Science 2.0

Though it is common to complain that advertising is following you everywhere and algorithms control our news, it is instead the case that the more tedious or challenging a task becomes, the more humans trust computers instead. Not many people listen to 4,000 songs to create a playlist they like, they make a playlist with a few and let Spotify do the rest.

A recent study involved 1,500 individuals evaluating photographs. The team asked volunteers to count the number of people in a photograph of a crowd and supplied suggestions that were generated by a group of other people and suggestions generated by an algorithm. 

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Some people believe that marijuana can be medical but almost no marijuana users think it impairs their vision.

Though over 90 percent of users believe that cannabis has no effect on their vision, or perhaps a slight effect, smoking cannabis significantly alters key visual functions such as visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, three-dimensional vision (stereopsis), the ability to focus, and glare sensitivity, according to research.

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Using their own proprietary consultant as the sole source for their "evaluation", US Fish and Wildlife Service once tried to extort up to $30 million from a private landowner in Louisiana, by stating they needed to created a habitat for an "endangered" frog and that was the only suitable location. And the landowner had to pay for it.

Except the frog already lived just fine in Mississippi. Its name was literally the Mississippi Gopher Frog.

Had sue-and-settle groups like Center for Biological Diversity actually won, not only would they have gotten fat from 'legal fees' paid by you and I, they could have created an ecological disaster chain, in the form of foreign parasites and diseases carried by those frogs.(1)

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If you see someone on "TODAY" hawking four products per minute they claim are going to make your life better, there is a 100 percent chance it is a paid influencer invited because a producer needed content. Such influencers get paid because it works.

This marketing strategy is also common on Facebook, Twitter, and outlets like Mother Jones, where organic food, supplements, and alternatives to medicine are popular for their demographics who have money and a distrust of science.

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At the height of his career, the pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla became obsessed with an idea. He theorised that electricity could be transmitted wirelessly through the air at long distances – either via a series of strategically positioned towers, or hopping across a system of suspended balloons.

Things didn’t go to plan, and Tesla’s ambitions for a wireless global electricity supply were never realised. But the theory itself wasn’t disproved: it would have simply required an extraordinary amount of power, much of which would have been wasted.

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Though modern humans and our closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes, shared a common ancestor millions of years ago, most similarities stop there. We live on the ground, walk on two legs and have much larger brains. 

That doesn't mean the larger brains evolved first. 

The first populations of the genus Homo emerged in Africa about 2.5 million years ago and though they already walked upright, their brains were only about half the size of today's humans. These earliest Homo populations in Africa had primitive ape-like brains - just like their extinct ancestors, the australopithecines.

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Micronutrient deficiencies pose health problems for a third of the world's population. Worldwide, zinc deficits are more problematic in the rural areas of developing countries, where diets are largely limited to vegetable products grown in soils suffering from low nutrient availability.

Biofortification, the process of bolstering the nutritional value of crops by increasing the concentration of vitamins and minerals in them, has arisen as a remedy for this problem.  Recent trials determined that foliar application, applying liquid fertilizer directly to leaves instead of the soil, boosted the zinc content of wheat grain by up to 50 percent.

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Eucalyptus trees are a pest-resistant evergreen that produce good lumber and oil that wealthy elites in the "wellness" marketplace buy - they are also an invasive species.

A new paper shows how scientists used CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out LEAFY, the master gene behind flower formation, so the trees will not reproduce sexually. The greenhouse study involved a hybrid of two species, Eucalyptus grandis and E. urophylla, that is widely planted in the Southern Hemisphere; there are more than 700 species of eucalyptus, most of them native to Australia.

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COVID-19 has been worse than the coronavirus pandemics of 2012 and 2003 yet the air is cleaner than ever, so a new op-ed claiming that 'virtual' pollution - so small you can't see it without an electron microscope - is the reason SARS-CoV-2 has been so bad comes across as silly, and bordering on deceptive.

Even sillier, they claim that 91 percent of planet earth lives in unsafe air.

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Today the University of Padova has issued a call for Ph. D. positions to start in October 2021, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy has 23 new openings. The English version of the call page is here.

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Muons are leptons(1), fundamental particles formed in the atmosphere by cosmic rays that are a heavier cousin of electrons. The Standard Model has three generations of leptons; electrons, muons, and tau plus their three neutrinos. The Standard Model is in line with "the big bang" and measurements of the hydrogen/helium ratio - because the number of types of neutrinos affects the prevalence of helium.

Things were great, or at least in a kind of intellectual détente on the Standard Model, until recently.

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At 5PM CET (11AM NY, 11PM Beijing) the Fermilab "g-2" experiment will release its most awaited results on the measurement of a quantity called "muon magnetic moment anomaly", and simultaneously, I will update this blog post to report on the released value.
But, why is that relevant, and why will it be so exciting to be updated on this measurement?
The muon

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