Science 2.0

People can deny a lot of science without making a huge difference in their lives; no one will die if they deny evolution. Gravity, on the other hand, will kill you. You can't just jump off a building and deny it exists and expect a positive outcome.

This unseen force dominates our entire lives so completely we forget it exists. We drop pencils and struggle to walk uphill and go on with our lives.

How people account for this invisible influence while moving through the world was the subject of a recent experiment, and the results showed we regard it a lot differently when we can see it instead of feeling it through changes in weight and balance. 

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“Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.” – Marshall McLuhan*

The famous media scholar’s statement about preliterate societies seems to apply also to our society today, in which the word “terror” appears in the news daily.

When McLuhan’s oral society gains enough leisure to develop a written language, “leisure” would mean not simply a few hours off work, but also some insulation from the terrors of the interconnected world. Enough insulation so that one could safely turn one’s attention inward for a while, to direct one’s mind to matters other than immediate survival.

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I recently presented a mathematical model to describe the evolution of the Holy Trinity from a system formed with differential equations that correspond to the God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Thanks to this, it was possible to obtain an analytical solution of time, and it shows that God the Son is the point of convergence of creation. This work can be obtained at https://cvraulisea.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/holytrinity-isea.pdf

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Some people are surprised that the New York Times has a piece fawning over astrology. Are they new to the publication? Do they think it's a science outlet?

In reality, the New York Times is a billion dollar media company, and to keep the lights on they must sell what their demographic buys; and their demographic is overwhelmingly anti-GMO and pro-astrology; they are anti-Republican and pro-Democrat. They are anti-natural gas and pro-acupuncture.

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A few years ago, after concern about the Obama administration's efforts to use EPA to pick and choose winners in the private sector reached a crescendo,  the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that EPA "violated publicity or propaganda and anti-lobbying provisions contained in appropriations acts with its use of certain social media platforms in association with its "Waters of the United States" (WOTUS) rulemaking in fiscal years 2014 and 2015."

It was a shockingly bold attempt by the federal government to use water regulations to penalize the public.

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Oseltamivir, which goes by the brand name Tamiflu and is sold by Hoffmann-La Roche, has long claimed to shorten the duration of flu severity, to skepticism and sometimes even derision from the evidence-based science community.

A recently unsealed whistleblower lawsuit claims the company bilked U.S. taxpayers out of $1.5 billion by misrepresenting clinical studies and and publishing misleading articles falsely stating that Tamiflu reduces complications, severity, hospitalizations, mortality and transmission of influenza. And that's just when they encouraged government stockpiling, it does not include people who bought it with their own money, based on aggressive marketing campaigns which used the articles as evidence, the lawsuit alleges.

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True Health Initiative, a vegetarian diet activist organization, is a Who's Who of the anti-meat community, touting prominent academic epidemiologists and even the founder of Center for Science in the Public Interest. They have been darlings of corporate media during their existence because a cabal of epidemiologists all said the same thing. Meat is bad for you.

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Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an avowedly anti-nuclear group, created the Doomsday Clock as a publicity stunt to oppose nuclear energy and weapons. Journalists loved it, and so it has stuck around, with a committee picking some new arbitrary hysterical point of no-return annually.

Last year it was at two minutes until midnight - when the world will end, presumably out of 1,440 possible minutes, which meant we were .0014 away from, well, something. A vague Armageddon caused by whatever is popular in media accounts of how the modern world is killing us. 

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Would any school with a medical program be happy about a paid talk by Robert F. Kennedy so he could rail against vaccines, claiming that a world of preventable diseases made humanity stronger by culling the weak? Would doctors be happy if a school organization devoted to fighting climate change helped fund it?

That is why the science community at Stanford, one of the best science schools in the country,  can't be happy that the Students for a Sustainable Stanford group has paid around $40,000 for an anti-science philosopher, Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., to talk about "sustainability" - when everything she advocates now made the world less sustainable in the past. 

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A fruit fly brain may sound meaningless but there is a reason that Howard Hughes Medical Institute spent $40 million and 12 years to map it. And that reason is us.

