Science 2.0

The Green New Deal is the name given to a half-formed quasi-rational publicity stunt formed by the New Guard in the House of Representatives. 

Deniers for hire like Organic Consumers Association, which are opposed to agriculture (not to mention their endorsement of anti-vaccine activists and endorsement of opponents of all science) say it will be great. And it will be, for their clients. That poor people will starve or freeze to death if city politicians define "sustainable" isn't really a concern, because the wealthy elites who give to environmental groups will be fine.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Mayzent (siponimod) tablets by Novartis to treat adults with relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis (MS), to include clinically isolated syndrome, relapsing-remitting disease, and active secondary progressive disease.

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Discussion of the periodic table of elements often ends with simply invoking Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist who formulated the Periodic Law and used it to correct the properties of some already discovered elements, not to mention predicting the properties of eight elements yet to be discovered.

But instead of being foundational, it would have been just a quaint paper in a mining journal. had its development ended there. Mendeleev had been appointed him professor of general chemistry in 1867 and was required to lecture on inorganic chemistry. Lacking a good Russian textbook, he decided to write one, and that required truly arranging the chemical elements, something that had eluded other scholars.

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I was astonished to find out that the BBC linked to this “paper” in a recent article about eco-anxiety without explaining to the reader that in the words of Michael Mann it is “crap”. This BBC article is here:

• Climate change: Are you suffering from ‘eco-anxiety’? - BBC Three

All they say about it is

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The largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton discovered so far, and therefore the largest carnivore on land currently known to science, was discovered in 1991 in Saskatchewan, Canada, but the extremely hard matrix surrounding the bones, in combination with the size of the skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex (RSM P2523.8), made it especially difficult and time-consuming to remove, assemble, and study. 

Since is is relatively complete (roughly 65 percent), RSM P2523.8 has finally been described in The Anatomical Record: Advances in Integrative Anatomy and Evolutionary Biology.

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The Scandinavian wolf population is a bit of an evolutionary mystery. In the hoped for descent with modification scenario, textbook natural selection, there would be signs that hybrids of dog and wolf have contributed to this population, but none have been found.

 Wolf-dog hybrids – crosses between wolf and dog – are known from many parts of the world and have mainly been the result of male dogs mating with female wolves. One such hybrid was found south-west of Stockholm, in 2017; another turned up near Oslo 20 years ago. In the Storting, the Norwegian parliament, the question has been raised of whether the wolves returning to Scandinavia in the 1980s, after they had been virtually exterminated, even had some elements from dogs in their genetic ancestry.

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I enjoy hearing about or even falling for a good harmless prank — and I certainly enjoy pulling a child or two’s string, in a cheerful, happy way, just to keep them on their toes — so, April Fools’ is one of my favorite days of the year.

The holiday underscores how important surprises are for our brains. Of course, one hopes those surprises will be delightful ones!

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I sometimes like to read the arXix preprint physics site. It's where a lot of papers go before they are in journals. It was open access, a way to see what scientists were working on before the results were locked behind a corporate journal paywall, before open access was even a thing.

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A small survey in Australia (n=442) found that more than half of car drivers think cyclists are not really human, and many admit to intentionally driving too close to them. 

The survey says it is the first to look at a road-user group with the problem of dehumanization, which is typically studied in relation to attitudes towards racial or ethnic groups. The authors state that cyclists have been conceptualized as a minority group and a target of negative attitudes and behavior - but if drivers can put a human face to cyclists, researchers say it could reduce aggression directed at cyclists and road trauma involving riders.

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There are substantial differences among Americans when it comes to knowledge and understanding of science and scientific processes.

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Since the oldest millennials are now nearing 40 it may be time for sociologists and psychologists to stop writing papers on how much nurturing they will need when they arrive. They are already here. Yet papers will keep coming, perhaps until people stop wanting to read them.

Researchers show that how well parents or guardians support millennials' psychological needs prior to their transition to college is an important predictor of their psychological well-being as they adapt to college life.

