can detect anything in anything in 2025.
2. Presence is not pathology.

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Having interacted for a few months with ChatGPT 5 now, both for work-related problems and for private / self-learning tasks, I feel I might share some thoughts here on what these large models can tell us about our own thought processes. 

The sentence above is basically giving away my bottomline from square one, but I suppose I can elaborate a bit more on the concept. LLMs have revolutionized a wide range of information-processing tasks in just three or four years. Looking back, the only comparable breakthrough I can recall is the advent of internet search engines in the early 1990s. But as exciting and awesome this breakthrough is, it inspires me still more to ponder on how this is even possible. Let me unpack this.

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A survey asked 185 practicing transplant hepatologists across the U.S. who are among the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases members across the U.S. about "unhealthy" alcohol use - alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen, so unless you eat healthy amounts of plutonium or smoke healthy amount of cigarettes 'unhealthy' is a strange qualifier only alcohol gets - and found 26.3 percent screened positive for way too much alcohol use.

Which is higher than the general United States population but ironic since hepatologists are gastroenterologists who focus on liver diseases and alcohol is the leading cause of liver disease. So common that they had to create a non-alcohol version for the rarer cases of fatty liver disease that don't involve drinking.

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If a politician who used to be a Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer hasn’t banned all food coloring by the time you read this, here is how you can make your own green slime. In both Gen X - chemicals that sound like chemicals - and more natural-sounding versions of chemicals. Basically, people who think Dawn dishwashing liquid is an organic weedkiller.

These are excerpted from Halloween Science 2.0, available on Amazon (and free if you have Kindle Unlimited)



Let’s post two ways. Both of these scale, depending on how much slime you want.

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Impostor participants are people who fake data in order to take part in health research or are  automated computer ‘bots’ which mimic human behavior and responses. As claims get promoted in journalism about harms related to PFAS in water, weedkillers causing cancer, or food coloring causing diabetes, lawsuits by predatory lawyers have become big business, and it won't be a surprise if such Predatorts or environmental and other activist groups are involved in fake participants to manipulate results in their favor.

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A new call to action by ecologists uses a numerical model to note that wildfires in places like California have been made worse by humans. 

That doesn't mean it is human emissions. For decades, California government has banned logging. They let people move to risky fire areas and then not pay for any mitigation or firebreaks. State and local governments refuse to allow dead brush to be cleared because it impacts the environment.

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A new study describes a new liquid phase in thin films of a glass-forming molecules. These results demonstrate how these glasses and other similar materials can be fabricated to be denser and more stable, providing a framework for developing new applications and devices through better design.

New research has identified potential treatment that could improve the human immune system's ability to search out and destroy cancer cells within the body. Scientists have identified a way to restrict the activity of a group of cells which regulate the immune system, which in turn can unleash other immune cells to attack tumours in cancer patients.

University of Washington scientists have developed a statistical framework that incorporates key COVID-19 data -- such as case counts and deaths due to COVID-19 -- to model the true prevalence of this disease in the United States and individual states. Their approach projects that in the U.S. as many as 60% of COVID-19 cases went undetected as of March 7, 2021, the last date for which the dataset they employed is available.

Mice exposed to the opioid oxycodone before birth experience permanent changes in behavior and gene expression. The new research published in eNeuro highlights a need to develop safer types of painkillers for pregnant women.

Researchers have identified a rare class of genetic differences transmitted from parents without autism to their affected children with autism and determined that they are most prominent in "multiplex" families with more than one family member on the spectrum. These findings are reported in Recent ultra-rare inherited variants implicate new autism candidate risk genes, a new study published in Nature Genetics.

An international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research and the University of Åarhus in Denmark have discovered that bacteria from the plant microbiota are adapted to their host species. In a newly published study, they show how root-associated bacteria have a competitive advantage when colonizing their native host, which allows them to invade an already established microbiota.

A new study reports that among individuals who had an allergic reaction to their first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine dose, all who went on to receive a second dose tolerated it. Even some who experienced anaphylaxis following the first dose tolerated the second dose.

Researchers from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital and the University of Queensland have developed a new formulation based on regulatory T-cell exosomes (rEXS) to deliver vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) antibodies for choroidal neovascularization therapy.

Lonely, older adults are nearly twice as likely to use opioids to ease pain and two-and-a-half times more likely to use sedatives and anti-anxiety medications, putting themselves at risk for drug dependency, impaired attention, falls and other accidents, and further cognitive impairment, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco.

What The Study Did: Survey data were used to investigate the relationship between loneliness and high-risk medication use in adults older than age 65.

What The Study Did: The association between Medicare eligibility at age 65 and changes in racial and ethnic disparities in access to care and self-reported health was evaluated in this study.

What The Study Did: Researchers examined the safety of the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines in patients who experienced an allergic reaction to the first dose.

The visual cortex stores and remembers individual images, but when they are grouped into a sequence, mice can't recognize that without guidance from the hippocampus, according to a new study by neuroscientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.