Science 2.0

What is multithreading? It is the use of multiple processors to perform tasks in parallel by a single computer program. I have known this simple fact for over thirty years, but funnily enough I never explored it in practice. The reason is fundamentally that I am a physicist, not a computer scientist, and as a physicist I tend to stick with a known skillset to solve my problems, and to invest time in more physics knowledge than software wizardry. You might well say I am not a good programmer altogether, although that would secretly cause me pain. I would answer that while it is certainly true that my programs are ugly and hard to read, they do what they are supposed to do, as proven by a certain record of scientific publications. 

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In the field of gender-affirming care for the LBGTQ+ community, there are drastic solutions - controversial if it involves those unable to grant real informed consent - but there are also therapeutic benefits to minimally invasive procedures, write a group in Canadian Medical Association Journal, and taxpayers should fund those.

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Racism has been technically banned in California higher education since 1996 but schools have routinely gone around it with a wink from a majority party that never followers voter mandates they happen not to like.
Instead of using race for admissions - but only preferred minorities determined by secret sauce, which is why racism in admissions went to the Supreme Court multiple times - they declare they're doing enrollment based on needs of the state work force. And the background of applicants, except for race.

Little surprise that ends being the same racist policy that got it banned by voters, who went around the legislature to do it. Asian heritage kids without American last names are still penalized by California.

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Obesity is closing in on smoking and alcohol as the top killer among lifestyle diseases. Over 25 percent of the world is overweight and in countries like the UK and US, that number is approaching 70 percent. It is correlated to things like heart disease.

Is it a genetic issue, and therefore exculpatory? A new paper hopes to show that. The authors analyzed brain scans of 1,351 young adults across a range of  body-mass index (BMI) scores. They found that the overall volume of the hypothalamus was larger in overweight and obese people. They declared a significant relationship between volume of the hypothalamus and BMI.

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Malaria infects 250,000,000 each year and kills nearly 700,000. It is so rare in America that academics and activists can lament chemicals that kill mosquitoes which transmit it to humans, and even block mosquitoes engineered to prohibit reproduction, but the damage is too great to risk on tinkering with alternatives.

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In 950 AD, the first beekeeping document was created. An Irish monk noted their hives had mysteriously died off.


Flemming G (1871) Animal plagues: Their history, nature and prevention. London: Chapman and Hall.

Bees have been recording dying off en masse ever since. Just like they died before. What was the cause before pesticides existed? The same cause as kills bees today, except lacking $3 billion in revenue and allies on corporate journalism; parasites. 

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Wait a minute - why is an article about automatic differentiation labeled under the "Physics" category? Well, I will explain that in a minute. First of all, let me explain what automatic differentiation is. 
Computing derivatives of functions is a rather error-prone job. Maybe it is me, but if you give me a complex function where the dependence on a variable is distributed in several sub-functions, I am very likely to find N different results if I do it N times. Yes, I am 57 years old, and I should be handling other things and leave these calculations to younger lads, I agree. 

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 In 2019, nearly 12 percent of Black individuals experienced pre-term births compared with 7 percent of White individuals, according to a new demography paper.

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If you have ever visited the Terracotta Army in China, you know they are guarding an old emperor. That emperor was Qin Shi Huang, from 2,200 years ago.

The tomb has not been opened. The Chinese are superstitious, they believe in acupuncture and that grinding up the bones of endangered animals gives them superpowers, but apparently even some western archaeologists believe in magic. They are worried about crossbow and mercury traps.

You know, like "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Fiction.

No bow on earth is working after 20 years much less 2,000 and detected mercury near the tomb is probably because he drank it after listening to Chinese shamen who still sell woo today.

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California is having a mild summer but some regions are having their hottest season in 10 years. Scientists who used to note that weather is not climate have now retired and their Gen X and Millennial replacements know that citations aren't the road to new grants, media coverage is, so a whole lot of them will try to say any incremental finding has 'implications' for climate change or social justice.

The uncomfortable truth is that we don't know a lot of about climate, and denying the impact of the sun is weird. The good news is that modeling by academics is much better than it was 20 and certainly 25 years ago, when Frankenstein hockey sticks and hiding the decline were problematic.

