Science 2.0

Common chemical reactions accelerate Brownian diffusion by sending long-range ripples into the surrounding solvent, which would mean that molecular diffusion and chemical reaction are unrelated.  

Yet that would violate a central dogma of chemistry; that molecular diffusion and chemical reaction are unrelated. 

The ripples generated by chemical reactions, especially when catalyzed - accelerated by substances not themselves consumed - propagate long-range. This challenges the view that molecular motion and chemical reaction are decoupled, and that reactions affect only the nearby vicinity. 

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Johnson  &  Johnson's Ad26.COV2.S COVID-19 vaccine raised neutralizing antibodies and robustly protected rhesus macaques against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

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TP53 is a gene found in every cell. It produces a protein called p53 which acts as a cell's barrier, even suppressing genetic mutations in the cell. However, if p53 becomes damaged, it no longer protects the cell as well. Perhaps even the opposite, it may drive the cancer, helping tumors spread and grow. That may be why only 2 percent of such cancers take root in the small intestine, while 98 percent take place in the colon, even though the colon is a much smaller organ.

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Biologists have mapped the genome of phylloxera, an aphid-like pest capable of decimating vineyards. In so doing, they have identified nearly 3,000 genes enabling the insect to colonize and feed on grape vines by creating what are essentially nutritionally enhanced tumors.

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There will never be another large telescope built in the United States, due to the influence of environmental activists, so those high-paying multicultural white collar jobs are instead going to Chile. But if we want even better conditions. Dome Angus, the highest ice dome on the Antarctic Plateau near the centre of East Antartica, is where to be, finds an analysis.

The problem is that, unlike Chile, no one wants to live there. That's due to the conditions that make it great for a telescope; high altitude, low temperature, and long periods of continuous darkness.

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Thanks to President Clinton's belief in supplements and alternatives to medicine, in 1994 FDA lost the ability to regulate a whole lot of products - as long as the products made supernatural claims and not medical ones, and put a disclaimer on the packages that no science was involved.

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If you've run out of friends to give your sourdought Friendship bread to, and 'feeding' it every three days has become drudgery, you can mix things up a little during your COVID-19 baking spree by making bread the Romans made 2,000 years ago.

How do we know the recipe is real? Because during excavations of Herculaneum in 1930, a loaf of bread was discovered still inside an oven. 

Here it is, courtesy of The British Museum and Chef Giorgio Locatelli.

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Reliable estimates of the mortality from SARS-CoV-2 infection are essential to understanding the COVID-19 epidemic and develop public health interventions, but we don't have them. If you realistically think that China, where the disease originated, only had a relative few deaths while, Brazil, which is both crowded and lacking in health infrastructure, has a fraction of U.S. deaths, you don't understand how disease transmission works.

But you should understand how numbers can be manipulated. There is also conspiracy theory that political activists are exaggerating or underestimating the disease in an election year.

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Kids often have excitement or anxiety about the return to school. COVID-19 threw a lot of families into disarray when kids started staying home. And it be may present as they go back. School safety protocols for COVID-19 or other things highlighted in the news such as racial tension could cause increases in anxiety.

While a little anxiety is normal, it may that the usual relief found in positive student relationships may disappear along with bullying if kids are again staying home.

Here are some tips for navigating the adjustment if kids are going back to school.


Image: Nationwide Children's Hospital

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When we talk about sight or hearing, the mechanisms that lead us to distinguish two colors or two notes have been well-established and translated into practical use. For example, we know which wavelength will appear red and which frequency will make us hear a G note.

We have not made similar progress with smell; we are not able to say how a molecule smells just by looking at its chemical structure.

A new paper examines the brain processes involved in the continuous flow of information arriving from our sense of smell. 

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Music training can make us well-rounded, it may change the way we think, and music is fun, but claims that it makes kids smarter may have hit a sour note.

Smart people often play musical instruments as well, so that has led to research trials seeking a causal link between music training and improved cognitive and academic performance, but they have reached conflicting conclusions. Some did suggest - a lot of bad epidemiology happens with that word so caution is warranted - that there may be a link between music training and better cognitive and academic performance. Others found no impact.

