Science 2.0

Though young people are able to obtain alcohol and drink it, their ability to buy alcohol at point of sale is almost nonexistent. That is not the case with recreational cannabis, where early adopter states have a shocking 37 percent rate of youth being able to purchase marijuana. In  recreational only cannabis stores, 71 percent were able to purchase without a valid ID showing they were of legal age. 

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If you are an African-American hypertensive at high risk of developing associated cardiovascular disease, a new paper from Maharishi Institute - where yogic flying instructors get trained to levitate(1) - says Transcendental Meditation will prevent abnormal enlargement of your heart and reduce chronic heart failure.

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This lovely specimen of Oncorhynchus nerka, a Pleistocene Sockeye Salmon, is from outcrops along the South Fork Skokomish River, Olympic Peninsula, Washington State, USA.

I'd expected to learn that the locality contained a single or just a few partial specimens, but the fossils beds are abundant with large, 45–70 cm, four-year-old adult salmon concentrated in a beautiful sequence of death assemblages.

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Sperm quality can be reduced by several lifestyle factors, like obesity and related diseases such as type 2 diabetes, but a new examination of epigenetic phenomena - gene expression changing even if the DNA sequence is not changed -  finds that even diet can impact sperm quality, and in just two weeks.

The concern is that such epigenetic changes might be able to lead to properties being transferred from a parent to offspring via the sperm or the egg. 

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Any time is a good time to start exercising but a great time to start exercising is today. Share this article on Facebook first, though. 

Don't be intimidated by those people who hiss about Crossfit or their Peloton, a new study shows you have the same ability to build muscle mass as highly trained master athletes of a similar age.

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New survey results in the Journal of Media Psychology find that how much you enjoy or hate the new "Star Wars" movie will depend a lot on your expectations. Nothing shocking in that, but there is a twist.

And the twist is not that the new movie will a fortune this week no matter what reviewers or the more rabid fringe of the fanbase say. That is entirely predictable.

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If you work at the higher levels of the kind of environmental groups that weaponize fear and doubt about science to raise money, like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, evidence-based decision-making is a big lump of coal in your stocking.

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Navan Fort, the legendary capital of Ulster. has long been considered a site of ritual gatherings.  Excavations have uncovered a huge 40-yard diameter building and a barbary ape cranium, likely from at least as far as Iberiam along with remnants of pigs, cattle and sheepfrom across Ireland, perhaps being reared as far afield as Galway, Donegal, Down, Tyrone and Antrim. 

That means Iron Age communities were very mobile at holiday time, their own version of driving for Christmas. 

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I am not going to alarm you by stating plainly that the New York Times is the go-to source for wealthy elites who are often out-of-touch with the real world but sometimes they are so tone-deaf that it makes the veins in your neck stick out.

Case in point is this article correlating opera attendance to better health outcomes. It was so bas I scoured the BMJ paper to see if it was part of their annual Christmas spoof pices and they got duped, the way we assumed Atlantic was duped when writing about how sexist scientists are, because "men are more likely than women to deem their own work new and profound."

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The anti-vaccine movement tries to portray itself as scrappy grassroots outsiders standing up to Big Pharma and Big Government, but it's nothing of the kind, finds a recent Washington Post exposé.

The National Vaccine Information Center, which claims to be the largest "awareness" non-profit opposing vaccines, actually gets almost half of its funding from corporations. And their largest corporate benefactor is the osteopath Joe Mercola, head of a $100 million empire that sells alternatives to medicine for nearly everything.  And who funds lots of groups opposed to science, from medicine to food.

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Timothy Litzenburg, lawyer on a team that helped convince a jury to ignore science and give a $289-million judgment against Monsanto over the weedkiller glyphosate, has been arrested for the attempted extortion of $200 million from Nouryon, another company involved in production of the same weedkiller.

