Science 2.0

From an early age, my life’s goal was to get at “the truth.” There were only two obvious career paths: Science, or investigative journalism. I went the first route, becoming an academic researcher. Proud of the path I chose, and always admiring the other one.

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Lard wasn't that long ago. Given the renewed prevalence of Health Whisperers, those progressive forms of trad wives who fetishize the ancient ways and call soup "bone broth", it is probably an alternative sold at high cost to people who also buy raw milk.

For my father, lard was a way of life. Bread made in my grandmother's kitchen with lard and salt and pepper was his school lunch. That wasn't bleak to him, he didn't go to therapy about it, it was just his life. We were poor when I was a child, below the poverty line most of the time, but not as poor as he'd been. He had provided us a better life than he'd had. 

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Since 2022, when I got invited for a keynote talk at a Deep Learning school, I have been visiting with increasing frequency the northern Sweden town of Lulea, and its Technology University (LTU). In 2023 I spent three months there, invited by Marcus Liwicki and Fredrik Sandin to join the Machine Learning group for some studies of neuromorphic computing applications to particle detectors. Then toward the end of 2023 they were able to secure funding to invite me as a WASP Guest Professor. I thus spent at LTU some four months in 2024, but this year I have spent there over 6 months, as the research collaboration with the computer scientists of LTU has become more intensive. 

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A doctor who told you to smoke cigarettes "in moderation" would likely lose their license, but alcohol has long been known as a legitimate class 1 carcinogen, deemed such before the International Agency for Research on Cancer was hijacked by activist epidemiologists as likely as not to be caught signing contracts with predatort trial lawyers, and has gotten 'in moderation' hand-waving by the medical community.

Maybe it is due to the amount of money the American Medical Association gets from the alcohol industry, maybe it is because there are 6X as many alcohol drinkers as there are smokers, but one thing certain is 'in moderation' free passes have nothing to do with science.

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Bleeding hosts and stigmatizations are the best-known medieval miracles but less known ones, like a scorched cherry twig miraculously sprouting, a diseased swamp becoming fertile land, and healing the broken leg of an ox, are getting a new look. 

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Is it possible for there to be ghosts? – Madelyn, age 11, Fort Lupton, Colorado

Certainly, lots of people believe in ghosts – a spirit left behind after someone who was alive has died.

In a 2021 poll of 1,000 American adults, 41% said they believe in ghosts, and 20% said they had personally experienced them. If they’re right, that’s more than 50 million spirit encounters in the U.S. alone.

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Environmental activists have claimed for decades that PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are "forever" chemicals that have been causing disease. Once former Natural Resources Defense Council environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. joined the Republican team, their belief in homeopathic effects and endocrine disruption was adopted by some on the right.

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Remember when a small bacterium from California’s Mono Lake was supposed to rewrite the very definition of life? Headlines screamed: NASA finds “alien” life on Earth!

The organism reportedly swapped out precious phosphorus - one of life’s six essential building blocks - for arsenic, the toxic villain in murder mysteries. For science communicators and, let’s be honest, journalists hungry for clicks, it was a dream come true.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has signaled it will once again examine formaldehyde under the Toxic Substances Control Act.

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Due to the rising costs and inability of doctors to own hospitals since the Affordable Care Act (ACA), costs have ballooned. The ACA was passed because 750,000 people had pre-existing conditions that made private insurance unavailable, yet their incomes were too high for government assistance. The ACA bridged that gap, yet as government requirements increased the cost for everyone increased so much that 50,000,000 now need subsidies.

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Nowadays researchers and scholars of all ages and specialization find themselves struggling with mailboxes pestered with invitations to conferences, invitations to submit papers to journals, invitations to participate in the editorial board of journals, invitations to receive prizes for this or that reason; and of course, 99% of the origin of these invitations are individuals running fake conferences, scam, or predatory journals. Spam filters are not extremely good at distinguishing good and bad invitations, so if one wants to avoid discarding prestigious opportunities the only option is a painful manual screening.

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The inexpensive medication pantoprazole prevents potentially serious stomach bleeding in critically ill patients and can save consumers and the government thousands of dollars.

The results of a new study show that when prescribed in hospital for mechanically ventilated patients in the intensive care unit, where patients are on life support and at high risk of upper gastrointestinal bleeding due to ulcers, the benefits are dramatic. So are the resulting savings, at a time when governments are struggling to contain costs during times of rising public criticism.


Image: Storyblocks

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Sports used to bridge a lot of cultural gaps. You could walk into any bar and ask what the score was and everyone was your friend, regardless of race, creed, or color.

Those days are gone, according to humanities scholars at coastal universities. Even elite athletes are shook by being around anything different from them, they write in a new paper. The authors even suggest their work means business teams may want to group employees by political beliefs. Perhaps restaurants should consider having sections just for Democrats or Republicans.

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In 2008, Senator Obama won the election against Senator John McCain to become America's 44th President. It brought a lot of excitement to the science community. Before social media, opinion was easy to manipulate. Academics who, let's be honest, are almost 90% Democrats, were ready to believe the worst about Republicans. Bush banned stem cell research and it would cure Alzheimer's if a Democrat was in office(1), they repeated. Solar was ready but Republicans blocked it, while nuclear energy had to stay banned because it always led to nuclear weapons, they insisted.(2)

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The 10th congress of the USERN organization was held on November 8-10 in Campinas, Brazil. Some time has gone by, so it is due time for me to report on the event. I could not attend in person for a cause of force majeure, but I was connected via zoom, and I also delivered two recorded speeches plus one talk in one of the parallel "virtual session" that were run via zoom in the evenings (CET) after the in-person program of the day was over. 

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The Nobel committee dropped a bombshell in 2025 by handing its annual physics prize—often reserved for theoretical wizards—to a scrappy team of chip engineers. For showing that quantum mechanics isn’t just for blackboards and headline-grabbing paradoxes, but the heartbeat of the chip in your own hand. That’s right: the same theory that has tormented generations of undergrads is now expected to run your phone.

Sounds wild. But before anyone starts imagining quantum teleportation apps, there are two (uncomfortable) facts to remember:

1. Quantum weirdness isn’t some bonus feature—it’s mostly a headache in modern electronics.

2. Most “quantum breakthroughs” in tech are more marketing than miracle.

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Despite big ambitions, most life sciences organizations are stuck navigating outdated systems that make collaboration harder and breakthroughs slower.

The result? Slowdowns, missed insights, and costly rework. 

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I am moving some baby steps in the direction of Reinforcement Learning (RL) these days. In machine learning, RL is a well-established and very promising avenue for the development of artificial intelligence, and the field is in rapid development. Unfortunately I have been left behind, as I never really needed to fiddle with those techniques for my research. Until recently.

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In the 1980s, Democrats produced data showing that a college degree meant hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime earnings difference than a high school diploma. It should be a right, they said, and universities readily agreed. Student loans became unlimited and suddenly it wasn't just rich dumb kids or scholarship winners, everyone could go everywhere.

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Though vegetable oil is all the rage this year, we need to remember that food scaremongering is designed to pile onto previous hysteria, not replace it. The Endocrine Disruptor/PM2.5/5G conspiracy community, dominated by the left for decades, finally got one of their into a position that was important, rather than Guardian journalists or Natural Resources Defense Council attorney, and that means a whole new tranche of Evil Science must be lamented.

If being worried that food coloring caused your autism and telling strangers that beef tallow would've prevented it is not enough to keep you in full militant mode this Thanksgiving, here is a list of other foods that the International Agency for Risk on Cancer (IARC) has linked to cancer.

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