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In a COVID-19 world, you may not want to visit a doctor but that doesn't mean you have to avoid seeing one.  A new RAND evaluation recommends that clinics even hire a telemedicine coordinator to head their efforts and that they consider offering telemedicine services to patients from their homes.  

It can happen with with modest investments in new staff and technology and can even help expand patients' access to specialized medical care.

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Though the world is facing on obesity crisis, at least in the U.S. the culprit is not sugar, it's too many calories of other kinds.

Americans are actually eating less sugar than two decades ago, partially thanks to non-nutritive sweeteners.

The analysis used a nationally representative dataset on household purchases at the barcode level (Nielsen Homescan) in 2002 and 2018 linked with Nutrition Facts Panel (NFP) data and ingredient information using commercial nutrition databases that are updated regularly to capture reformulations. Keyword searches were performed on ingredient lists to classify products containing various types of non-nutritive sweeteners.

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Don't be fooled by those tourist volcanoes that reliably produce small basaltic lava eruptions. A new study shows they hide the same chemically diverse magmas in their underground plumbing systems as volcanoes that generate explosive activity.

Some volcanoes in Iceland, Hawai'i and the Galápagos Islands consistently produce lava flows of molten basaltic rock which form long rivers of fire down their flanks. They are so slow, you can outwalk them, and therefore so predictable you can visit them but unless you build a house in front of one, they are safe. 

Yet they share chemistry in common with Vesuvius or Mt. St. Helens, which means they are not as timid as we think.

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Marie Gangneux is co-president the organic food company Alterna'Bio so it's no surprise she hates science. It's not even a surprise she commits eco-terrorism.

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By Catherine Meyers, Inside Science 

(Inside Science) -- If you’ve heard the name Rosalind Franklin, you’ve probably also heard the names James Watson and Francis Crick. Watson and Crick form the famous duo most widely credited with figuring out the spiral staircase shape of DNA, and Franklin’s public image has become inextricably linked to the story of how it all happened.

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Scientific publishing is not known for moving rapidly. In normal times, publishing new research can take months, if not years. Researchers prepare a first version of a paper on new findings and submit it to a journal, where it is often rejected, before being resubmitted to another journal, peer-reviewed, revised and, eventually, hopefully published.

All scientists are familiar with the process, but few love it or the time it takes. And even after all this effort – for which neither the authors, the peer reviewers, nor most journal editors, are paid – most research papers end up locked away behind expensive journal paywalls. They can only be read by those with access to funds or to institutions that can afford subscriptions.

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Center for Science in the Public Interest is a litigation group which claims to be consumer advocates over eeeevil corporations. They were formed by a group who worked for Ralph Nader and specifically wanted to sue food and beverage companies. A few years later the two co-founders left, leaving Michael Jacobson in charge. Jacobson is a microbiologist so why he felt he could correlate infant formula to lower IQ in kids was a mystery.

Michael Jacobsen is also a sexist demagogue who'd be forced to resign if he tried to do today what he did to female PhDs who stood up to his uninformed conspiracy theories before social media existed - suggest such women were using their feminine wiles to get all of those male scientists to side against him.

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Using the genome-editing technology CRISPR, researchers can make targeted cuts to the genome or insert useful genes, called a gene knock-in, and they have done it with the cattle SRY gene, responsible for initiating male development, into a bovine embryo.

This first demonstration of a targeted gene knock-in for large sequences of DNA via embryo-mediated genome editing in cattle will mean it produces male offspring 75 percent of the time.

That's not to increase sexism, it's a benefit because male cattle are about 15 percent more efficient at converting feed into weight gain than females. That keeps costs low, especially on the checklist now when we have seen how precarious food supply can be for the poor, and it's better for the environment.

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In a 1972 book, "The Mountain People", Colin Turnbull deemed the the Ik ethnic group of hunter-gatherers in the Uganda mountains 

There was a huge confounder in his work that scientists would've noted immediately and now fellow anthropologists have caught; since the observations were done during a severe famine in the mid-1960s, they did not uncover typical behavior of the Ik. Instead, sharing and cooperating re-emerged once resources were plentiful enough.

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