Science 2.0

Most people know that domesticated dogs and wolves share a common evolutionary tree, and that the branches were entangled for quite some time, but nothing drives that home more than a two-month-old canine puppy found in the permafrost of the Belaya Gora site in Siberia.

Is it a dog or a wolf? It was a male and radiocarbon dating gave the age range but DNA sequencing has been unable to determine the species.

Here is another amazing find from the Belaya Gora site!

Radiocarbon dating says it 18,000 years old.

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In late November 1999, a TV producer called me about an alarming report that 44,000 to 98,000 Americans were being killed each year by preventable errors in hospitals and another 1 million were being injured.

Could that be true? Based on my research, I replied, the estimate seemed low.

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This is in response to a “Nature comment” Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against which is scaring people. This is a little different from a normal Nature paper - it's a sort of scientific political comment. It argues and persuades rather as debaters do in politics.

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This exceptionally well-preserved crinoid, Delgadocrinus oportovinum, was found on October 11, 1905, by Nery Delgado during his work mapping the geology and paleontology of Portugal. 

Crinoids are marine animals in the class Crinoidea. They are echinoderms related to starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers and brittle stars. Adult crinoids have a mouth located on the upper surface surrounded by feeding arms. These have feathery pinnules and are spread wide to gather planktonic particles from the water.

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This week you have likely been deluged with fast-talking influencers on television talking about how to stick to your diet this holiday season. They don't know what they are talking about, next week the same group of thin, hurried, fast-talking, overconfident people will be making gift recommendations.

Calories are a marathon, not a one-day spring. If you are fat, binging for one day didn't cause it, it is the chronic overeating that did. I lived in Manhattan, with some of the best Italian food on earth. Somehow I gained 10 pounds? There was no mystery, it was eating stromboli every day and pretending it was a treat rather than a lifestyle.

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Let's say your Generation Z child is concerned about chemicals in your Thanksgiving meal and you want to avoid that awkward moment when they don't look up from their phones while saying "OK Boomer" as you try to explain to them that all food has chemicals.

Maybe they just don't want scientific chemicals. Maybe they want the organic kind that are healthier, according to, well, organic industry trade groups and journalists at the Mother Jones.

So you trudge off to Whole Foods or a store you read about on a Facebook page and buy the stuff on your menu. I hate to alarm you but it all has chemicals that are known carcinogens. That's right, they cause cancer.

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We are headed for the next round of climate pledges in 2020. So, what do we need to do to stay within 1.5 C? This is based mainly on the new UN Emissions Gap Report 2019

Here is a video with me talking about this article:

(click to watch on be)

See also

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With endorsements from five previous FDA Commissioners and a Republican Senate deciding his fate, Stephen Hahn, M.D., is certain to become the next Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

He's qualified, but most FDA heads have been(1). He also understands politics, and that is always part of FDA because a Commissioner has to let career scientists do their jobs while navigating demands from both the White House and Congress, which can often be politically motivated. And he s a lung cancer doctor, so he understands better than most what really causes lung cancer (smoking) and what is hype promoted by pharmaceutical companies and other groups who have tremendous influence inside organizations like the American Medical Association.

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“The history of the bow and arrow is the history of mankind,” said Fred Bear.

If you want to get a fresh turkey for Thanksgiving, you don't need to spend $120 for something that calls itself Heritage, you can honor your actual heritage and go get one the way your ancestors did. With a bow and arrow.

Since that time, a lot of has improved about archery. Though guns haven't changed much in the last 100 years, archery has gone through a technological renaissance. Entire science conference presentations are devoted to it, and that happened this weekend at the annual meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics in Seattle.


Credit: INSEP, France.

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"Many people have dogs. We have stem cells," says Cedara-Sinai Hospital lab manager Loren Ornelas-Menendez about why they will be working on Thanksgiving, hand-feeding a special formula to their charges and making sure they stay at just the right temperature. Like they do every day, for 52 weeks a year.