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Most opioid addicts are recreational users, not those who started on prescription pain medication and continued to have pain and migrated to illegal routes when doctors behaved ethically and shut them off. It just makes people feel good. It is no surprise that opioids are involved in far more deaths each year than guns. If opiods were legally available without a prescription, they'd be in the same category as alcohol when it comes to lifestyle killers. That is what addiction does.

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A novel asteroid discovery algorithm, HelioLinc3D, spotted its first potentially harmful asteroid (PHA), a 600-foot (183 meters)

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The dirty secret of university admissions in the Affirmative Action era is that it was only affirmative if you matched the preference of the committee creating the secret sauce for admissions. In 2012's "Science Left Behind", written with Dr. Alex Berezow, we noted that Asian students with American last names were told to put Caucasian on the admissions box.

It was so well-known among Asians that being an Asian minority incurred a huge admissions penalty in universities that touted affirmative action that families told young people to deny their heritage. Even white kids had a better chance of getting than Asians.

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It is common for internet influencers to secretly be lying about their behavior but 'fruit only diet' guru Zhanna Samsonova was actually practicing what she preached. And it killed her at age 39.

She had survived COVID-19, she claimed, thanks to 'dry fasting'- though obviously billions of people survived it on a normal diet, and refused to seek medical treatment while everyone who saw her worried she was dying from malnutrition.


Zhanna Samsonova claims people would tell her they couldn't believe she was approaching 40. Maybe she misunderstood and they thought she was approaching 80.

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Harvard Humanities Academic Francesca Gino has filed a defamation lawsuit against her employer, Harvard University, and three bloggers on the site Data Colada.

Humanities academics and social scientists love to wrap themselves in the flag of culture and claim it is sexism if, for example, no evidence shows that standing with arms extended for two minutes will cause a woman to “embody power and instantly become more powerful.” The people who debunked the methodology were overwhelmingly men while social psychology itself is overwhelmingly women.

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The number of girls diagnosed with precocious puberty increased during the COVID-19 pandemic was most likely due to obesity - increased screen time and less physical activity. 

Precocious puberty is when children's bodies begin to change into adult bodies too soon. They start to develop physical changes before the age of 8 such as breasts buds in girls and bigger testes in boys. 

Girls diagnosed with precocious puberty during the COVID-19 pandemic tended to have higher body mass index (BMI) scores than girls who did not. These girls spent an average of 2 hours per day using electronic devices, and 88.5% of them stopped any physical activity.

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With historically high levels of LGBTQ2+ visibility, hardly a TV show exists where no matter how small the character list, someone isn't a sexual minority, a new paper says that coming out can still mean drama - even from those inside the LGBTQ2+ community if you don't match the style and tone of the cool clique.

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Prior to 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic, American Democrats led the anti-vaccine movement. They couched it in anti-corporate terminology and that let politically allied academics and journalists turn a blind eye to the harm their thinking caused. In 2015, after a decade of effort by Science 2.0 and many others, California passed a law banning 'philosophical' objections, a haven that had only been used by fringe religious groups before the 1990s, but in California had led to more un-vaccinated children on the coasts, in places like Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Marin County, than the entire rest of the United States combined.

It was a struggle to educate parents that vaccines were safe and necessary when they instead believed in supplements, organic food, and solar power.

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A new survey says lots of people opt for 'healthier' substitutes like chicken instead of beef and vanilla-flavored plant juice instead of milk, and 56 percent of them claim to feel better doing so.

Well, they probably do feel better. The reason is not the food, it is that they changed their diet and it is a psychological adjuvant for lots of other positive things, like fewer calories or more exercise or just feeling like they are 'doing' something by getting on a scale. 

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When the SpaceX Starship self-destruct system exploded it over the Gulf of Mexico in April, it's easy to imagine that Center for Biological Diversity and other predatory law groups were giddy - they had a new reason to sue someone and collect a settlement check.

That time has finally arrived, they can start counting yacht payments.

Because environmental groups have mastered 'sue and settle' agreements with prearranged outcomes, and with the Biden administration in a panic about losing the election in 2024, environmental groups know government agencies won't be allowed to alienate anyone in the tribe.

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