Science 2.0

Since the Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded to biochemist Jennifer Doudna and microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2020, for developing the gene-editing technique known as Crispr-Cas9, Crispr has enjoyed a lot of attention and interest from scientists. The technique has been touted as a possible source of new treatments for diseases caused by genetic mutations, such as muscular dystrophy, and congenital blindness.

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"All The President's Men" inspired young people to rush to journalism while "Mad Men" caused enrollment in advertising courses to surge and "Top Gun led to more Navy recruits.

Film and television shapes young minds and marketers know it. A whole generation of people will believe a show like "The Offer" is a history of "The Godfather" film the same way some believe "Food Inc" is science; because it is on a screen. Yet trends have changed as fashions have. 'Stewardess' is out of the lexicon while 'Congressman' is still in.

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A new study finds that hugging a romantic partner can prevent the acute stress response of female bodies.

Women who embrace their romantic partner prior to undergoing a stressful experience had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in saliva compared to women who did not embrace their partner. No effect was found for men.

Some papers have claimed that massages, embraces combined with hand-holding, and embraces combined with affectionate communication can reduce signs of stress in women but those usually do not include men nor any effects of a brief embrace.

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Some of the problem with infant formula is due to COVID-19 and the resulting supply chain issues, but the other problem America has during this crisis with domestic formula is that we have tariffs and restrictions on imports that have nothing to do with safety. Democrats claim it is Trump, everything is Trump, while doing nothing about it for the past 17 months but now declaring more government will fix it.

Protectionism is designed to make imports unprofitable and favor domestic companies. Unlike "buy American", which appeals to emotion and is fine marketing, protectionism gives mandates and therefore subsidies to companies, which means higher prices.

In this case, it also means when there is a 40 percent shortage, infants at risk.

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In the 16th century, it was shown by Paracelsus that 'the dose makes the poison' - too much medicine or anything else could kill while too little did nothing. In the 21st century activists have sought to dispel that. They claim homeopathic effects from chemicals at safe doses, endocrine distuption and u-shaped curves, but science knows better.

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The recent precise measurement of the W boson mass produced by the non-dead CDF collaboration last month continues to be at the focus of attention by the scientific community, for a good reason - if correct, the CDF measurement in and of itself would be the conclusive proof that our trust in the Standard Model of particle physics when producing predictions of particle phenomenology needs a significant overhaul. 

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There are many laws to protect the environment of Earth. As prt of the process in the US, NASA is inviting comments and it's the kast day to give your feedback to NASA about their Mars sample return mission plans - can submit your comments to NASA here as a public comment.

This is for their draft environmental impact statement which they plan to submit later this year.

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Once upon a time vaccine deniers were on the left and conspiracy theorists who felt government was out to control us using radio waves were on the right.

Now they have flipped. Welcome to political intelligence.

Environmental Health Trust, the brainchild of discredited zealot Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., thinks Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and especially 5G cell phone signals are killing us. The most bizarre part is he thinks cell phones were safer in the 1990s, when they emitted more radiation with more power.

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At the centere of our galaxy, the Milky Way, there exists what must be a black hole. But detecting it has been challenging because of the cosmic dust around it.

Now, for the first time, a group of radio antennas knows as the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole four million times more massive than our Sun.

known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced "sadge-ay-star") it obviously can't be seen, that is built into the black hole name, but it can be inferred thanks to a dark central region (called a “shadow”) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole.

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Despite shutting down its operations in 2011, data from an old experiment at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) has pushed scientists to further rethink the Standard Model.

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As a new century dawned just over 20 years ago, a new war began, this one on expectant mothers. Companies, and their paid influencers, began to trot and even fund "studies" which correlated whatever they were selling to some positive outcome. Organic food meant better grades, abstaining from coffee meant higher IQ, you name it and someone was blastly already worried mothers will fear and doubt.

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In the Liliʻuokalani Ridge in the Papahānaumokuakea Marine National Monument (PMNM) in the Pacific Ocean, the exploration ship Nautilus, operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust, caught sight of an odd formation that looks like a cobblestone road.

"It's the road to Atlantis," one explorer jokes, before another one asks, "The yellow brick road?"

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Mars doesn’t have tectonic plates like Earth, but it does have volcanically active regions that can cause rumbles, and one way to develop a better understanding of Mars’ mantle and core is to examine seismic active. In March, NASA’s InSight lander detected two strong, clear quakes originating in a location of Mars called Cerberus Fossae – the same place where two strong quakes were seen earlier in the mission. Those quakes have magnitudes of 3.3 and 3.1; the previous quakes were magnitude 3.6 and 3.5.

InSight has recorded over 1,300 quakes to date, but nothing like the magnitude 5 temblor that occurred on May 4, 2022. That is a medium-sized earthquake on Earth, they happen 5 times each day, but it is a size researchers only hoped to get during this mission on Mars.

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Sri Lanka is in the midst of a rebellion bordering on civil war, and as these things often go, it resulted from leaders out of touch with the people.

Last year, the government of Sri Lanka, with European environmental Wormtongues whispering in their ears, showed what anti-science activists called "leadership" and banned any process that was not "certified organic." 

The collapse of the country was so sudden, a few months, it can be taught in political science classes for how not to govern. Even socialists in Venezuela had to be shaking their heads and wondering what Sri Lanka was thinking.

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A half-mile-long stretch of tunnel in California is now colder than most of the universe. It contains a new superconducting particle accelerator, part of an upgrade project to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser, one of the last milestones before LCLS-II will produce X-ray pulses that are 10,000 times brighter, on average, than those of LCLS and that arrive up to a million times per second – a world record for today’s most powerful X-ray light sources. 

Crews have successfully cooled the accelerator to minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit – or 2 kelvins – a temperature at which it becomes superconducting and can boost electrons to high energies with nearly zero energy lost in the process.

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Seeing a doctor can be crucial to managing and preventing chronic disease but there has long been a racial gap in routine visits that can't be explained by racism or income. 

Maybe people didn't like like going to the doctor because the COVID-19 pandemic caused use of telemedicine to rise sharply, and as that happened gaps in visits disappeared for black patients at Penn Medicine. 

Once “normal” in-office appointments returned, previous inequities stayed erased, indicating that telemedicine wasn’t just a stopgap solution but a potential long-term tool for equity. 

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In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations World Health Organisation told the Trump administration not to cut travel from Wuhan, they insisted that there was no pandemic at all, and then that SARS-CoV-2 could not be transmitted from human to human.

A year later they repeated the communist dictatorship's claim that COVID-19 might have been caused in the US and shipped to China in frozen food, and finally corporate journalists started to believe what independent people in science media had been saying for a decade - the WHO has a Chinese influence problem.

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Astronomers have been assuming that real new knowledge of black holes might have to wait until 2030, when/if NASA’s gravitational wave detector, LISA, launches into space.

The Event Horizon Telescope may have something else in mind. They have called a press conference for Thursday and speculation is rampant about what it might mean.

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By looking at the ‘shadows’ of two supermassive black holes in the process of colliding, astronomers may have a way to measure black holes in distant galaxies and test competing theories of gravity.

Three years ago, the first ever image of a black hole, at the center of galaxy Messier 87, came into focus thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of synchronized radio dishes acting as one giant telescope.

Now a new imaging technique could allow astronomers to study black holes smaller than M87’s, a monster with a mass of 6.5 billion suns, harbored in galaxies more distant than M87, which at 55 million light-years away, is still relatively close to our own Milky Way.

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