Science 2.0

In humans, if we spend time beneath the ocean and then travel to the surface, we can suffer decompression sickness, known as "the bends" - when the nitrogen in compressed air that dissolved into our blood during a dive does not have time to clear and forms bubbles in tissues. 

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There is a saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

So, it should come as no surprise that vaccine skeptics worldwide are sounding the alarm about the flu shot as a real danger in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Confused? Well, it turns out the anti-vaccine activists are too.

In the Beginning, There was Misunderstanding: The Genesis of a Myth

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While the world recovers from the third coronavirus pandemic of the last 17 years, it's important to be mindful that nature is always evolving new ways to kill. It's why scientists need to create a new influenza vaccine each year.

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Tab, the Coca-Cola company’s original diet soda brand, is headed to the soda graveyard, joining retired brands such as Like, Leed and Limette.

Coca-Cola has announced that it is discontinuing Tab after 57 years on the market, and fans of the drink will have until the end of December to purchase their last can of nostalgia.

From the beginning, Tab’s story has been one of perseverance. The brand survived initial low sales, the artificial sweetener scares of the 1960s and 1970s, lukewarm enthusiasm for the product at the corporate level and intermittent consumer availability to become – for a brief period – the most popular diet soda in America. Then, of course, Diet Coke came along.

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Have you ever looked at the moon through a telescope, or even a pair of binoculars? Our satellite is really beautiful to look at - it is full of detail you can get lost in: craters, mountain ridges, canyons, plateaus. And there's no clouds to obscure the view (if you are a planetary observer and you put an eye on Mars a couple of years ago you know what I mean - a dust storm that went on for weeks completely hid the surface from outside observers).

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Mumps IgG titers, levels of IgG antibody, have been correlated to lowered severity in recovered COVID-19 patients who had the Merck MMR II vaccine, and that has led a group to speculate that the MMR vaccine may protect against COVID-19.

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A lot of environmentalists raise money talking about climate change, but their energy recommendations - mitigation, rationing, high cost - are regressive.

Scientists are interested in progress and nothing has exemplified that like genetically modified organisms (GMOs) which optimize nature in order to speed up organic processes that may take centuries to happen naturally. From insulin to watermelon to any number of other foods, GMOs have made it possible to grow more food on less land using less water and energy and chemicals than ever possible before.
Now a team believe GMOs can fix climate change, by reducing the amount of CO2 plants put into the atmosphere.

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I was blissfully unaware until today of a slightly anomalous effect, which was found by the ATLAS Collaboration when performing a search for top pairs plus Higgs bosons in their Run 2 data. The anomaly I am talking about is an apparent excess of events which could be explained, as ATLAS did in this preprint article, by dialing up the cross section of some background processes producing a top pair and a W boson. 

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This is yet another baloney false prophecy from Paul Begley - but it is scaring many people so I thought I should do a proper debunk. Hopefully this article finds some of you. I have been helping people who have been made suicidal by this false prophefcy and seriously considered killing themselves over it. Please any false prophets out there who read this, please please consider the effect of your false prophecies on vulnerable people like the ones I help. Also those of you who are writing for sensationalist press journals. Some of the people I help might well have killed themselves without my help as a result of your stories. You know that it is not true, that your stories are just click bait nonsense.

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A new study found that natural selection, a key mechanism in biological evolution, favors pathogens with more virulence - how much harm they cause - at the point the disease emerges in a new host species.

Not too much, or else everything will be dead, but not too weak to matter either. 

Virulence and transmission are linked, with virulence arising because pathogens need to exploit hosts to persist, replicate and transmit. Low virulence will be detrimental for pathogens if they cannot transmit while virulence that is too high will also be a disadvantage if infection kills hosts so fast that the pathogen does not have time to transmit. 

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In the modern world of chemistry, where we can detect parts per billion, trillion, and even quadrillion, we can detect anything we want in anything else. In the modern world of epidemiology, we can also link anything to anything we want, as Harvard School of Public Health does often with its claims that some food or trace chemical is either curing or causing cancer when grant application season rolls around.

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A billion people still use wood for cooking and heating - and western countries are to blame. In the last decade, centralized energy production for developing countries was derailed unless they used solar or wind - neither of which are viable on their own.

That leave families cutting and burning wood or dried dung for fuel, both of which are far worse for the environment than coal. 

Yet there are other obstacles that even prevent people from even switching to local Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) - a belief that local firewood increases "wellbeing" for their families.

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With the third coronavirus pandemic of the last 17 years, and this one worse than ever, there is a great deal of talk about a vaccine. Pfizer set off a lot of excitement with its preliminary results, which exceeded the 50 percent scientists expected. And there are 197 other vaccine candidates in the pipeline.

Yet by the time government, which will now want to be involved more than ever, gets any vaccine into the hands of people, the virus may have mutated. Like a flu vaccine, instead of having this go away, scientists may have to deduce what mutations will occur and create an annual vaccine based on that - because SARS-CoV-2 may develop resistance.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has sent both political parties rushing to wrap themselves in the flag of science - even those voters who were historically more inclined to oppose vaccines and medicine and purchase organic food.

They should have been on Team Science all along, and a new analysis shows why; in a recent 16 year period, over 1.2 million people were saved thanks to 106 new treatments approved across these 15 most common tumors from 2000 to 2016 - including colorectal cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, leukemia, melanoma, gastric cancer, and renal cancer.

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Everyone recognizes that less less food means fewer pests but when you have to grow food to keep billions from starving, yields matter. Farming has gotten more efficient, thanks to big data tools leading to targeted pesticide use and modern pesticides that are less toxic to the environment while still getting rid of pests, such as neonicotinoids. 

That's important. Even with modern science, insects cause losses of up to 18 percent and in older practices that use less-effective pesticides like the organic manufacturing process, those yield losses are even higher - along with food costs.

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That gooey cheese you see in pizza advertising is actually glue. That's probably not a surprise. Consumers understand that with choices, marketing matters. With over 20 food ads seen per day, educated people recognize that though organic food contains toxic pesticides their advertising will have images of produce weeded by hand on tiny plots, while fast food looks both huge and savory and is likewise disappointing in reality.

Less clear is why people think prettier food is actually healthier.

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Well-meaning advice for people freaking out about current events often includes encouragement to be patient, stay calm and keep the faith… but how on Earth are you supposed to do that amid the insanity of 2020?

As a practicing clinical psychologist and professor who studies how to manage anxiety and tolerate uncertainty, I offer 10 suggestions to make it through this highly stressful election period.

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Tomorrow - that is, November 8th, at 8AM GMT - I am chairing a session titled "Artificial Intelligence for Physics Research, and Physics Research for Artificial Intelligence" at the Vth USERN Congress. The event takes place in Tehran, and is broadcast via zoom. If you are interested in the talks, of which I give some detail below, you will be able to connect through this link.
The agenda of the workshop is as follows (those shown are are Tehran times):

11.30-11.55 Tommaso Dorigo, “Artificial intelligence and fundamental physics research”

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In its 47 year history, the Endangered Species Act went from an essential law to protect actual endangered species to a hammer with which to pummel companies and landowners. What started with an American bald eagle became holding housing development projects hostage by getting an obscure endangered designation for some creature and then demanding huge settlements and fees to 'protect' it.

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If there is one lesson that political experts may have finally gotten in 2020, it's that polls are shockingly inaccurate.

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