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Last Monday and Tuesday I gave a few lectures on Machine Learning at a Data Science school (IDPASC) in Braga, Portugal. I think that this topic has received so much attention in the last few years, with heaps of excellent resources now freely available online, that it is very difficult to be original and provide useful information to any student who is proactive enough to google "auto-encoders" by herself.

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As if mothers don't get blamed for enough, a new paper claims attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)may have been caused by her diet during pregnancy.

The results of a study led by a team from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by "la Caixa", suggest that the risk of a child developing symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may be modulated by the mother's diet during pregnancy. The study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, analysed samples of umbilical cord plasma to quantify the levels of omega-6 and omega-3 that reach the foetus. The statistical analysis showed a higher omega-6:omega-3 ratio to be associated with a higher risk of ADHD symptoms at seven years of age.

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A woman in Scotland can feel virtually no pain due to a mutation in a previously-unidentified gene, according to a research paper co-led by UCL.

She also experiences very little anxiety and fear, and may have enhanced wound healing due to the mutation, which the researchers say could help guide new treatments for a range of conditions, they report in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

"We found this woman has a particular genotype that reduces activity of a gene already considered to be a possible target for pain and anxiety treatments," said one of the study's lead researchers, Dr James Cox (UCL Medicine).

"Now that we are uncovering how this newly-identified gene works, we hope to make further progress on new treatment targets."

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The more intensive and narrow the agricultural process, the more intensive the greenhouse gas emissions - which means your organic vegetables, wild-caught salmon, and free-range grass fed beef is a larger contributor to climate change than modern farming techniques.

And that means rich White people disproportionately affect the environment through their eating habits, according to a new report in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

The report looks at what different demographic populations eat and was undertaken to get a better understanding of the environmental impacts of the food consumption patterns of major demographic groups.

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A Massachusetts-based company earlier this month cleared the last regulatory hurdle from the Food and Drug Administration to sell genetically engineered salmon in the U.S. Animal genomics expert Alison Van Eenennaam, who served on an advisory committee to the FDA to evaluate the AquAdvantage salmon, explains the significance of the FDA’s move and why some have criticized its decision.

1. How is AquaBounty’s salmon different from a conventional salmon?

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Since 1990, the U.S Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.) has had NASA on its High Risk list due to persistent cost inflation and missed schedules.

Well, NASA is bold adventure, right? Doing things no one else can do? Bureaucratic timetables can't stand in the way of science. Except just the opposite is true. GAO regards NASA as a job works program for the opposite reason than that its missions are too bold for terrestrial accountants - it promises a lot and then once government is on the hook for the money, fails to deliver.

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Supplement distributor USA LESS has been forced to recall all of its LEOPARD Miracle Honey which touts itself as "an instant source of energy and enhancement of male vitality", from stores because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration discovered why it works for male vitality.

It's not their bogus mixture of rainforest herbs such as Tongkat Ali root, Ginseng root, Carob and Cinnamon, it's the presence of actual Sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra.

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When we think of racial bias we usually think about differences when being stopped by the police or being watched more closely in a small deli, but there is another facet of it, an indirect bias by people who otherwise behave in ways that seem diverse and tolerant. In a recent preprint paper, the authors concluded that white liberal politicians and individuals engage in "competence downshift" when talking to minorities while conservatives don't. Liberals downplay their own verbal competence and use more emotional language. It's like mansplaining, except for people of color.

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Science 2.0, a nonprofit science journalism group operating under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code that's educated over 300 million people, is soliciting evidence-based op-eds from PhDs with relevant expertise on the following topics. Write admin at science20.com if you want to submit 6-800 word articles related to:

1. 5G lawsuits. 

Lundy, Lundy, Soileau and South are soliciting plaintfifs to sue over 5G wireless, because it is so widely believed that any science that goes before a jury will lose, as seen in Johnson&Johnson baby powder and Bayer weedkiller cases.

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