Science 2.0

Miami has a problem and a solution. The problem has happened throughout history; hurricanes. Yet that is magnified now because of the property values and population density. The solution is a seawall.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has it covered, with a six-mile seawall proposal, but lining up against them are the usual suspects; environmentalists. Joining them are real estate developers who want to sell views, make their profit, and then leave it to 49 other states to pay the costs when another hurricane hits.

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Advocates for proposed crab gear legislation in California, AB 534, often cite misleading information in support of policies that would destroy California’s iconic and sustainable trap fisheries, while doing noth

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Animals can cause diseases in humans. That won't surprise you. What may surprise you is to read that these diseases can be prevented by eating less meat. 

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In the early days of agriculture, everyone was somewhat equal. While one farmer could work harder or longer than another, it wasn't by an order of magnitude. Oxen and other beasts of burden changed that. A farmer with an ox was doing the work of 7 humans, and that meant a huge advantage over someone who didn't agree with progress - that the old ways were the only way to have "real" food. Thus began economic disparity, as did modern civilization. When not everyone had to hunt and grow their own food, they didn't. They could become craftsmen and priests and mathematicians. Culture was born.

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In an April 2020 email discovered by Buzzfeed as part of a Freedom Of Information Act request, EcoHealth Alliance head Peter Daszak thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci for dismissing concern that SARS-CoV-2, which erupted in 2019, could have come 'from a lab.'

A lab like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the world's largest coronavirus lab, which Daszak gave $3.4 million in US taxpayer funding to, in order for them to study bat coronaviruses. The 'thank you' was while the lab was removing its database of 16,000 bat coronavirus samples that the US helped pay to create and while denying the World Health Organisation permission to visit.

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The Tibetan plateau covers nearly 1,600,000 square miles. With an average altitude of nearly 14,000 feet, Tibet is called the Roof of the World for good reason. It contains the world's two highest peaks, Mount Everest and K2, and the vast Himalayan mountain range towers higher than anywhere else on Earth.

Some researchers contend it has been that height for most of its existence while others argue the roof of the world has gotten higher.

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Experts got it catastrophically wrong, according to Dominic Cummings, UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser. Cummings has argued that the UK government’s official scientific advice in March 2020 hugely misunderstood how the pandemic would play out, leading to a delay in locking down that cost thousands of lives.

According to Cummings, it was certain specialists with less knowledge of pandemics or medicine – such as data scientist Ben Warner, artificial intelligence researcher Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, and mathematician Tim Gowers – who gave more accurate forecasts at this point.

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The CMS Collaboration submitted for publication last week a nice new result, where proton-proton collisions data collected by the experiment during the past run of the Large Hadron Collider were scanned in search of very peculiar events featuring a weak boson (W or Z) along with two energetic photons. The rate of these rare processes was measured and found in good agreement with predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics.

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The Swedish government might ban the sale of new combustion cars in 2030 - and a new paper wants to get even more Draconian. Their computer estimate suggests that banning all combustion cars, even older ones already in use, might be the only way they will meet their climate targets. The replacement: electric vehicles.

It could work.

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LeRoche Benicoeur/ConceiveEasy; EU Natural Inc.; Fertility Nutraceuticals LLC; SAL NATURE LLC/FertilHerb; and NS Products, Inc. have received warning letters from the US FDA due to their selling fraudulent treatments that claim to help with infertility.

Though dietary supplements are mostly exempt from FDA scrutiny due to the Clinton administration giving them a free pass if they put a small disclaimer on the packaging, companies still can't do things like claim to treat cancer, or anything that legitimate medicine does. They can only use marketing to suggest they might make you feel better and other claims that allow naturopaths and homeopaths to make money.

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In a recent study, scholars did a prospective review of charts of nearly 300 adult patients hospitalized for COVID-19 at Michigan Medicine during the pandemic's first wave between March and April 2020. They analyzed discharge locations, therapy needs at the time of release and if they needed durable medical equipment or other services..

The investigators found that 45 percent of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 experienced significant functional decline after being discharged.

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An analysis of ancient fish bones from 30 archaeological sites in Israel and Sinai which date from the Late Bronze Age (1550-1130 BC) until the end of the Byzantine period (640 AD) finds that Judeans commonly ate non-kosher - lacking scales or fins - fish.

This finding sheds new light on the origin of Old Testament dietary laws that are still observed by many Jews today - and how well people adhered. Some things become part of culture because they are common. If people in Tennessee banned eating sharks it wouldn't be a huge loss. The ban on finless and scaleless fish deviated from longstanding Judean dietary habits, the authors note.

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If you are still being paid and your job is so secure you can go on strike to demand that your employer not ask you to come into the office, you might think getting a vaccine is not only no big deal, but is a moral mandate more important than any other. You can dismiss people who are less enthusiastic(1) as vaccine deniers or something even worse for journalists and 94 percent of science academics; Republicans.

That's privilege talking. It's also untrue.

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At the end of "Marvel's The Avengers" we had some idea who the next film's big villain would be - we just didn't know they would build the entire MCU around gim.

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Georgia would like to get COVID-19 vaccine up to herd immunity levels sooner rather than later but there are obstacles; among the less educated, they may be a little nervous because prior to 2020 FDA and CDC acted like all pharmaceutical companies were spawns of Lucifer, so suddenly being told they are saving the world causes cognitive dissonance. Some journalists and social media pundits who can't get out of their own way will try to find a way to blame Republicans.

But among wealthy educated people the problem may be chiropractors.

Going to a chiropractor is mostly for the rich, who can augment real medicine with supplements, organic food, and getting a 'spinal adjustment.' 

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A recent report by the World Health Organisation on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and resulting disease COVID-19 glossed over China - the country is not even mentioned until page 15 - but the rest of the world is not so easily bullied.

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The Mars Curiosity rover has been on the job since the summer of 2012, exploring Gale Crater on the red planet. It's slow going, it has driven only 25 kilometers to date.  

But it can be fun to watch, like its ascent of Mount Mercou, a broad outcrop of rocks on the northern flank of Mount Sharp near the center of the crater, on April 18th 2021.

Mt. Sharp is over 2 miles high and Curiosity is the size of a small car. In the picture, it is above a 20-foot-high cliff where it examined the exposed rocks.


Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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Last year it was announced that the Chinese government was going to pay for a third season of the Russian TV show "Better Than Us", a drama about an advanced AI robot that has a neural network bordering on free will, no limitations on killing, and drops terminology about family so often it could be in a Vin Diesel movie.(1) It was an odd move for a totalitarian regime historically afraid of culture they don't control centrally.

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When one thinks about chemistry, one doesn't usually consider quantum mechanics to play a part. Yet it does. When it boils down to it, all matter is a combination of a handful of subatomic particles and the forces holding them together. Chemistry, is in essence, applied physics. For decades, scientists have been trying to determine how to follow a chemical reaction from its initial state through all of its quantum states to its products. The hope was that, by doing so, researchers could understand the quantum dynamics that drive these reactions. Until now, it has mostly been speculation. However, a recent paper published in Nature by Liu et al. suggests that this may be possible.

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The title of this post coincides with the one of a scientific report which was submitted for publication in Reviews in Physics last Sunday; and it is also the meaning of the acronym "AMVA4NewPhysics", the name of an European Union-funded Innovative Training Network I directed as scientific coordinator from 2015 to 2019. 

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