Science 2.0

Medicine works. When progressives insisted Science Is A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy it was dumb. Vani Hari and Joe Mercola, DO, and the rest jumping on the MAHA train and claiming Science Is A Left Wing Conspiracy (enjoy endorsing glyphosate you two!) is still dumb.

Because facts are real.

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COVID-19 lockdowns were an important tool in mitigating risks of acquiring the disease and putting those with comorbidities at higher risk, but objective epidemiologists questioned the value of lockdowns beyond three weeks. Some areas exceeded SAR and R0 models by months or, in states like California, years.

The value of public education over home-schooling or private has been touted by proponents as social adjustment, so there was also concern about how children might be stunted by not having access to anything except close family and device screens. 

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A new study finds that even in urban environments, trees make a terrific contribution to offsetting carbon dioxide emissions in cities, while grass is less valuable.

Soil respiration of grass exceeds photosynthesis so grassy areas release more carbon dioxide than they bind, making them a source of CO2 rather than mitigation, whereas on summer days, tree absorption can cover the emissions from Munich's urban car traffic and even exceed them at times.

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A new paper says the way to lower your risk of acquiring type 2 diabetes is not losing weight and exercising more, but sleeping 7 hours and 18 minutes every night.

You can't multiply that by seven days and catch up by sleeping more on the weekend and it also means if you just sleep less, you are out of luck. That is why like all epidemiological correlation, this is only EXPLORATORY. Science has not confirmed this and the correlation arrows could easily go the other way; insulin misfires may make you sleep less.

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A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial tested a four-day oral supplement, “FoTv,” which is made from the mycelium — the root-like network — of two types of mushrooms: Fomitopsis officinalis and Trametes versicolor (FoTv).

Participants began taking the supplement on the same day they received their vaccine and the authors reported that the supplement acted as a natural immune regulator and decreased vaccine side effects while preserving or increasing antibody levels and helping vaccine protection last longer. They say it could replace synthetic immune adjuncts which help the body produce a stronger antibody response - but have been linked to side effects such as fever, chills, fatigue and muscle aches.

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A new study examining regional snow cover trends across the Northern Hemisphere found seasonal shifts in snow - and a lot less of it.

The authors used the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab Northern Hemisphere Weekly Snow Cover Extent Data Record to determine whether snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere is increasing or decreasing. Then their two-state Markov chain model with periodic dynamics was used to analyze snow cover and found that significantly more areas are losing snow cover than gaining it.

And the seasons were changing.


Central Park in New York City. Credit: Mary Pollitz

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A bad liver today currently means a replacement, but having enough transplant organs is challenging when families worry their loved ones' skeletons could be sold to middle schools and end up immortalized in prank photos. The future will involve replacements made with a patient's own stem cells, no immunosuppressive drugs or waiting lists needed.

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A cohort analysis of preschoolers in Canada has led the authors of the paper to call for bans on so-called "ultraprocessed" foods, charging that it will lead to long-term mental health and well-behaved children.

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For four decades, a controversial idea has shaped how autism is understood by researchers, healthcare professionals and the public: the claim that autistic people are “mind blind”. The phrase suggests an inability to grasp what others think or feel. It is simple, memorable – and wrong.

The claim rests on a concept called “theory of mind”. In everyday terms, theory of mind is the ability to recognise that other people’s thoughts, beliefs and emotions may differ from your own. This idea explains why someone understands that a joke can fall flat, that a promise can be broken, or that a friend can be mistaken without lying. It is often presented as the key to how people make sense of one another.

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The gut bacterium Bacteroides fragilis has long presented researchers with a paradox. It has been associated with colorectal cancer, yet it also lives quite happily in most healthy people. A new study from a Danish research team offers a possible clue. When they looked beyond the bacterium itself and into its genome, they found a previously unknown virus embedded within it – one that was significantly more common in cancer patients.

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By this time 25 years ago, the "Dot-Com Bubble" was ready to burst. People who wanted to raise investor money claimed that they could sell anything affordably on a website; three companies were devoted just to pet food and buying ad space on broadcast television.

So-called AI is enjoying a similar frenzy. Though they are still just Large Language Models (LLMs), and the best analogy for that is a fancy autocomplete, they are attracting huge levels of financial investment partly because of the potential and then primarily because people want to make money on stocks, not companies.

