Science 2.0

The Rainbow Papaya in Hawaii is a great example of how biology solved a devastating problem that nature created and chemicals could not fix. It put GMOs, the successor to mutagenesis, on the map worldwide, and today billions of meals have been served using GMO science.

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Though lead levels across America are far safer than even a generation ago, the lack of a solid answer on what the safe level is leads to concern that leaching, such as from water pipes, could be harmful. 

As the crisis in Flint, Michigan a few years ago showed, the public can be put in a panic easily, and politicians will use public health concern for advantage, even after their decisions to stop using the science that had protected the public caused the problem.

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When the Obama administration's Food and Drug Administration gave way to the Trump era, there were a number of positive changes in how the federal government treated smoking cessation tools that were not controlled by large corporations.

They rolled back the arbitrary framing that claimed all tobacco was as harmful as cigarettes - except Big Pharma products like nicotine patches and gums. They accepted that adults should have all options available for quitting cigarettes or at least reducing harm.

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Researchers 35 years and younger, the annual Eppendorf&Science Prize for Neurobiology, which is awarded for contributions to neurobiological research based on methods of molecular and cell biology, is now open for entries.

Applying requires a 1,000-word essay and tell the prize committee about your work.

The prize is $25,000 plus Science magazine will publish an essay about your work. You'll have travel paid to the Prize Ceremony held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in the USA and AAAS throws in a 10-year AAAS membership (but only a digital subscription to the magazine).

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As measles outbreaks spread across the U.S., our new look at how information about vaccine safety and reliability spreads online suggests that the tide may be turning against the anti-vaccination movement.

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Everyone in 2019 likes to claim their beliefs are grounded in evidence.  The most anti-science groups, from the journalism department at New York University to Greenpeace, still claim to have evidence-based decision-making behind their political or financial agendas. It's no different in the "raw" pet food market, but it's harmless posturing to wrap yourself in the veil of science unless you are actually claiming to be scientific when you poison people or their pets.

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Methane detection in the Martian atmosphere haa been a source of debate because methane means a greater possibility for habitability and may even be a signature of life., but spacecraft and telescopic observations from Earth reported no detections of methane, at least not outside the realm of statistical wobble.

Finally, independent measurements report a firm detection in the Martian atmosphere above Gale Crater on 16 June 2013 by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer onboard Mars Express, one day after the in situ observation of a methane spike by the Curiosity rover.

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Air in England, the United States and most of Europe is now cleaner than it's been in over a century, but you wouldn't know that if you read populist epidemiology claims, which have redefined pollution from PM10, dangerous soot like black carbon, to PM2.5, which you can only detect with an electron microscope, and even down to PM1.0, which might as well be virtual pollution.

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The Green New Deal is the name given to a half-formed quasi-rational publicity stunt formed by the New Guard in the House of Representatives. 

Deniers for hire like Organic Consumers Association, which are opposed to agriculture (not to mention their endorsement of anti-vaccine activists and endorsement of opponents of all science) say it will be great. And it will be, for their clients. That poor people will starve or freeze to death if city politicians define "sustainable" isn't really a concern, because the wealthy elites who give to environmental groups will be fine.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Mayzent (siponimod) tablets by Novartis to treat adults with relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis (MS), to include clinically isolated syndrome, relapsing-remitting disease, and active secondary progressive disease.

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Discussion of the periodic table of elements often ends with simply invoking Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist who formulated the Periodic Law and used it to correct the properties of some already discovered elements, not to mention predicting the properties of eight elements yet to be discovered.

But instead of being foundational, it would have been just a quaint paper in a mining journal. had its development ended there. Mendeleev had been appointed him professor of general chemistry in 1867 and was required to lecture on inorganic chemistry. Lacking a good Russian textbook, he decided to write one, and that required truly arranging the chemical elements, something that had eluded other scholars.

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I was astonished to find out that the BBC linked to this “paper” in a recent article about eco-anxiety without explaining to the reader that in the words of Michael Mann it is “crap”. This BBC article is here:

• Climate change: Are you suffering from ‘eco-anxiety’? - BBC Three

All they say about it is

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The largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton discovered so far, and therefore the largest carnivore on land currently known to science, was discovered in 1991 in Saskatchewan, Canada, but the extremely hard matrix surrounding the bones, in combination with the size of the skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex (RSM P2523.8), made it especially difficult and time-consuming to remove, assemble, and study. 

Since is is relatively complete (roughly 65 percent), RSM P2523.8 has finally been described in The Anatomical Record: Advances in Integrative Anatomy and Evolutionary Biology.

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The Scandinavian wolf population is a bit of an evolutionary mystery. In the hoped for descent with modification scenario, textbook natural selection, there would be signs that hybrids of dog and wolf have contributed to this population, but none have been found.

 Wolf-dog hybrids – crosses between wolf and dog – are known from many parts of the world and have mainly been the result of male dogs mating with female wolves. One such hybrid was found south-west of Stockholm, in 2017; another turned up near Oslo 20 years ago. In the Storting, the Norwegian parliament, the question has been raised of whether the wolves returning to Scandinavia in the 1980s, after they had been virtually exterminated, even had some elements from dogs in their genetic ancestry.

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I enjoy hearing about or even falling for a good harmless prank — and I certainly enjoy pulling a child or two’s string, in a cheerful, happy way, just to keep them on their toes — so, April Fools’ is one of my favorite days of the year.

The holiday underscores how important surprises are for our brains. Of course, one hopes those surprises will be delightful ones!

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I sometimes like to read the arXix preprint physics site. It's where a lot of papers go before they are in journals. It was open access, a way to see what scientists were working on before the results were locked behind a corporate journal paywall, before open access was even a thing.

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A small survey in Australia (n=442) found that more than half of car drivers think cyclists are not really human, and many admit to intentionally driving too close to them. 

The survey says it is the first to look at a road-user group with the problem of dehumanization, which is typically studied in relation to attitudes towards racial or ethnic groups. The authors state that cyclists have been conceptualized as a minority group and a target of negative attitudes and behavior - but if drivers can put a human face to cyclists, researchers say it could reduce aggression directed at cyclists and road trauma involving riders.

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There are substantial differences among Americans when it comes to knowledge and understanding of science and scientific processes.

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Since the oldest millennials are now nearing 40 it may be time for sociologists and psychologists to stop writing papers on how much nurturing they will need when they arrive. They are already here. Yet papers will keep coming, perhaps until people stop wanting to read them.

Researchers show that how well parents or guardians support millennials' psychological needs prior to their transition to college is an important predictor of their psychological well-being as they adapt to college life.

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Last Monday and Tuesday I gave a few lectures on Machine Learning at a Data Science school (IDPASC) in Braga, Portugal. I think that this topic has received so much attention in the last few years, with heaps of excellent resources now freely available online, that it is very difficult to be original and provide useful information to any student who is proactive enough to google "auto-encoders" by herself.

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