Science 2.0

Just 6 days after passing a law banning conventional cars, California is asking residents not to use electric ones either. It isn't the first time various parts of the state have undone themselves when faced with reality. 

read more

Scientists know very little about the matter that makes up the galaxies in the Universe. About 20% of the matter in galaxies is visible or baryonic: subatomic particles like protons, neutrons and electrons. The other 80%, referred to as “dark matter”, remains mysterious and unseen.

In fact, it may not exist at all. “Dark matter” is just a hypothesis. Physicists and astronomers may be chasing a phantom – but that doesn’t stop us from looking. Why? Because if dark matter isn’t real, then the behaviour of the stars, planets and galaxies makes little sense.

read more

The teen years are a challenging time for people transitioning from adolescence to adulthood, especially if they have mental health issues.

The online posting, sending or sharing of hurtful content is like being trapped in a small town, except possibly the whole world sees it. So why would someone do it to themselves?

That's the puzzle of digital self-harm. Like older forms of self-harm (cutting, burning, hitting oneself), there is worry it will lead suicidal ideation and attempts, but since peers assume a third-party is the culprit, the dysphoric or abnormal reasons to post cruel, embarrassing or threatening content about themselves is compounded.

read more

Not all that much to do with Hank’s recent blog about the Galileo document that isn’t, but a note about how Einstein could be somewhat “pig-headed”, similar misunderstandings and new developments in contemporary fundamental physics.

read more

It is common today to have food, or even a feast, to memorialize the dead. It is a legacy from ancient times.

Across the Roman Empire, funerary rituals were conducted to ensure the protection of deities and the memory of the deceased.  They were required by law.

read more

Lori McClintock, wife of California Congressman Tom McClintock, believed in herbal remedies and has died from dehydration caused by gastroenteritis and whose inflammation was caused by “adverse effects of white mulberry leaf ingestion,” according to the Sacramento County coroner's report. 

Such deaths are considered accidental but if you wouldn't drink and drive on the windy roads of the Pacific Coast Highway, you shouldn't believe in folk medicine, traditional medicine, alternative medicine, complementary medicine, integrative medicine, or whatever else naturopaths and supplement charlatans are calling their dangerous money-making schemes these days.

read more

An early document which seemed to be “observational data that showed objects orbiting a body other than the earth.” - later known to be moons around Jupiter - is not a product of early 17th century science at all, but a 20th century fabrication that capitalized on the attention Galileo received after the 19th century atheist wave in Italy.

read more

Many of us enjoy a drink at the end of a stressful day. But for some, this is less of a discretionary treat and more of a nightly must-have.

While alcohol reduction campaigns ask us to check our relationship with alcohol, emphasising the role it can play in causing violence and disease, our research has found many Australian women view alcohol in a different way. Many don’t see alcohol as only a bad thing and have complex reasons for their relationships with alcohol.

We conducted 50 interviews with midlife women (45–64 years of age) from different social classes living in South Australia. All women had a relationship with alcohol but the nature of the relationship was really different according to their social class.

read more

A launch window – the period during which a rocket must be launched to reach its destination – opens on August 29 for the first flight to the Moon since 1972 by a spacecraft designed to carry humans there. If all goes well, the Artemis project will be on track to meet its goal of putting humans back on the Moon in 2025.

read more

The standing desk fad, and disastrous future outcomes for those who followed it, happened because epidemiologists correlated sitting and 'higher risk' of death. Obviously there is a 100 percent chance of dying but correlation looks for rows of behaviors, like eating cilantro or skydiving, and disease outcomes. Find enough correlation and you can declare statistical significance. Unfortunately, you can even do that with coin flips to show coins are prejudiced against landing on heads. Or tails.

read more

There is a reason for 25 years the anti-vaccine movement was dominated by progressives - they believe in the naturalistic fallacy and that science is a corporate conspiracy. Progressive darling (because female, academic, conspiracy theorist) Dr. Marion Nestle claimed it again just a week ago, which sounds so anti-science and politically partisan it feels like 2005.

It took Republicans being opposed to the COVID-19 vaccine for Democrats to finally accept them for the first time since Reagan was president.

read more

In over 15 years of blogging, in this and previous sites, I have mostly stayed away from the topic of climate change, the environmental catastrophe we are creating with our "perennial growth" myths and our disdain of our planet and the other species that inhabit it, and the continuous slaughter of over a billion animals every year for our unnecessary opulent lunch tables. 

read more

Whole Foods and other high-priced alternatives like Farmer's Markets sell imagery of pretty, thin people carrying bountiful produce, but the icky reality is that, unless it is canned or frozen, most food purchased rots quickly.

It is nature at work. Rot caused by microorganisms spoils half of all food harvested. The strange good news is that because plants also volatile organic compounds into the environment, science can detect those and tackle plant disease faster, which will prevent food loss. 

read more

Once upon a time, terms like 'primate' and 'Neanderthal' were used as joke insults, but they are both entirely true, and the latter even more so now.

Unlike databases of where people live such as companies like Ancestry.com uses to claim 'you are 12 percent Irish', biology is not a marketing gimmick. Once the science is settled, social fields like anthropology and other exploratory studies can fill in some gaps.

A new exploratory paper assessed the facial structure of prehistoric skulls, hoping to support the hypothesis that a lot of Neanderthal-Modern interbreeding took place in the Near East – the region ranging from North Africa to Iraq.

read more

It's no secret that a lot of people eat when they are depressed, and that social distancing, fear, and isolation during COVID-19 lockdowns and other government restrictions caused some depression to be worse.

Being young is always a time of struggle and the pandemic saw a resulting surge in obesity, which has meant a surge in type 2 diabetes.

read more

People who buy electric cars don't understand a lot about energy generation. They may believe that solar panels and wind are providing the energy, but even after $3 trillion in subsidies, those have not changed the percentage of energy generated by mainstream sources, like natural gas.

Their second introduction to reality is charging. If you are sleeping, and can sleep well knowing your electric car charging is equivalent load to an entire extra house on the grid, long charging times are fine, but it makes long trips a source of anxiety for most.

read more

Mitochondria provide the lion’s share of energy that cells need to function normally, so genetic defects in mitochondria can cause severe diseases that can be devastating if not caught and treated early.

Mitochondria remain important throughout our lives. People with higher mitochondria function age 'better.' 

Yet how mitochondrial defects lead to disease and aging has not been well understood. A paper published today in Aging Cell links mitochondrial dysfunction to the shortening of telomeres,  specialized DNA sequences that act as caps that stabilize the ends of chromosomes, and premature aging. 

read more

The good news for public health is that there have been significant decreases in past-month cigarette smoking by young adults and recreational use of opioid medications in the past year compared to 10 years ago. The same goes with alcohol, which is still the most used substance but has seen declines in past-year, past-month, and daily drinking.

read more

A common first step in embryonic development is that an egg meets a sperm but in a Weizmann Institute of Science study published today in Cell, researchers have grown synthetic embryo models of mice outside the womb by starting solely with stem cells cultured in a petri dish.

Without the use of fertilized eggs.

read more

Before every Marvel film premiere, comic books related to the characters almost always rise in value. People who speculate buy them from sellers. It's a bad idea.

In other parts pf culture, people who read about trendy topics like working-from-home and the metaverse and buy exchange traded funds (ETFs) will also likely be disappointed. Researchers found that ETFs based on these and similar hot topics earn an average return about 30 percent lower than more diversified funds over the five years after they are launched.

read more