Science 2.0

How hard is it to get "organic" certified?

About as hard as you think it would be when the companies that do the "certification" only make their money certifying organic farms and collecting the fees. It has about as much legitimacy as buying a Ph.D. in Theoretical Phys Ed in the mail.

There is a good reason that about 25 percent of organic food is just overpriced regular food and that reason is - there are no surprise spot checks on farms in America and if you believe Russia or China are telling the truth about their organic process, they have a bat from Wuhan wet market they'd like to sell you.

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"Hygiene theater", the kind of symbolism that makes people feel like they are caring about their fellow humans, isn't going away, so get used to having someone unqualified stick a thermometer up to your forehead and we'll all pretend your grandmother will die if they don't.

The reason is the CDC, and then ridiculously hyperactive states like California, who still haven't even adopted the overly conservative stance of the CDC. Vaccinated or not, you have to wear a mask unless you are drinking coffee - and they weirdly tried to tell people to mask up between sips, the opposite of what every expert says.

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If you are old enough to remember Baghdad Bob, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf was the spokesperson for Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein who, no matter how bad things were, insisted they were on the verge of winning against a United Nations that was going to dethrone him.

He's been dead for years but if he were still around, it's easy to imagine China would want to use him.

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There are lots of advertisements for 5G cellular service but it still isn't available in most places, and devices that take advantage of it are in relatively low use. Better quality cat videos on a 5-inch screen are not all that compelling

Sooner rather than later, people are going to want the haptic internet - a virtual reality tactile experience far more advanced than a vibrating Xbox controller - and businesses will want holographic conferencing and both will require more mobile edge computing - mini-clouds closer to users than current centralized storage.

Those will require the next evolution in the terahertz band - 6G. It is blocked out to be from 95 GHz to 3 THz.

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In the previous post I mentioned a research project that I was about to conclude, centered on the detection of anomalies in multidimensional data. Here I would like to give some more detail of that research, as the article I wrote on the subject is now publically accessible in the Cornell preprint arXiv (and is being sent to a refereed journal).

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The modern research university was designed to produce new knowledge and to pass that knowledge on to students. North American universities over the last 100 years have been exceptionally good at that task.

But this is not all that universities can do or should do. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it even easier to reduce teaching to knowledge dissemination and to obscure other, equally important, forms of education that help students be better citizens, thinkers, writers and collaborators.

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The biggest mistake a company can make is treating its customers like they are criminals. While "The Soup Nazi" was a fun bit on "Seinfeld", and there are some instances where you can adapt a 'take it or leave it' approach to how you treat people, that is not where the IPOs are.

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Over 26 percent of the western US  is in exceptional drought while  72 percent is in severe drought. That has not stopped the federal government from dumping so much water into rivers it creates hazardous conditions for people in them.

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In 2016, after over a half century of fighting, the communist group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) gave up. The revolutionaries had hidden in the Andes-Amazon region and the occupied rainforest remained under-developed for obvious violent reasons: if you want to have a successful takeover, you can't make people happier, you have to make them miserable and hope they blame the government. 

It didn't work, and instead simply created multi-generational terrorism. The only winner during the attempted overthrow was, strangely, the environment, according to a new paper.

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Environmentalists believe the Pacific Ocean needs more water, and also that no new water infrastructure can be built, which leads to one of the bizarrely counter-intuitive events that have made California famous across America.

Despite a drought, laws that environmental lawyers lobbied to get in place during politically sympathetic administrations mean that 1,500 cubic feet per second of water must be dumped by law from the New Melones Reservoir until...no one knows when. 

 

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The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and AVITA Medical have halted recruitment for the ongoing pediatric burn study of RECELL spray-on skin for the best possible reason; it has been shown to work.

This expanded use just received FDA approval for pediatric burn patients as well as extensive burns covering more than 50 percent of a body’s total surface area.

The most common treatment for burns is skin grafting – a painful treatment that can be disfiguring, and sometimes results in additional complications as a child grows. Large burn injuries often do not have enough viable skin available for conventional skin grafting. 

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One of the things that scientists rely on to accurately predict climate change is the amount of carbon sequestered underground. Carbon dioxide in the air leads to increased global warming, exacerbating climate change. When plants have a lot of access to carbon dioxide, they photosynthesize more. Scientists have assumed for a long time that this led to a high concentration of carbon sequestered under the ground. As plants took in this carbon dioxide, they transformed it into compounds and organic structures such as roots and leaves, which would add to the amount of carbon stored underground.

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Two recent articles showed showed changes in the focus and funding of clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease therapies.

And they suggested the change might be evidenced by today, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seemed ready to approve aducanumab (Biogen) as the first new drug therapy to Alzheimer's patients in nearly 20 years.

Namely the emergence of taxpayer-funded government and nonprofit organizations as the primary drivers of research. 

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In Switzerland, it is easy to oppose science. The country is wealthy, with a minimum wage 3X that of most US states, because other countries pay the bills.  Even anti-science activists like Swiss Public Eye are funded by the government rather than consumers.

When you are rich, food is no longer on the hierarchy of needs, it becomes part of the hierarchy of 'values' and values are easy when you have money. You can advocate for expensive food for poor people in other countries because you will never see them. You don't know their struggle to feed their families when UN members walk down the street daily.

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In March of 2020 The Lancet published an article claiming that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus variation that erupted in Wuhan in 2019 and set off the COVID-19 pandemic, could not have come from the world's largest coronavirus lab. In Wuhan. Where scientists had been working on "gain of function" experiments to create stronger coronaviruses.

Suggesting it might have come from one of only three labs in the world doing this research, near the Wuhan market, was the same as being a global warming denier, they said, which was codespeak for 'only Republicans who are racist will ask that question.'

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Usually, when we talk about our research we discuss things we have recently published, highlighting the importance or novelty of their contribution to the advancement of human understanding or knowledge of the specific field of Science we work on. 


So it is only normal for me to try and go against that particular cliché here, and talk about things I will publish in the future. Admittedly, it is a bit of a mine field (it is never easy to be an anticonformist), but I will try to avoid stepping on the most obvious triggers (violations of confidentiality, scooping risks, impossible promises).




1. A new tool for anomaly detection

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Marvel is a big name now, so big that even an obscure property like Shang-Chi can get a film and people just assume it will be good.

That wasn't always the case. Marvel had instead been known for taking any sketchy deal where the check would clear. 

So when they decided they wanted to make their own films, and capitalize on the success of The X-Men (sold to Fox) and Spider-Man (sold to Sony), no one was really interested. The reasons were obvious; they had baggage and no good characters left. There were only B (Captain America) and C (Iron Man, Thor) level characters left.

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If you read corporate news over the last year, it would be easy to believe that Republicans hate science. If someone didn't want to wear masks and needed to tell you about it, it was a right wing person being displayed on social media. 

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Most people think that scientists don't get emotional. "Star Trek" and the mostly dispassionate Spock may be why they believe a science officer does not have feelings.

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Old age is the biggest risk factor for most diseases, but if you have solid nutrition your health is likely to be better throughout all periods of life. Including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the USDA dietary guidelines produced every five years won't tell you how to optimize nutrition for where you are at in life. They are one size fits all for broad swaths of age and gender, and that needs to change

The dietary guidelines were created to make sure consumers are kept in touch with the latest science and that taxpayer-funded programs like school lunches are properly feeding developing brains.

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