Science 2.0

Enrico Stomeo - A Lifelong Passion For Meteor Studies Tommaso Dorigo Tue, 05/12/2026 - 00:20 Categories Space

Californis is the largest dairy producer in the United States. It is also the most anti-science state, distrustful of the modern world. That is why coastal cities had measles parties until the COVID-19 pandemic happened; they believed the MMR vaccine caused autism in children. They love raw milk because they believed pasteurization eliminates magical nutrition that scientists can't detect.

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There are concerns about projected warming on the Earth’s surface and in the lower atmosphere even while the planet’s upper atmosphere has cooled.

It's not a paradox, it's a pattern and a recent paper described the mechanics of how it works. The short answer is that carbon dioxide (CO2) reacts differently to wavelengths of light. Closer to earth, CO2 traps it but it makes the stratosphere better at radiating, which cools it—but because it becomes colder, the Earth system ends up losing less heat to space overall, strengthening warming below.

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Why Raw Dairy Farms In California Accelerated The H5N1 Bird Flu Pandemic Hank Mon, 05/11/2026 - 06:57 Categories Microbiology

Why Raw Dairy Farms In California Accelerated The H5N1 Bird Flu Pandemic Hank Mon, 05/11/2026 - 06:57 Categories Microbiology

Nobody likes to wait in line. Whether you are sitting in your car waiting to reach the toll booths, on a plane waiting to disembark along with the other passengers, or in a queue at the ticket office, you may experience a range of feelings ranging from perplexity (“What am I doing here?”) to impatience (“Why is this not moving forward?”), to annoyance (“What is that idiot in the front chatting about with the operator?”). 

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Wavelengths Of Light Are Why CO2 Cools The Upper Atmosphere But Warms Earth News Account Mon, 05/11/2026 - 04:43 Categories Atmospheric

Wavelengths Of Light Are Why CO2 Cools The Upper Atmosphere But Warms Earth News Account Mon, 05/11/2026 - 04:43 Categories Atmospheric

The Supreme Court recently issued another ruling that seeks to end racial discrimination. most recently in specially-created political districts. What has not been an issue, because it was not obvious like universities and Louisiana politics, is how grants get chosen.

A new study says that there was a component of racial favoritism in science funding as well, and it's only been revealed in the wake of NIH grant cuts.

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We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology laughs at that notion. The next time you go on vacation, a new tool can show you how many places your vacation destination has been. 

Paleolatitude.org can do that, right down to the movements of small tectonic and ‘lost continents’ now called Greater Adria, the Tethys Himalayas or Argoland, which we know as  folded rocks in the mountain ranges of the Mediterranean, the Himalayas, and Indonesia. 

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One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than rolls of dice suggest. A new study of the mimicry of several distantly-related South American rainforest butterfly and moth species with similar wing color patterns that may warn away predators (it's not a costumed bluff, the moths and butterflies are actually toxic to birds) found that they reused the same two genes - ivory and optix - to evolve near identical color patterns.

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of individuals, companies, and NGOs, from California to Minnesota to Massachusetts, have come under investigation for fraud in taking money from the federal government.

Now the Department of Justice is investigating an insider in Dr. David Morens, M.D., a career advisor inside the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which came into controversy when it was learned that they had funded gain of function research in the Wuhan Lab where SARS-CoV-2 may have erupted.

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There are many hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter and one idea to explore how strongly hypothetical dark photons interact with normal photons wouldn't even involve a new and expensive dedicated facility, says Tokyo Metropolitan University Associate Professor Wen Yin.

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Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific determination of what that even means.

There are metrics but standard 0-to-10 scales and questionnaires are subjective and basically only useful for justifying treatments to insurance companies, they are clinically not much help.

Pain patients were demonized by the Obama administration in their war on Big Pharma and "opiods" that many in Congress now claim to support and that may be why both doctors and patients minimize their symptoms on official forms. No patient wants to be told their pain is just recreational desire while doctors are the easy targets for government. That plus general recall bias and confusion about what a pain scale really means clouds the issue.

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An analysis of 6.14 million maternal-child health records  has linked prescription medications to higher rates of Autism Spectrum Disorder in offspring. 

Sterol biosynthesis–inhibiting medications (SBIMs) inhibit the cholesterol synthesis pathway and are include antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, beta-blockers and statins; aripiprazole, atorvastatin, bupropion, buspirone, fluoxetine, haloperidol, metoprolol, nebivolol, pravastatin, propranolol, rosuvastatin, sertraline, simvastatin, cariprazine and trazodone. 

These include some of the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States, accounting for more than 400 million annual prescriptions. 

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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. 

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