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Choosing Your Bets: The Selection Bias
As some of the long-time readers of this blog know, in this column I have occasionally discussed probability calculations in the context of gambling and betting. A long time ago I also famously won a $1000 bet on the LHC not discovering any new physics. Below I will mention a similar bet that ended up not being agreed upon by the parties, for the sake of discussing a subtle effect one has to worry about when placing bets: the selection bias.
Categories: Science 2.0
Environmentalists, What Are You Asking From Dedmoroz Lenin For Earth Day This Year?
Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is also Lenin's birthday.
That's not coincidence. The leader of the first Earth Day was not a politician, as the movement has greenwashed Democratic U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson into being, yet credible journalists and an alarming number of commenters will invoke the Earth Day site or some anonymous Snopes blogger or even Wikipedia(!) and claim the primary sources from 56 years ago are wrong.
That's not coincidence. The leader of the first Earth Day was not a politician, as the movement has greenwashed Democratic U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson into being, yet credible journalists and an alarming number of commenters will invoke the Earth Day site or some anonymous Snopes blogger or even Wikipedia(!) and claim the primary sources from 56 years ago are wrong.
Categories: Science 2.0
Repurposing SGLT2 inhibitors for cirrhotic ascites: from mechanistic research to clinical exploration
Categories: Content
How Ancel Keys Went From MAHA Hero To MAHA Villain
If a lot of the food and health claims you read and hear today seem like things left over from the 1970s, that's because they are. The food activist community, vegetarians and other diet groups, rebranded their beliefs as Make America Health Again (MAHA) after former Natural Resources Defense Council and pillar of the Democratic party Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. switched sides and joined Republicans in the Trump administration, but they are the same claims that were psychological platforms of progressives.
Categories: Science 2.0
AACR: New platform uses machine learning to predict responses in patients with lung cancer
Categories: Content
NYU Langone Health neurologists present latest clinical findings and research at AAN 2026
Categories: Content
Are Baseball Pitchers Faster Today?
On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became the first to have his pitch speed measured during a game. Rockwell International experts clocked the ball velocity at 100.8 miles per hour.
That was the fastest pitch ever recorded.
Yet last season over 50 pitchers in Major League Baseball threw 100 MPH and 140 more hit that velocity in the minor leagues. In September of 2010, Aroldis Chapman threw 105.1 MPH. Clearly, pitchers have gotten a lot faster, due to superior training and better scouting identifying athletes who will excel at pitching and getting them to play baseball rather than basketball or something else.
That was the fastest pitch ever recorded.
Yet last season over 50 pitchers in Major League Baseball threw 100 MPH and 140 more hit that velocity in the minor leagues. In September of 2010, Aroldis Chapman threw 105.1 MPH. Clearly, pitchers have gotten a lot faster, due to superior training and better scouting identifying athletes who will excel at pitching and getting them to play baseball rather than basketball or something else.
Categories: Science 2.0
You're Seeing More Redheads Than Ever And Evolution Is Why
Just a few years ago, there were concerns that minorities like blondes and redheads were going extinct. The future belonged to Miss Clairol because they're recessive genes and with just five generations of bad biological rolls, you could have less chance of Scottish hair than Senator Elizabeth Warren has of being Native American.
It may be that scientists just weren't seeing the signals.
Instead of going extinct, a study of 10,016 newer ancient West Eurasian genomes, plus 5,820 existing ancient sequences and 6,438 modern ones finds that red hair and fair skin have become more common over the last 10,000 years, not less. Evolution not only didn't slow down in that time, natural selection could those traits to speed up over the last 4,000 years.
It may be that scientists just weren't seeing the signals.
Instead of going extinct, a study of 10,016 newer ancient West Eurasian genomes, plus 5,820 existing ancient sequences and 6,438 modern ones finds that red hair and fair skin have become more common over the last 10,000 years, not less. Evolution not only didn't slow down in that time, natural selection could those traits to speed up over the last 4,000 years.
Categories: Science 2.0