Science 2.0

Countries where regressive policies toward science have banned modern technologies like genetic engineering are also overwhelmingly unable to feed themselves. Some European countries not only prevent much of Africa from feeding themselves, they ban imports by former colonies that don't do as they are told.

A new breakthrough may mean genetic optimization that green NGOs won't have a reason to ban, like mutagenesis genetic engineering and copper sulfate pesticides, which are currently organic certified.

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In the modern era, people are rarely not busy. When we have a free moment we are reading on a cell phone or playing a game.

There are even jokes about someone sitting in a coffee shop and seeming bizarre because they just enjoy a coffee. 

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Multimodal adaptive optics imaging has revealed photoreceptor and retinal pigment epithelium relationships in eyes with vitelliform macular dystrophy.

 Vitelliform macular dystrophy (VMD) is an inherited genetic disease that causes progressive vision loss through degeneration of the light-sensing retina. Genes implicated in VMD include BEST1, PRPH2, IMPG1, and IMPG2. Depending on the gene and mutation, age of onset and severity vary widely. All forms of the disease have in common a lesion in the central retina (macula) that looks like an egg yolk and is a build-up of toxic fatty material called lipofuscin. VMD affects about 1 in 5,500 Americans and there is currently no treatment for this condition.

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To appreciate what B mesons are, and what is the magic of their behaviour, which is the topic of this article, I need to give you a three-paragraph introduction below.

At the smallest distance scales, matter is made of quarks and leptons, which we consider as point-like objects endowed with different properties and interactions. Most of the matter around us is in fact made up of three-quark systems: protons and neutrons, organized in tightly packed nuclei kept together by the strong force; with electrons (which are the lightest charged leptons) orbiting around them thanks to the electromagnetic force attracting them to the protons. 

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During the pandemic we have all become familiar with a lot of epidemiological concepts.

One that was introduced to us early in 2020 is the “basic reproductive number”, or R0. This tells us about the intrinsic contagiousness of a virus, or its inherent capacity to be spread from one person to another in a particular population.

We also learned about the “effective reproductive number”, or Reff. This tells us about the rate at which a virus is actually spreading through that population.

With the emergence of BA.4/5, there has been some confusion around how these concepts help us to understand why one variant spreads faster than another.

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The omicron subvariant known as BA.5 was first detected in South Africa in February 2022 and spread rapidly throughout the world. As of the second week of July 2022, BA.5 constituted nearly 80% of COVID-19 variants in the United States.

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A new study may improve the sense of embodiment when using autonomous prosthetic limbs. The work had left and right limbs are controlled by two people simultaneously and revealed that the visual information necessary to predict the partner’s intentions behind limb movements can significantly enhance the sense of embodiment towards partner-controlled limbs during virtual co-embodiment.

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If you want to find the demographic that most likely thinks chiropractors, massages, meditation, and yoga are medicine, find middle-aged women in a rich country. 

They just don't mention it to their doctors, even though physicians ask what else they are doing or taking, including things like supplements. 

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Vaping devices, e.g. the unfortunately named e-cigarettes, were a valuable tool for smoking cessation and harm reduction, with better results in ending smoking that nicotine patches and gums.

Then suddenly they were everywhere, a market so large that a tobacco company whose primary business was cigarettes spent billions for a small stake in Juul, which had become the leader in vaping products. Now they have written 90 percent of that investment down because it turns out that while nicotine is addictive, vaping never had the 'cool' factor of cigarettes. Cigarettes were boosted in culture by film and television prevalence but vaping never attained that kind of traction.

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Few researchers would commit half of each day to science if they were doing it for free but they are no different than other occupations in believing that economic necessity is a bubble surrounding...themselves.(1)

Publishing is not exempt from the double standard. Two generations ago being "peer-reviewed" in a top journal didn't mean much. Krebs, of the famous Krebs cycle, was rejected by Nature because they already had too many articles so he went elsewhere. He still got a Nobel prize for his work.

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Physicists from the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider have used the total data sample of 13 TeV proton-proton collisions collected in the past few years to search for resonant decays of heavy hadrons into pairs of J/Psi mesons, and they found three of them. 
One of the three new resonances is likely to be the same as a particle already identified for the first time by the competitor LHCb experiment, while the other two are new finds. LHCb is also a LHC detector, but it is one optimized for heavy hadron spectroscopy; while CMS is a "general purpose" detector built with the primary goal of finding the Higgs boson (a 2012 success) and searching for new phenomena at the highest-energy frontier. 

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An analysis of 5,329 patients across the U.S. who died from medical aid in the 23 years after Oregon became the first state to legalize assisted suicide and predictably found one demographic dominates the group: well-educated, wealthy people with cancer. 

If they are not in a state that allows it, they have the money to travel and to incur the cost of the drugs needed for voluntary euthanasia, which are not covered by insurance. The results: More than 72 percent of patients who died with medical aid had college experience, more than 95 percent were non-Hispanic whites, and nearly 75 percent had cancer. 

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Nature is out to kill everything so a newborn animal must learn to walk on its legs as fast as possible to avoid predators. Learning the precise coordination of leg muscles and tendons takes some time and initially baby animals rely heavily on hard-wired spinal cord reflexes. More advanced and precise muscle control lead to the nervous system becoming well adapted to the young animal’s leg muscles and tendons.

No more uncontrolled stumbling – the young animal can now keep up with the adults.

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We often think of babies as blank canvases with little ability to learn during the first few weeks of life. But babies actually start processing language and speech incredibly early. Even while in the womb, they learn to discern voices, along with some speech sounds. At birth, they already prefer speech sounds over other types of non-language sounds.

But exactly how the baby brain learns to process complex language sounds is still a bit of a mystery. In our recent study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, we uncovered details of this mindbogglingly speedy learning process – starting in the first few hours of birth.

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In today's Washington Examiner, I detail how the Biden administration did an end-run around their own scientists - and what that will do to the price of food.  

How ridiculous is the new level imposed on a popular weedkiller for America's most important crop? It is equivalent to government saying you should not be exposed to the sun for more than one second every 10 years or you will get skin cancer. 

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The Journal of Volcanology and Geothe

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We have entered into a new age of space exploration, in which the commercialization of space travel has opened up the possibility that within a generation, space tourism will become a normal part of human existence. Yet, space travel does not come without a price.

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In an increasingly polarized political climate, media has taken clear sides. No one in Manhattan confuses the skew of the New York Times with the New York Post.

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One thing that must annoy psychiatrists is that everyone will try to claim expertise in their field if they want to make a political point - in the case of a recent paper it is literally humanities scholars who want more mask and vaccine mandates.

To achieve that, and despite having nothing we might consider qualifications, they used profiling to suggest a clinical diagnosis. They did it by creating their own custom analysis to claim that while other studies showed there were lots of reasons people might not like to wear a mask, opponents casually claiming they were selfish or even narcissistic are clinically correct.

Let's unpack that. 

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