Science 2.0

In the bizarre maze of modern cultural geopolitics, European progressives spend a lot of time rending garments about their history of colonialism, slavery, and exploitation while engaging in it - using financial blockades if former colonies do not comply.

If a small trading partner wants to export food to Europe, it cannot use any science that Europe bans, and European progressives have a level of control over science that American activists only wish they could attain.

There's one big big problem with that; it cripples small countries. They are already at a disadvantage that science can fix. Europe prevents them from using it.

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When eco-terrorists destroyed a sugar beet field in Oregon a few years ago, the local organic industry group there said they were shocked anyone would be violent, even though the organic industry there demonized science daily. The attackers could not have been unknown to local groups, it is certain they were part of the community.

But how did they switch from misguided - mutagenesis chemical and radiation baths can be certified organic but GMOS are an abomination of nature - to violent?

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NASA has told us that the James Webb Space Telescope, first funded in 1996 as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, will miss its launch date again.

An astronomy site worries it's been delayed since 2014.

It's worse than that. It started getting delayed in 2002.

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Smallpox has been eradicated from the face of the Earth following a highly effective, worldwide vaccination campaign. Paralytic poliomyelitis is no longer a problem in the U.S. because of development and use of effective vaccines against the poliovirus. In current times, millions of lives have been saved because of rapid deployment of effective vaccines against COVID-19. And yet, it has been 37 years since HIV was discovered as the cause of AIDS, and there is no vaccine.

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An analysis of noble gases dissolved in groundwater finds that the low-to-mid latitude land surfaces at low elevation cooled on average by 11 degrees Fahrenheit during the Last Glacial Maximum - the ice age.

Prior to modern times, ice ages were about 90,000 of every 100,000 years. Since it has been 12,000 years since the last one, prior to concern about global warming there was concern about global cooling happening again.

Yet 11 degrees is less than some notable marine and low-elevation terrestrial studies that have relied on various proxies to reconstruct past temperatures. 

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Researchers working with a paralyzed participant who has sensors implanted in his brain have deciphered the brain activity associated with trying to write letters by hand.

They used an algorithm to identify letters as he attempted to write them. Then, the system displayed the text on a screen - in real time. 

Brain-computer interfaces convert thought into action. By attempting handwriting, the study participant typed 90 characters per minute - more than double the previous record for typing with such a "brain-computer interface."

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Preclinical findings suggest that targeting the mitochondrial enzyme dihydroorotate dehydrogenase (DHODH) can restore ferroptosis-driven cell death, pointing to new therapeutic strategies that may be used to induce ferroptosis and inhibit tumor growth.

Ferroptosis is a form of controlled cell death triggered by the toxic accumulation of lipid peroxides in the cell. Because lipid peroxides are generated through normal metabolic activities, cells also have mechanisms in place to defend against ferroptosis. Glutathione peroxidase 4 (GPX4) is one of the key defense mechanisms identified to date. 

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Quantum Mechanics (QM), the theory that describes the behaviour of matter at microscopic distance scales apparently unfathomable by our senses, is very hard to understand and make sense of. And indeed to this day, 100 years after its first formulation, there are thick debates among theorists on the very meaning and interpretation of the wave function, which is the mathematical description of a quantum system. Yet we deeply rely on QM to figure out the organization of matter at molecular, atomic, and subatomic level. It works, despite the open questions. And today we deeply rely on QM for our technology.

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Bioware has released the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, with graphical modernization and some gameplay improvements, but at nearly $60 it's not cheap.

Is the story still great? Yes it is, one of the best ever (dream sequences in Mass Effect 3 aside). Are the characters still compelling? Sure.

But it already was, so is it worth spending nearly $60 again?

That's a little trickier. If you already have the games, maybe not. If you don't, the story and characters won't be compelling enough to feel like you got value. While ME and certainly Mass Effect 2 made great advances in decision-driven story telling, they are not exceptional now.

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The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, located in San Francisco, is unsurprisingly  the most 'progressive' appeals court in the United States. That their judges are so California when it comes to decisions is why they dominate the others when it comes to being overturned by the Supreme Court.

San Francisco is a great place to file a lawsuit if you are anti-science and that is why when a fellow with cancer claimed it was due to a weedkiller, the federal multidistrict litigation lawsuit was filed there.

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With climate change a constant hot button issue, the rise of any new industry to a massive and global scale always attracts interested parties. The same has also been true for the CBD industry, which was globally valued over $500 million USD in 2020 and expected to top $4 billion USD by 2027. 

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Stephan Richter, Hassan Abu AlHaija, and Vladlen Koltun of Intel Labs have written a paper outlining their new G-buffer encoder which takes photorealism to a whole new level.

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Amazonian tribes did things a lot of their counterparts in Europe did but some things they did in more interesting fashion. Rather than putting heads on spikes, which is so medieval Romania, old time Ecuadorians peeled the skin from the skull. turned the face inside out and removed all the fatty tissue. then simmered it a pot of hot water and Chinchipi plant juice, and they shrank into tiny preserved heads.

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A new paper finds that greenhouse gas emissions from standing dead trees in coastal wetland forests are not properly accounted for when assessing the environmental impact of so-called "ghost forests."

Ghost forests are what is left of former forests in coastal regions where changes led to shifts in the height of land. As salt water moves in, dead, white, trees are created. North Carolina has some that can even be seen from space.

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When even CNBC is talking about the writing on the wall for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, they know they are in big trouble.

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Quantum computers (QCs) operate totally differently than classical computers. Due to the quantum effects known as superposition and entanglement, quantum bits (called qubits) can take on non-binary states represented by complex numbers. This facilitates computational solutions to mathematical problems that cannot be solved by classical computers because they require sequentially computing an astronomical number of combinations or permutations. 

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The latest coronavirus pandemic started in Wuhan, China. You'd barely learn that from yet another non-report courtesy of the World Health Organisation, they don't mention it until page 15. You certainly won't learn anything about how it began.

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Turbulence is part of the cultural lexicon. For casual situations where there are short-term challenges that just require some managing, people often say they are experiencing turbulence. Anyone who has taken a few plane trips has experienced the bumpy ride caused by turbulence in the air.

A new technique for studying turbulence in quantum fluids used a mechanical resonator, a miniscule bar 1/1000th the width of a human hair, in superfluid helium near absolute zero temperature to effectively 'trap' a single vortex for study.

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Almost since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a piece of the SARS-CoV2 virus called the “spike protein” has drawn interest from researchers and healthcare professionals.

New research by Yuyang Lei and colleagues published in the journal Circulation Research sheds new light on how the spike protein might play a critical role in the widespread damage caused by SARS-CoV2, and offers insight into treating the complications of COVID-19.

Vaccine skeptics have seized on the study to cast doubt on the safety of vaccines. But a review of the study’s findings shows that the concerns raised by vaccine doubters are much ado about nothing.

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If a post is not popular, you will never see it, so views count, but it is the message and not the popularity of it that persuades people, according to a new paper.

819 demographically diverse American adults aged 18-35 were shown two YouTube videos either for or against vaping. The pro-vaping videos were commercials for e-cigarette brands. The anti-vaping videos were public service announcements produced by anti-tobacco groups. What was changed was the view numbers that participants saw for the videos.

Participants saw view numbers either around 10, 100, 100,000 or 1,000,000.

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