Science 2.0

In pursuit of the ambitious goal of reaching net-zero emissions, nations worldwide must expand their use of clean energy sources. In the case of solar energy, this change may already be upon us.

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A recent

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For decades, if you wanted to get a grant from the NIH, the best route was to go to Johns Hopkins. They received so much money from the federal government that it is a surprise they can't let students attend for free. 

They never would, like Harvard they are in business to make money and student loans are a giant pool of money that Congress made unlimited in the 1980s - way to stick it to Reagan, Democrats - and schools are going to get all they can, and lobby to keep it while agreeing that $200,000 in student loan debt for arts degrees is a problem.

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During the last periodic drought cycle, California politicians, catering to the their environmental allies, told everyone to replace their grass with artificial turf so that bizarre environmental regulations mandating water flow into the Pacific Ocean could stay in place. 

None of it had a basis in science. The 'flow' in rivers, so strong the state had to warn kayaks to stay out - during a drought - was chosen by activists who used a high level, not the levels that a state which is naturally a desert had in the real world world. 

Artifical turf meant less water needed by humans, we were old, and compassionate voters dutofully ripped up their grass. 

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Harvard University, and its anti-science allies like The Guardian(1) paper in England, are again claiming that meat causes diabetes.

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The occasional reader of this blog will excuse me if yet again I do not report here of this or that new result by the LHC collaboration, and instead discuss matters of lesser relevance. But to me, education is important. Even if I am not a University professor, but rather an employee of a research institute (and as such, not obliged to spend some of my time teaching), I do teach courses to university students. I do that because I believe I can give students a positive imprinting on the beauty of physics, on the exciting nature of research in fundamental science, and on how interesting all of that is. 

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If you are a parent, or know a parent, you have had someone claim that if their kid eats sugar they get 'hyperactive' - that may happen, but only because a child has been told they get hyperactive and act that they, the same way if you tell a child rum cake has rum they may act drunk.

Biologically, it doesn't work that way. Sugar can certainly help you if you are diabetic(1) and "anti-sugar rhetoric is simply diet-centric disease-mongering engendered by physiologic illiteracy,” according to Edward Archer, PhD.(2)

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With myths about razor blades or GMOs in candy, pedestrians running down children, and sugar rushes, not to mention belief in ghost and UFOs, October needs some science help.

So we are creating National Happy Spectral Apiology Day beginning October 16th next year. Bees are important but the apparition of them dying off remains undetectable. Yet honey bees are important, if you like honey - or are in a business where you need to rent them, like almonds. Outside honey bees, we don't really know. We don't even know how many species there are, because tens of thousands of bee species don't have hives to guess about numbering.

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A new study sought to analyze the chewing nature of four types of gum bases and along the way determine bubbling capacity also. Gums are generally oils, resins, and elastomers generally held in pleasant form by the gum base. 

So gum base is important to manufacturers. Chewing gum is a $25 billion per year business, 1,740,000,000,000 sticks. If humans chew each stick for 10 minutes, that is over 33,000,000 years we spend at it - annually. 

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Common sense says that if you have a lot more people walking, often in dark costumes, and just as many people driving, plus more people drinking alcohol than would otherwise occur on a Tuesday, pedestrian fatalities will go up. 

Common sense is right. They will.

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Do you know someone old who takes proton pump inhibitors and got Dementia? Lawyers are standing by to sue, thanks to epidemiologists who can "correlate" anything to anything. If an emotional appeal to a jury is made - 'we need to hold these corporations accountable!' - they are sure to win.

And then lose on appeal, as has happened with weedkillers, because a jury can believe anything they want but an appeals court uses science. And science says plants are not tiny green people so they cannot cause human cancer, and science says epidemiology is only over in the EXPLORATORY pile, with claims about mice and cell cultures. No drug has ever gone to market based on correlation or a mouse study, and none ever will.

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Antiviral drugs are generally considered to be a 20th century invention. But recent research has uncovered an unexpected facet to your immune system: It can synthesize its own antiviral molecules in response to viral infections.

My laboratory studies a protein that makes these natural antiviral molecules. Far from a modern human invention, nature evolved cells to make their own “drugs” as the earliest defense against viruses.

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Activists in the Baby Boomer and Generation X demographic promote a narrative that guns are a big worry for youth, and climate change will kill them unless everyone gets solar, but it is only resonating with people in their tribe.

Gen Z has been raised in an information age, they know that outside suicide and criminal activity, gun deaths are so rare that it's only slightly more concerning than dying due to a tornado. And they like their phones too much to endure the persistent black- and brown-outs that countries which relied too heavily on solar endure now.

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A Science editorial sought to appeal to scientists who might want to publish open access, or in another journal, by suggesting ways AAAS is better than other corporations: "Despite these similarities, the fact that Science is a nonprofit journal makes a big difference in how we operate" and then noting the profits they make "does not go to corporate shareholders."

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When science finally settled the debate between genetics and lifestyle regarding oral health, the world began to set new benchmarks for improved health overall. After World War II it was discovered that bacteria in our mouths create acid from carbohydrates, and that acid erodes the enamel on teeth, which will mean more decay and cavities.

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Next week is the oddly named National Health Education Week. Like calling a law that will dump poison into rivers the National Clean Rivers Act, the Health Education name is odd because the year it was created, 1995, by the Clinton administration's appointees in the National Institutes of Health, was the year after he exempted supplements and alternatives to medicine from FDA oversight. The $35 billion industry populated by grifters who get away with lying as long as they put “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease" in small print and don't adulterate their placebos with real medicine.

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Our five senses are gathering information at all times. One way our brain sorts the abundance of information is by combining information from two or more senses, such as between smells and the smoothness of textures, or pitch, color, and musical dimensions.

It may be why we began to associate higher temperatures with warmer colors, lower sound pitches with less elevated positions, or colors with the flavor of particular foods. A new paper argues that such unconscious 'crossmodal' associations with our sense of smell can even affect our perception of colors.

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A new paper has given a name for long-term symptoms that test negative for COVID-19 - "long colds."

Coronavirus is very similar to the common cold, so similar that coronavirus was not known to be distinct until the 1960s. Most who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 and got COVID-19 experienced symptoms like a cold, but those with co-morbidities or who had severe reactions got more like a super flu, some with devastating effect. Even after recovery, some still report lingering effects, given rise to the term 'long COVID.'

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With nearly $600 billion in unfunded liabilities, a loss of $30 billion just this year, and new regulations that will create unemployment while an entire Congressional seat fled for a more welcoming place, California needs ways to cut back.
California solar is one place they're reducing costs. Right now, solar customers who already got subsides to install their panels also get to the sell excess energy back to the utility at the same price they'd buy it.

That obviously makes so little sense it's a surprise even politicians fell for it, but the state regulates utilities and tells them to pass the costs along to conventional energy customers. Everyone wins except the poor, and they don't donate to campaigns. 

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Controversial social media video site TikTok has one supporter - a public relations academic at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

A recent paper, ironically in a journal from a publisher that has also been called predatory, argues that TikTok may be effective for encouraging women to get a pap smear, which aids in early detection of cervical cancer, which kills some 4,000 women each year in the United States. 

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