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December 25, as we all know, is Jesus Christ’s birthday, a Christian celebration in which the myth of three kings who travelled far and wide to give gifts to the “new born king” inspires the modern Christian tradition of gift giving. Early gifts used to be fruits or nuts, but as this act took on more importance, gifts became larger and less modest, and were placed under a tree.

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Center for Food Safety, an organic industry-funded activist group, tried to stop the Impossible Burger from being "approved" by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on the grounds that it is, you know, based on science.

That it is a plant, and therefore uses no meat, and therefore is more ethical and means less emissions than ranching, according to proponents, did not matter, because the organic food industry can't grow if science does; they truly fund deniers for hire to block out things like genetic engineering.

But not all genetic engineering. They are fine with mutagenesis, plant strains created using chemical and radiation baths, they are even happy those are certified organic - only with 80 synthetic exemptions that can still carry the organic label.

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Light propagation usually goes both ways; it is reciprocal in that the trajectory of light traveling one direction is identical in the opposite direction.

Isolators and circulators, which make light propagate only in one direction, are vital building blocks in many modern laser and communication systems, but are almost exclusively based on the magneto-optic effect, making devices bulky and difficult for integration. A magnetic-free route would be a great breakthrough for many optical applications. 

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The idea of hanging up decorations in the middle of winter is older than Christmas itself. Decorations are mentioned in ancient descriptions of the Roman feast of Saturnalia, which is thought to have originated in the 5th century BC.

Some 900 years later, a Christian bishop in Turkey wrote disapprovingly about members of his congregation who were drinking, feasting, dancing and “crowning their doors” with decorations in a pagan fashion at this time of year.

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Ryan Patrick O'Leary, 30, and Sheila O'Leary, 35, only fed their kids raw fruit and vegetables and their 18-month-old son starved to death. According to the police report, the child weighed only 17 pounds, what a healthy seven-month-old would weigh but was starvation for a child nearly two years of age. The child was born in their home and had never seen a doctor. 

A Lee County Grand Jury has indicted the couple, charging them with first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse, aggravated manslaughter, child abuse, and two counts of child neglect. It was simple torture, according to authorities.

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The CDC has updated its fatality and illness list due to illicit marijuana vaping. Now there have been 54 deaths and 2,506 hospitalizations. The culprit is Vitamin E acetate, needed to make marijuana tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)products into a vapor because, unlike nicotine, it does not dilute readily.

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You may be aware that film runs at 25 frames per second because humans will then not see it as individual images. These 'blinks per second' are measured in Hertz and some humans can see up to 60 Hz.

You may not sleep well if you have a light blinking all night. And a new study shows that in bird care, light control is even more important than realized.

A new study has found that birds of prey have much greater visual acuity but a peregrine falcon is over twice as adept as humans - 129 Hz, which would be like being able to see the details of a race car driver's face as they zoom by you at 200 miles per hour.

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NASA has spent $7 billion on a program to launch humans from the U.S. and end reliance on Russians to get to the International Space Station, but an important test for Boeing hit a snag.

The Starliner is hoping to compete with SpaceX, which already had a successful docking earlier this year.

NASA wants to outsource more of this kind of thing but the program is two years behind schedule, which along with chronics overruns and delays on programs like the James Webb Space Telescope has led to renewed concerns that NASA is no longer equipped to do big programs and should stick to smaller experiments like cute robots on Mars, while outsourcing advanced technology to contractors, the way they did in the 1960s.

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Merck has received approval for Ervebo, the first F vaccine for the prevention of Ebola virus disease (EVD), caused by Zaire ebolavirus in individuals 18 years of age and older.

Cases of EVD are very rare in the U.S., only acquired by individuals in other countries who then traveled to the U.S., or health care workers who became ill after treating patients with EVD.

“While the risk of Ebola virus disease in the U.S. remains low, the U.S. government remains deeply committed to fighting devastating Ebola outbreaks in Africa, including the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” said Anna Abram, FDA Deputy Commissioner for Policy, Legislation, and International Affairs.

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