Science 2.0

Vaping in kids had its day. While useful before and since for smoking cessation and harm reduction in cigarette smokers, vaping only became a fad in teens when, as predicted, social authoritarians in the Obama administration declared it an epidemic - if on a survey a young person claimed to have tried one in the previous year and began rolling out commercials of children filmed in black and white looking like zombies.(1) 

It was Reefer Madness for the 2010s and did the same thing Reefer Madness did; it caused teens to think it was cool to outrage their elders.

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The 'natural' movement is not evidence-based but the beliefs of progressives that modern science is killing us and ancient ways are more nutritious usually aren't harmful. Your risk of E. coli and higher levels of toxic pesticides from organic food is certainly greater, but in a relative risk sense all food is safe.

Except raw milk. Like sushi when you are pregnant, the risks, in this case 700X the harmful outbreaks of pasteurized milk, are not worth it, and anyone who has seen a dairy farm and isn't selling raw milk to rich coastal elites knows it.

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If you read Twitter, and probably Bluesky, if anyone reads that, Republicans are in a War On Science and the proof is (1) being Republican and (2) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former darling of Democrats and once pushed to run EPA by President Obama, is in their camp.

Except he didn't take his allies against science with him. They are still firmly anti-science progressives, which means they still vote Democrat, and they are still cheering every time science is suppressed.

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Electric cars and solar and wind energy alternative schemes have a few crippling limitations; low energy densities and unavailability when people need energy most. Batteries could help with that second one except current batteries are legacy technology that are held back by subsidies and mandates, not improved.

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Since being discovered in 1993, microRNAs have gone on to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, thanks to private sector uptake with the COVID-19 vaccines that saved the world during the pandemic that emerged from Wuhan, China in early 2020. 

Errors in the manufacture of over 1,000 microRNAs can put us at risk for developmental disorders, cancer, or neurodegenerative disease and a new study looks at a molecular machine called Microprocessor (MP), which trims longer molecules called primary microRNAs (pri-miRNAs) - without cutting other kinds of RNA that resemble pri-miRNAs.

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“This is a new and emerging epidemic, and we must increase awareness of this disease process so we can avoid delays in diagnosis and treatment for our patients,” says University of California in Los Angeles radiology resident Sundus Lateef, M.D.

Epidemic? Again? No.

Americans are now so healthy that we have migrated from promoting nonsensical fear about virtual pollution (PM2.5) and weedkillers and lumber all the way down to...kitchen countertops.

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At the IV Workshop in Valencia a student from my group, Emanuele Coradin, presented the results of a novel algorithm for the identification of charged particles in a silicon tracker. The novelty is due to the use of neuromorphic computing, which works by encoding detector hits in the time of arrival of current impulses at neurons, and by letting neurons "learn" the true patterns of hits produced by charged particles from the noise due to random hits.

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Their Infiniti car couldn't ruin Nissan, but a climate where government mandates and subsidizes electric cars, which means deviating down to the revenue and running lean, are going to put them out of business. 

Because they were the world's largest electric car company, and they foolishly believed politicians who said if government forced the product on people, a miracle of capitalism would occur and consumers would like it.


Leaf. Credit: Nissan.

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Cannabis and THC, its main psychoactive compound, have been endorsed by people suffering from anxiety, sleep problems, epilepsy, and cancer pain.

What is missing from such claims is a plausible biological hypothesis for how it can be everything to everyone, which means scientifically it is still just a placebo.

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Europeans who emigrated to the colonies in America had a dream of religious freedom, denied to them by European elites and government-mandated beliefs, and legal equality, absolutely impossible in England if you were poor, but they also believed in an economic Utopia.


That last belief nearly cost them their lives. William Bradford, the first leader of that Massachusetts Bay colony, eventually conceded their socialist ideal failed. Free riders who chose not to work nearly doomed them. By 1621, a year after landing in Massachusetts, they had changed from socialism to a system where each family owned their land and worked it for their family.

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Quality by Design (QbD) is  a decade-long approach that was first introduced by quality expert Joseph M. Juran. Juran proposed a “Juran Trilogy”, of which quality and innovation were two of the pillars necessary to ensure breakthroughs in developing new products, services and processes.

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Last week I got to the part of my course in Subnuclear Physics for Statisticians (yes, there is such a course at the Department of Statistical Sciences in Padova, and I have been giving it since its inception 6 years ago!) where I discuss CP violation in the system of neutral K mesons. In one of the most surprising experiments of modern physics, the group of Cronin and Fitch proved in 1964 that the combination of the two symmetries operations called "charge conjugation" C and "parity inversion" P could in some cases modify the properties of physical systems. 

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The abstract for a new humanities paper published by the former Nazis who now own a surprising chunk of science media (Holtzbrinck Publishing Group) reads like it was created using a postmodernism generator.

Maybe it was. It's hard to imagine a human with any critical thinking let this go by, much less the dreaded Reviewer #2, but a pay-to-publish journal like this Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics is really just "editorial review" - the credit card has to clear and then it gets the same level of scrutiny as a paper about astrology gets in an astrology magazine.

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A brand of fake cheese - it must be that Europe doesn't require standards of identity so bacon can label itself vegan if cheese can - is making the rounds on social media again because of its virtue signaling to wealthy progressives that they are saving the planet even more ethically.

By posting their virtual carbon cost. 

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If you have done nothing wrong, do you want to be treated like a criminal? That was always the failure of Social Justice Social Science efforts like the Implicit Bias test; you're a racist, the test will show you how racist you are. 

You may not hate anyone so it would be perfectly understandable if you resented being told you are a terrible human being and that if you believe you are not, you are a Fascist.

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Minnesota is having a challenging year, so challenging they are approaching California as the wackiest state, according to other states. They have a chronic anti-Semitism problem, including a member of Congress who may soon have to register as a foreign national, a Governor so completely associated with violent protests that mainstream Democrats were baffled he was designated as their Vice-Presidential nominee in the 2024 election, and rampant distrust of science that made Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the darling of events there.

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Once upon a time, stories were just stories. They were fantasies that took people to a new world. 

In the 21st century, cultural pundits insisted that books, films, video games and television shape our personalities. It began in the 1980s when Democrats wanted to censor lyrics in music, and then video games in the 1990s, and then smoking and guns out of films, and now they ban books by everyone from Hemingway to Chaucer to protect us from being poisoned by content not institutionally controlled.(1)

First they came for the Disney princesses, and I said nothing, because I am not a girl...

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Artificial Intelligence is artificial, but it is not intelligence. That could change some day but it isn't happening soon, Large Language Models are fine for a few things but limited in most. That is why Ben Affleck can talk in a hurry and assure fellow film creatives that their jobs are safe. LLMs can't write a great script.

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USERN (Universal Scientific Education and Research Network, https://usern.org) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that supports interdisciplinary science across borders. Founded in 2015 by a distinguished Iranian Immunologist, Prof. Nima Rezaei, USERN has grown to acquire a membership of 26,000 members in 140 countries, from 22 scientific disciplines. From November 2022 I am its President.

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No one likes getting a needle but most want a vaccine. A new paper shows progress for messenger RNA (mRNA), that can be sprayed and inhaled thanks to improved lipid-polymer nanoparticle technology for holding mRNA that is stable when nebulized and successfully delivers aerosols, liquid droplets, in mouse lungs. 

A mouse study means this is only EXPLORATORY but the authors of the paper, including scientists from oRNA Therapeutics (RNA medicine) and Moderna (mRNA medicine), have filed for a patent while they get ready to see about human trials. 

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