The hemibrain connectome and its clock neuron circuity contains around 25,000 neurons, which can be grouped into thousands of distinct cell types spanning several brain regions and is the largest synaptic-level connectome ever created. It covers central fly brain circuits critical for associative learning and fly navigation. 

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Horizon Therapeutics Ireland DAC approval for teprotumumab-trbw as treatment in adults with thyroid eye disease, a rare condition where the muscles and fatty tissues behind the eye become inflamed, causing the eyes to be pushed forward and bulge outwards (proptosis).

The compound is approved under the brand name Tepezza and is the first drug approved for the treatment of thyroid eye disease.

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Are you more likely to buy salt if the label on it notes it is "Free of Nuclear Waste"? 

Don't deny it if you are one of the people who buys any of the 65,000 products that Non-GMO Project has sold stickers for, like salt. Not only can't GMOs be harmful, only a handful of foods are even made using that process, and yet it adorns tens of thousands of labels.

But awareness and truth are not their goals.

Like a "free of nuclear waste" sticker, Non-GMO Project wants you to think the food sold by their non-clients is harmful using the "nocebo" tactic - they want to convince the public the lack of something makes you healthier. Like nuclear waste, or unicorns, or GMOs, or ghosts. 

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About 300 year die each year due to heat, but if you look at the statistics of heat deaths another 300 list heat as a "contributing" cause, which means something else killed them but heat may have made the thing that caused the death more likely.

Though a 100 percent increase seems odd, that heat as a contributing cause could be a factor is not a surprise. 

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On his website Kevin Klatt, Ph.D., R.D., note that a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial is the gold standard for research, but when it comes to food it's not so simple. There is no true placebo when a sugar pill has calories.

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After Robert Koch first separated Mycobacterium bovis from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and seeing the success of vaccination in preventing smallpox, scientists believed that infection with bovine tuberculosis might protect against human tuberculosis.

It wasn't a linear path but after a lot of trial and error, and some fitful starts (including deaths, the kind of thing that would get a product pulled from existence in today's cancel culture, the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine has been administered routinely to protect babies against tuberculosis since 1921.  

Today only a few countries, such as the United States and the Holland (where TB is rare) don't use it.

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A new survey found that 86 percent of parents believe teens spend too much time gaming. The C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health. also finds differences in gender. Twice as many parents say their teen boy plays video games every day compared to parents of teen girls. Teen boys are also more likely to spend three or more hours gaming.

Surveyed parents believe gaming often gets in the way of other aspects of their teen's life, such as family activities and interactions (46 percent), sleep (44 percent), homework (34 percent), friendship with non-gaming peers (33 percent) and extracurricular activities (31 percent).

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Microsoft has declared they will become carbon neutral regarding their energy usage by 2030. While their details were sparse, they included electric cars, which still create emissions because 81 percent of electricity is generated using fossil fuels, and charging themselves an internal carbon tax which they would then use to invest. 

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Waiting for the weekend can often seem unbearable, a whole seven days between Saturdays. Having seven days in a week has been the case for a very long time, and so people don’t often stop to ask why.

Most of our time reckoning is due to the movements of the planets, Moon and stars. Our day is equal to one full rotation of the Earth around its axis. Our year is a rotation of the Earth around the Sun, which takes 364 and ¼ days, which is why we add an extra day in February every four years, for a leap year.

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Sailors have told tales of giant tentacled sea monsters for millennia. In ancient times, it was the Kraken. In more recent work, Jules Verne delighted and terrified the public while reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

The monstrous Architeuthis dux, the giant squid, must have been terrifying to ancient mariners. They were the size of modern school buses, never a good thing when you are in a wooden trireme, with eyes as big as dinner plates and tentacles that can snatch prey 10 yards away.

During an evolutionary scale when most creatures got smaller, how did this squid get so big?
Publication of its full genome sequence may give us clues.

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Since math is a language, there is no reason blind people can't learn it, but math and science textbooks in Braille require an enormous effort to produce. That means much higher cost for a small market, which means it can only be done by nonprofits on one economic end of the scale, or wealthy book companies on the other end, who want to offset their guilt at charging college students $200 for a book that should be $20 on Amazon.

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