Science 2.0

In March of 2016, a game called "Tom Clancy's The Division" was released. Unlike other "shooter" games such as "Destiny" and "Call of Duty", "The Division" has a compelling science story.(1) And the plot began on "Black Friday", the busiest shopping day of the year.

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What machine will replace the Large Hadron Collider to further our knowledge of fundamental physics at the high-energy frontier, in the forthcoming decades? 

The question is not at all a far-fetched one: these large machines require two decades to be built - and can then typically be operated for two further decades, amassing collision data that slowly but steadily improve the precision of our estimates of the parameters of nature.

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Many journalists have penned exaggerated, click baity but inaccurate articles about the IPCC report on climate change. One of the worst is the one published in the NY Times. It doesn’t have that many out and out mistakes, but it is a highly respected source, and so its mistakes, particularly the confusion of carbon costs and carbon pricing, and not being clear about what happens in 2040, in 2075 or 2100, confused many people and got reposted in many articles.

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This is running as a scary story in the more sensationalist science outlets. Dark matter barely interacts with matter and if they are right we are right in the middle of it already. It can’t do any harm. It’s been doing this for all of human history and more.

It's not even like a wind. Not even like the pressure of light. It's like nothing at all.

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This is running as a scary story in the more sensationalist science outlets. Dark matter barely interacts with matter and if they are right we are right in the middle of it already. It can’t do any harm. It’s been doing this for all of human history and more.

It's not even like a wind. Not even like the pressure of light. It's like nothing at all.

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Nothing to worry about for us. It's pointing in the wrong direction to ever harm us with the gamma ray burst jet. Their best fit model is that it is angled at 30 degrees to the line of sight.

It is too far away from us anyway at 8,000 light years. And there are no gamma ray burst candidates close enough to harm us. I go into that in detail in my article:

But this would be seriously bad news for any living beings that are on stars right close by within a few light years especially, along the line of the jet. Up to 50 light years away, it would cause significant effects on a planet like ours.

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This is a very bizarre click bait title from the NY Post that is scaring people. There is nothing here to worry anyone. It is not true at all,even the article itself says nothing about the planet exploding. Just some journalists inventive idea about a way to get people to click on the title?? Fake news. But the research is interesting, an interesting puzzle

Fake click bait title from the NY Post:

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This is a very bizarre click bait title from the NY Post that is scaring people. There is nothing here to worry anyone. It is not true at all,even the article itself says nothing about the planet exploding. Just some journalists inventive idea about a way to get people to click on the title?? Fake news.

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Early this year, I testified at FDA in support of approval for a new smoking cessation tool called iQOS. While it may have seemed odd for the president of the American Council on Science and Health, which has campaigned against smoking for 40 years, to endorse a product made by a tobacco company, the reason was simple data.

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After 32 people were infected with the outbreak strain of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli O157:H7 in 11 states between October 8th to October 31st, the CDC is now warning people about Romaine lettuce.  All of it, whole heads of romaine, hearts of romaine, and bags and boxes of precut lettuce and salad mixes that contain romaine, including baby romaine, spring mix, and Caesar salad, because no common grower, supplier, distributor, or brand of romaine lettuce has been identified.

If you keep lettuce that long, anyway. The CDC is great about food warnings that are weeks too late, the same thing happened last year, only then they warned people about the November outbreak in January so this is an improvement.

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Radiation is one of the most common treatments used in fighting cancer with roughly 60% of cancer patients benefiting from it alone or in combination with chemotherapy. Radiation is used to either destroy tumors completely or to shrink them prior to surgical removal. Previous research had led to a promising compound called Idoxuridine (IUdR) which had been shown to significantly improve the effectiveness of radiotherapy. The drug however, could only be given intravenously (IV) and had many side effects for patients. As a result of more recent research, a prodrug called IPdR has been developed. It is called a prodrug because by itself it has little or no pharmacological efficacy.

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Mommy shaming and chemophobia have long found common cause when it comes to the cosmetics industry.

Though mercenary, it is understandable why companies that make labels "certifying" something safe, and activists raising money touting our doom, prey on expectant parents; they are easy targets. Being a new parent is scary. Books are basically useless and 'better safe than sorry' is a well-worn cliché.

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Because its spirit seeks truth objectively rather than by imposition, science must enjoy academic freedom to be useful.The spirit of science is dialectic, in perpetual open discussion and debate about the nature of things. It is the opposite of religion, the opposite of fundamentalist positions and dogma, the opposite of politics or diplomacy.

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By Nala Rogers, Inside Science -- When do you need a broadsword, and when would you be better off with a dagger? That's the question that faced artiodactyls, the group of mammals that includes deer, antelope, goats, giraffes, pigs, buffalo and cows, during their evolution.

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Though anaphylaxis is rare, you are more likely to be murdered this Thanksgiving than die from a food allergy, companies and schools are increasingly buying epinephrine auto-injectors (EpiPens), which has led to shortages (government approval policies make it difficult for competitors to enter the market) and thus high costs. Though rare, the consequences of anaphylaxis are high, much more severe than using it when it might not be necessary.

If you are one of the millions of people in the U.S. who now carries an epinephrine auto injector (EAI) you probably wondered if it will still work if it freezes this winter. It will, according to new research being presented at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) Annual Scientific Meeting.

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As I mentioned in yesterday's post, there is a workshop going on this week at Fermilab, where 110 attendees - mostly particle physicists, but some computer scientists are also present - discuss how to push for more effective use of machine learning tools in the extraction of information on particle collisions. 

Also one goal is to understand what new ideas from the world of machine learning could find ideal applications in the typical use cases of research in fundamental physics. Here I wish to mention a few interesting things that I heard at the workshop so far, in random order. I will rarely make direct reference to the talks, to encourage you to dig into the pdf files available here.

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As I write this, our local school is closed due to concern about smoke inhalation. Other parts of the nation may not realize it but two severe wildfires broke out recently, in northern and southern California. If this had happened anywhere near New York City or Washington, D.C. it would be called Smokemageddon, or a Particulate Vortex, or something else clever, but because it's California we won't get Lester Holt in a facemask and 24 hour coverage on CNN.

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I flew to the US yesterday to get to Fermilab, where I am following a workshop titled Machine learning for jet physics". My goal of this post is to explain what this is about, and to give a few examples of the status of this interesting research activity, which encompasses particle physics and computer science and can provide spin-offs in a number of related areas of fundamental research.
First of all, machine learning. This is a booming field of research, which employs computer programs to create models of the way the human mind learns from examples, to then apply the learned structures to a number of different tasks of big relevance in today's society and to advance human knowledge. 

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A pilot study in Development and Psychopathology concluded that teenage girls who engage in self-harm like cutting often have brain features like adults with borderline personality disorder. Often is relative, since this was only 40 individuals.

Cutting and other forms of self-harm are warning signs for suicide, which data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say increased 300 percent among 10- to 14-year-old girls from 1999 to 2014, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During that same time, along with a 53 percent increase in suicide in older teen girls and young women.

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Dams keep the boom and bust of flooding from being too severe, they prevent water shortages, they make human existence better. But they clearly change nature.

Why is a human building a dam unnatural but a beaver building a dam natural? Only an environmentalist can figure that out, but what was a great idea 10 years ago - hydroelectric power and storing water - is now the enemy of the paid activism community, and politically sympathetic researchers have increasingly begun to curry media attention by writing papers to prove them right, as has happened again in Nature Sustainability, a journal which, like something might be called Nature UFOs, was created to make money legitimizing the beliefs of the activism community inside academia.

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