Science 2.0

After Fast Track consideration, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the neffy epinephrine nasal spray for emergency treatment of allergic reactions and anaphylaxis, initially for those who weigh at least about 66 pounds).

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Alcohol is the best-marketed carcinogen out there. Cigarettes and obesity only wish they were able to devote the money to positive imaging that alcohol, one of the top three lifestyle killers, receives. Instead, governments devote billions to education and awareness of those two while the only tepid warning about alcohol is not to drive after you roll the dice on cancer.

When it comes to BPA, PFAS, or weedkillers, government epidemiologists say any presence should be considered pathological but say nothing at all about alcohol use despite it being scientifically shown, unlike most epidemiology, and addictive.

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Last week I traveled from Venice to Tokyo through Zurich, and during the flights I could do some more tests of the RadiaCode 103 - the nice spectrometer for gamma radiation I have been playing with as of late (for a couple of earlier posts and tests see here and here). This time I was curious to see not only how the radiation increases as you raise your elevation above sea level (something that I observed already a long time ago with a different radiation detector, and then again with another unit a few years later), but rather see what the energy spectrum would look like - something that the older devices were not able to provide.

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If you ever get the chance to visit Turkey, I encourage you to do so. Like Civil War battlefields in the southern US, you can trip and stumble across something old - except in the case of Turkey it could be 2,000 years old.

Some sites are archaeological research and you can't just wander around like you can in Cappadocia. That is the case with the Göbekli Tepe temples in southern Turkey. It was inhabited in neolithic times and is ground zero in the culture wars over whether agriculture begat civilization or the other way around. Archaeological evidence shows they processed grain there, for example, but not that they grew it. 

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Environmentalists prey on the poor, which ironically harms the poor the most because they are most impacted by high-cost foods like the kind made using the organic process of companies that fund environmentalists to undermine competitors.

Mexico has many problems, and they are nearly all caused because people with money control too much of government. It's a country deep in oil, with a government monopoly on oil, that still somehow manages to lose money on oil during record oil prices. 

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Over 20 years ago, Professor Tyrone Hayes of U.C. Berkeley sent a thunderclap throughout agriculture. He published a paper in PNAS showing that a popular weedkiller, named atrazine, was changing the vocal behavior and therefore mating of frogs. In the words of Hayes, it was making them 'gay.'

Frogs are an indicator species. I was concerned. EPA was concerned biologists were concerned. The manufacturer of the weedkiller was really concerned.

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Epidemiologist Dr. Phil Landrigan claims conventional modern pesticides cause autism,birth defects, low IQ, ADHD and lots of other things, though pesticides sold by the companies who endorse him are basically health food.

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Epidemiologists aren't trusted by the public, and for good reason. A field once so scientifically conservative it was last to accept a hereditary factor in cancer now pumps out 25,000 "studies" per year "correlating", "linking to", and "suggesting" that everything causes cancer.

Epidemiology is why California is a scientific joke around the world, with Proposition 65 'cancer' warnings on 80,000 products that have led to no decline in cancers. Just much higher costs on common products, which unfairly impacts the poor most.

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Activists who just happen to take donations from competitors to normal farming - e.g. organic industry trade groups, corporations, and foreign nationals laundering money through offshore donor-advised funds - get paid to claim farming is a problem.(1)

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Every country has people claiming to be native now, whereas in previous generations if you were born there, you were native. In reality, outside the cradle in Africa, no one is native.

Everyone was an immigrant, and over time everyone calling themselves native to an area now stole land from someone else and colonized it. It's impossible to know who were the first to arrive but science can use inference, and new evidence of human occupation in southeast Indonesia dating back 42,000 years provides some idea of the time and the route taken by some of the first humans to arrive in Australia.

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I remember having been flamed, a long time ago, when in this column I ventured to claim that there was an inflation of physics conferences and workshops around, which to me looked both counter-productive (if there are too many such events, they become a distracting factor from research work, and returns are diminishing) and, I went as far as to propose, even unethical in some cases. I do not like being flamed, if only because it is yet another unproductive distraction, so I will not fall in the same mistake again here; rather, I have to observe that these days I am rather on the offending camp, so who am I to cast the first stone?

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Nicolas A. Van Larebeke, MD, cancer expert at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, was not convinced by offhand claims that organic food must be healthier(1) than food growing using modern tools and sought to find out if such claims were true. Instead of organic food being healthier, his team found that it had more chemical inputs, and those inputs resulted in higher concentrations of lead, arsenic, and organochlorine compounds linked to cancer in young people. The 600 Flemish adolescents in the data who consumed organic food more than 7.5 times a week had concentrations in their blood of toxins from 20% to 40% higher. 

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Solar power is promoted by its lobbyists and marketing departments as a great source of clean, affordable energy, but you don't have to pay people to buy your product if it is both of those things.

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Each man kills the thing he loves, sang Jeanne Moreau in a beautiful song some thirty years ago. But the sentence is actually a quote from Oscar Wilde - aren't all smart quotes from that amazing writer?
Anyway, in some way this rather startling concept applies to every man except researchers in fundamental physics - both male and female, in fact. There, all of us love our Standard Model - it is a theory so wonderful and deep, and so beautifully confirmed by countless experiments, that it wins you over forever once you reach enough understanding of its intricacies. And physicists have tried, unsuccessfully, to kill the Standard Model for over fifty years now. 

Anomaly! Anomaly!

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During last evening's Republican National Convention, speakers repeatedly invoked the fentanyl crisis and blamed lax border control and unchecked illegal immigration. Democrats, on the other hand, blame Big Pharma, and argue corporate exploitation of supply chain monitoring loopholes fueled the US opioid epidemic.

They are both right. Every high-profile death related to fentanyl had it purchased illegally, that is due to crime syndicates, while the other side argues that it doctors and pharmaceutical companies caused the addiction which forced them to go the illegal route.

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Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories have always been with us. The belief that Republican Vice-President Dan Quayle couldn't spell 'potato' or that Democratic President Barack Obama was not a citizen are common modern ones that still get repeated as facts.

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A recent paper did something interesting with data from 100 hypertension trials around the world - it compared blood pressure reductions by the type of healthcare professionals who led the interventions.

The results were that pharmacists achieved the greatest improvements, followed by community health workers. The authors believe that, unlike in the government-controlled medical environment, especially if patients are subsidized or free under the Affordable Care Act, doctors and nurses don't spend much time, while pharmacists and community health care workers have calmer, more empathetic demeanors.

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Alzhiemer’s, the most common form of dementia, is increasingly prevalent.

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In 2009, one of the first orders of business for self-proclaimed Scientist-In-Chief President Obama was to cancel NASA's Constellation project.

He said he wanted to 'go bigger' but given the hostility of his campaign, politically agnostic people knew what it meant - he was no Nixon, he was never going to allow a program with his predecessor's name on it to get off the ground, so the Constellation had to die to spite Bush. NASA has never really recovered from such overt politicization of science but the problems were evident before that.

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If epidemiologists were held accountable for the high costs, drug shortages, and food and chemical misinformation they cause, nonsense like claiming a type 2 diabetes drug that is popular off-label for weight loss in rich people also prevent dementia would stop.

Yet the reason so many "studies" by epidemiologists are being pushed onto the public now is because it is a fad. Fads, creating them or capitalizing on them, is big business for lawyers on one side and corporations on the other, and epidemiologists capitalize on that.

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