Science 2.0

In the age of the dinosaurs, you could have walked from one pole to another. At that time, the continents were all joined together, forming the supercontinent Pangea. 

Yet they didn't.Though sauropodomorph dinosaurs first appeared in Argentina and Brazil about 230 million years ago, it took them 15,000,000 years to migrate to the northern hemisphere.

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Do you think food is medicine? While Whole Foods imagery touted that in 2019, the coronavirus pandemic that began in Wuhan later that year punctured efforts to convince the public that health is a moral or economic issue - you owe it to your kids to buy overpriced food. SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic showed that eating expensive onions won't save anyone from anything. 

What may help save people is remembering the past rather than wishful thinking about the present. In this case, looking back at the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic which killed far more than COVID-19.

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If a tourist doesn't know messing around with a coral reef is bad, they may try to touch them or pet turtles, but after being told by someone local that it has risks for the nature they are there to see they far less likely to do so.

A new paper found that such "nudges" works well. Which would mean we often don't need government 'ignore of the law is no excuse' type shaming policies to change behavior.

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Have you ever looked up to a clear sky on a moonless night, in a place away from large cities? If you have, you will remember seeing hundreds of bright stars, and maybe even the faint collective glow of 250 billion more within the Milky Way, our own galaxy.

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There are a few known risk factors for heart disease; age is the big one, and then genetics and smoking. Everything else is instead a risk factor for a risk factor for heart disease or even more circumstantial. So butter was a risk factor for cholesterol which was a risk factor for high blood pressure which was a risk factor for heart disease.

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At the turn of the 20th century Carrie Nation smashed up a saloon in Kansas, gold was discovered in Alaska, and New York City's boundaries became set with the inclusion of Queens and Staten Island.

America had five new states and they had a big problem.(1)

Water. 

Homesteaders wanted to move out west, and government wanted to help, but there was a water issue. When rain was happening things were fine but nature is fickle. Weather was less predictable then and even if you lived near a river, there was no guarantee you'd have water.

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A new study has identified nine new regions that influence facial features such as nose, lip, jaw, and brow shape

The analysis of genetic data from more than 6,000 volunteers across Latin America was designed to find genes that determine the shape of a person's facial profile but also learned that one of the genes appears to have been inherited from the Denisovans, an extinct group of ancient humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago.

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The Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2019 report stated that in the previous 10 years the world had spent $2.6 trillion on solar and wind power subsidies - which they framed as a good thing. Since we need to get billions off wood and dung, the largest sources of pollution, that so much money only led to 1,650 gigawatts(GW) of energy should have environmentalists concerned.

Instead of focusing on how we can get energy, and therefore water and sanitation. to the poorest, activists continue to create propaganda about natural gas and nuclear while claiming solar and wind are ready.

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Today I wish to offer you, dear reader, the chance to contribute to scientific research in particle physics. And I claim you can do that by only leveraging basic high-school knowledge in mathematics and geometry. Let me explain what the problem is, first of all, and then I'll put you in the conditions of contributing!

Muons are subnuclear particles of high interest in collider physics. I could write about muons for ages, but it would not be of relevance for our problem of today, so let's just say they interact feebly with matter, so they traverse thick layers only depositing in them small amounts of energy (mainly in the form of electromagnetic radiation).

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A few short years after NASA got money for the successor to the Hubble telescope, they told Congress that 11 years would not be enough time to build it. They told the public they couldn't put a telescope into space by 2002, even though that was more time than it took to start from nothing and have living breathing humans walk on the moon.

The James Webb Space Telescope is named after the NASA manager who oversaw that moon landing. Were he alive today he'd probably wish they had chosen Gene Kranz for the name instead. He'd certainly be skeptical that modern NASA can do any Big Science. Cute robots on Mars, sure, but not big stuff like this.

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The Doomsday Clock, a marketing gimmick of the anti-nuclear group Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, gets an unreal amount of attention from political allies in journalism in a way that scientists can't understand any more than how Environmental Working Group's so-called "Dirty Dozen" list of foods (that strangely exempts organic food pesticides their corporate donors sell) gets so much corporate media coverage.