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During the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the Office of Naval Research created a Young Investigator Program for early-career academics in science, technology, engineering and mathematics with innovative solutions to ensure the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps maintain warfighter superiority. 

This year, ~$17 million in funding will be shared by 23 researchers who obtained a Ph.D. on or after Jan. 1st, 2018 and are working on significant scientific breakthroughs in coastal forecasting, machine learning, additive manufacturing, autonomous operations, advanced sensors, dexterous robotics, hypersonics, decision superiority, ocean acoustics, ultrafast lasers and advanced composites. Typical grants are $750,000 over a three-year period.

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Once the weather got political, more attention became focused on the cyclical climate phenomenon El Niño. Critics charged that too many early models were shaped by understating its effects while proponents insisted its efforts were worse due to CO2 emissions.

There is something for everyone. It is cyclical, but not predictable, because it might bring wetter conditions to some areas and drier to others every two years. Or every seven. Experts can't agree on when it begins or ends, only that it's impacted by changes in what ancient sailors called the trade winds - the air currents that moved cargo ships from from east to west along the equator.

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For many people living with psoriasis, the red, scaly skin patches are only part of the story. Another challenge is the uncertainty about whether there is anything they can do themselves to help manage their skin.

Treatments have improved greatly in recent years. Creams, tablets and injectable medicines can all help control symptoms. Even so, many people still ask a straightforward question in clinic: is there anything I can do alongside my medication that might make a difference? Weight often comes up in that discussion. Psoriasis is more common in people who are overweight or living with obesity.

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These days I am putting the finishing touches on a hybrid algorithm that optimizes a system (a gamma-ray observatory) by combining reinforcement-learning with gradient descent. Although I published an optimization strategy for that application already, I am going back to it to demonstrate a case where the simultaneous optimization of hardware and software is necessary, for a paper on co-design I am writing with several colleagues.
In the course of the software development, I ran into a simple but still interesting statistical issue I had not paid attention to until now. So I thought I could share it with you here.

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A new paper says that players where a few superstars get the money leads to less cooperation and poor team performance. The authors say this salary compression is why teams won fewer games.

The authors also suggest that companies should strive for more equity in pay, to increase synchronized effort. Because individual effort by key people isn't enough.

They may have a point. The U.S. Army pays everyone, good or bad, the same, and it is the best in the world. But current military and veterans will laugh if a humanities academic suggests it it more efficient or cooperative because of equal pay. Instead, they will tell the stories of all the people their unit had to carry, because it's not a meritocracy and reductions only happen at promotion tiers. 

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In 2026, it is easy to feel intellectually knocked around by all of the health claims you read, and all claiming to be supported by science. Weedkillers causing cancer, food coloring causing diabetes, vaccines causing autism, and ultra-processed foods causing everything else are part of a Vast R̶i̶g̶h̶t̶-̶ Left-Wing Conspiracy to make us compliant and Evil Corporations rich.

Thinking about the new Trump administration in 2024, Republicans transforming into the 1990s Democratic party - except they haven't banned nuclear power again yet - was not on anyone's Cultural Bingo card.(1) 

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In late January 2026, New York Magazine published a striking piece of cultural reporting: wellness clinics, influencer funnels, and WhatsApp “consultants” selling the dream of brighter skin, faster fat loss, and cleaner energy—often via compounds framed as “peptides,” sometimes as other “cellular” molecules bundled alongside them.

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Olympians Chloe Kim and Eileen Gu are both Americans but have Asian descent. Yet Kim competed for her country in 2018 while Gu chose to instead compete for Communist China, which does not allow dual citizenship yet actively recruits foreign athletes to be on their Olympic team even if they have no Chinese ancestry at all.

Humanities academics say American media have been hard on Gu because she chose to compete for China, whereas Kim was celebrated. Maybe. She'd have lost her passport if she had done it to the CCP. The authors suggest it is because Gu's father is white.

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Glioblastoma, a deadly brain cancer, is treated with surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible and then radiation and chemotherapy.

Like all cancer, that may not be the end of it. Sometimes, the aggressive cancer returns. A recent study sought to find out if high doses of vitamin B3 or niacin could help, by rejuvenating compromised immune cells to kill tumor cells, the way it had with mice. The researchers found that while glioblastoma suppresses the immune system, niacin in mice gave immune cells a boost so they could continue to attack and destroy cancer cells.

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