This is not just any lab, it houses stem cells derived from hundreds of healthy donors and patients, and a catalog of human ills, including diabetes, breast cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and Crohn's disease.

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Short summary: A Koala population in New South Wales has been severely impacted by fires with loss of perhaps 70%, at least 350 of them killed, and it could be more, leading to headlines of "1000 koalas killed". However, it will recover again, not immediately but in a couple of decades. A koala population can triple in population in 12 years. It depends on eucalyptus leaves and those trees have died, but the eucalyptus grows quickly too.

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When it comes to news literacy, schools often emphasize fact-checking and hoax-spotting. But as I argue in my new book, schools must go deeper with how they teach the subject if they want to help students thrive in a democratic society.

As a new poll shows that Americans struggle to know if the information they find online is true, news literacy remains essential in student education.

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This is the latest of several articles I've done about NASA / ESA’s plan to return a sample from Mars. I ask people to comment on my articles and ask my friends if they know of anything NASA or ESA are doing to prepare legislation for a sample return. So far nobody I talk to has come up with anything. The caching rover to collect the samples is already complete and will be sent to Mars in 2020.

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The 1950s were the first sign that with a booming economy, progressive busy-bodies were going to once again turn their sights on controlling behavior. Though Prohibition had ended the Puritan Piety attack on alcohol, and Hitler had put a halt to progressive dreams of eugenics, the war on inferiors continued by well-meaning elites unabated after the soldiers came home.

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Much of recycling is aspirational, and we choose to believe it works because we don't want to feel worse knowing it is a scam.

In the 1980s I worked as a fundraiser for an environmental group, Public Interest Research Group.  PIRG had all of the predictable anti-science activism points, which was a challenge since part of the region I covered contained a whole lot of people working at Westinghouse Nuclear, but I would concede they were goofy when it came to nuclear energy, but they were absolutely right that a bottle bill - a fee on top of the cost of a drink - was better for everyone than government recycling.

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Is there a fifth force of Nature, beyond the four we know about ? This question has been around ever since it was understood that 
1 - electric charges attract and repel, and influence one another, due to the action of the electromagnetic force;


2 - hadronic matter is held together by the strong force;


3 - quarks transmute into other quarks due to the action of the weak force (and leptons do that too);


4 - bodies carrying mass feel attracted to one another, although very weakly, by the gravitational force.

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You know you are in a wealthy country when there are articles about how people are depressed if they can't get a $2,000 Macbook, young people can talk about how bored they are, and poor families live in more square footage than the middle class in France.

Oh, and a majority are fat, even among poor people. It was never before possible for poor people to be obese, abundance of food used to be a sign of wealth.

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Many people feel anxious about the prospect of their death. Indeed, some philosophers have argued that death anxiety is universal and that this anxiety bounds and organizes human existence. But do we also suffer from birth anxiety? Perhaps. After all, we are all beings that are born as well as beings that die.

Whereas philosophers have said a lot about our anxiety about death, they have said little about birth anxiety. This is part-and-parcel of the broader neglect of birth in the Western philosophical tradition. The guiding thought has been that ‘all men are mortal’ (‘men’ in the sense of ‘human beings’) rather than ‘all human beings are mortal and natal’.

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NASA have put a great deal of work into the engineering for a sample return but I can't find any papers or blog posts or any sign of prepration for the legal side of the return mission. We are strongly protected by many environmental laws and laws to protect human health that we didn’t have at the time of Apollo. These laws don’t rely on the Outer Space Treaty for their legal basis. How NASA categorizes Mars makes no difference to them. See the article by Margaret Race of the SETI institute.

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While they last, gamma-ray bursts outshine stars and even galactic quasars. They are the most energetic phenomenon known to humankind, resulting from the formation of neutron stars or black holes as dying stars collapse. They are triggered by outflows of plasma ejected near the speed of light. 

They usually display energies in the region of tens of giga-electron-volts but why not even greater? Indeed, it is no longer speculation, a gamma-ray burst in the region of a tera-electron-volt has been detected. Which means these energies might actually be common.

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