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I base this on the advice of the WHO, the US CDC and other such reliable sources.

Check the links to find out more.

Here I talk about this article in a video:

(click to watch on Youtube) 1. Most people don’t know to isolate from their own household and that you can still protect your loved ones if you develop symptoms of COVID.

You may remember this video of how Li Ting, an emergency room nurse looked after his wife at home in Wuhan.

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The mosquitoes that carry zika, like Aedes aegypti, are considered by all but the most activist ecologists to be useless disease vectors. There is nothing they do in nature that isn't easily done by other mosquitoes and they can safely join the 99.999999999% of species that have gone extinct without causing a cascade of doom. 

Seriously, Send me your hate mail, @ me on Twitter, try to cancel me, I don't care, that is absolutely correct. They are ecologically useless and have survived despite that, because evolution is not always fair.

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Eight years ago the CMS and ATLAS experiments, giant electronic eyes watching proton-proton collisions delivered in their interior by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), discovered the Higgs boson. That particle was the last piece of the subnuclear puzzle of elementary particles predicted by the so-called "Standard Model", a revered theory devised by Glashow, Salam and Weinberg in 1967 to describe electromagnetic, weak, and then strong interactions between matter bodies. 
The Higgs boson itself is even older, having been hypothesized by a few theorists as far back as 1964 to explain an apparent paradox with massive vector bosons, particles that had to be massless in order to not violate a symmetry principle that could in no way be waived.

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If you are thinking you might buy a Creality 3-D printer to save money making stuff at home, a new MLS listing may make you change your mind. It is the first 3D-printed home to get a government permit in the United States and is on sale for a whopping $299,999.

The house $213 per square foot, and you are so far from Manhattan you might as well live in Scranton, but whether it sells right away or not is less important than the proof-of-concept. The hook is that it was printed on site using SQ4D's Autonomous Robotic Construction System (ARCS) and they want to get a patent to have robots print houses.

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Most dog owners will say that dogs understand tone, and interpret that rather than words, and that most dogs do not learn words (i.e. names of objects), unless extensively trained, but a new analysis shows that is not always the case.

Some dogs have some exceptional abilities and can learn new words after hearing them only four times. A new study by the Family Dog Project is just what it sounds like; investigating dogs who seem to learn words in the absence of any formal training by simply being exposed to playing with their owners in the typical way owners do, in a human family.

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The Arsinoite nome (now called Faiyum) region 60 miles south-west of Cairo was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire but by the end of the third century most settlements there had been abandoned.

The problem was climate change. Attempts by local farmers to adapt to the new dryness and desertification of the farmland didn't work and they had to move.

Nature gave the area a one-two punch. Climate data indicates that the monsoon rains at the headwaters of the Nile in the Ethiopian Highlands suddenly and permanently weakened, which meant lower high-water levels of the entire river in summer, while a tropical volcanic eruption in 266, which in the following year brought a below-average flood of the Nile, also played a role.

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In January of 2020 we began to write about "coronavirus 2019" due to concern regarding increased cases of pneumonia during a mild flu season, while the Chinese dictatorship was denying there was any problem at all. Just over a week later a key whistleblower in Wuhan, Li Wenliang, turned up dead after being arrested and held prisoner for a month by the communist government for "rumor-mongering."

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In 1975, four percent of school-age kids were overweight and the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration says that was up to 18 percent in 2016. Like with smoking and alcoholism, obesity is often a pediatric disease - people who start early are far more likely to keep doing it in adulthood. 

Obese people have shorter life expectancy and risk factors like Type 2 diabetes and heart disease and the easiest indicator for obesity is weight gain.

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I know, Google has been around for decades by now, and nobody should be surprised to learn how easy they have made the life of information seekers, among other things (I am also an addict of their search engine, scholar, maps, trends, and gmail utilities). But my mouth still dropped today as I discovered their "ngram viewer". 
It happened by chance. I was trying to find out whether "as best as possible" is really a correct English phrase, or if it is just a tad slang, and the google search pointed to a page where the matter was settled by a cool graph:

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