Science 2.0

Exercise is obviously physically beneficial and there are claims it also releases happiness-inducing hormones - and it may work that way for a few but if you are suffering from depression the last thing you need is someone in a Live Love Laugh shirt asking if you tried going for a walk.

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Fires in the Amazon rainforest have captured attention worldwide in recent days. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in 2019, pledged in his campaign to reduce environmental protection and increase agricultural development in the Amazon, and he appears to have followed through on that promise.

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In America, more women than men receive Ph.D.s and at the faculty level are not 2:1 more likely to be offered a job. Not so in France. Only 35 percent of researchers at the French National Centre for Scientific Research are women and the reason may be bias in French culture. 

In France, the concept of science remains much more strongly associated with masculinity than with femininity and it may lead to scientific evaluation committees putting women at a disadvantage during promotion rounds involving men and women researchers, say social science scholars.

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If you read the Anglo-Saxon history of England, the island was a backwater savage place populated by sacrificial druids worshiping angry spiritual gods before Rome paved the way for the arrival of modern inhabitants, but that me just be invading victors writing history.

It has been assumed northwestern European trade during the Bronze Age was primarily socially embedded, as in the exchange of gifts.  It turns out people in England, before the invasions by Celts, Picts, Irish, Angles, Saxons, Romans, Vikings, and Normans, were using balance weights and scales to measure the value of materials as early as the late second and early first millennia BC. 

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Scholars from  from Boston University School of Medicine), National Center for PTSD at VA Boston Healthcare System and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have used statistical correlation to conclude that individuals with greater optimism are more likely to live longer, age 85 or older.

Obviously a lot of things go into a long life but the authors feel like they are early in positing that positive psychosocial factors promote healthy aging.

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A CRISPR gene editing system inside a nanogel delivery system injected into the body could put a stop to the growth of triple-negative breast cancer and it's gone past the first hurdle; human tumor cells and mice.

Triple-negative breast cancer has the highest mortality rate of all breast cancers. Lacking estrogen, progesterone and HER2 receptors, it accounts for 12 percent of all breast cancers. It occurs more frequently in women under age 50, in African American women, and in women carrying a BRCA1 gene mutation.

Currently, surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy are the best treatment options for this highly aggressive, frequently metastatic cancer, but a lot of research is being done toward targeted therapeutics.

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A recent paper found that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) refugees and asylum seekers from Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Pakistan reported they were often expected to be "flamboyant" and "outspoken" in their asylum interview, and that overall, asylum seekers were more successful if they could prove their 'gayness' by being involved in gay/queer activism in their country of origin, visiting gay bars, being members of lesbian and gay groups and attending gay pride marches.

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Legal briefs, in even the most high profile cases, rarely make headlines. They are technical documents intended to persuade judges in a case about particular points of law.

In American law schools, students now take courses to help them master the arcane genre of brief writing. Their persuasiveness depends on carefully marshaling legal precedents and complex, factual arguments. As a result, they seldom interest anyone outside the legal community.

On Aug. 12, we witnessed a rare exception.

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A new study finds that French transplant centers would have transplanted about 17,500 kidneys from nearly 28,000 deceased-donor kidneys discarded in the United States between 2004 and 2014.

If American standards are simply too high, and not instead that French patients have higher future risk, then many of the 90,000 Americans awaiting a kidney transplant could reap major benefits from the more lax standard in Europe.

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The pulsar wind nebula surrounding pulsar B0540-69 has brightened gradually and astrophysicists say that is because  the pulsar experienced a sudden spin-down rate transition.

But why? The answer may lie in the mysterious magnetic field structure of the pulsar.

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In science, the saying goes, if it can happen in nature it will. 

This Totalitarian Principle expressed by Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann actually originated with Plato. Nothing new there, what is interesting in a recent article by by Tom Siegfried in Science News is that Gell-Mann doesn't seem to have been inspired by T.H. White of "The Sword In The Stone" fame.

White did have statement in the 1958 edition of "The Once and Future King" compilation but not in the prior books leading back to 1938. Gell-Mann had placed it in a strong nuclear force paper in 1956.

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Red Bull GmbH has agreed to pay $640,000 to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by lawyers for Canadian energy drinkers who insist they bought a can of Red Bull in the last 12 years thinking that Red Bull would literally give them wings.

Decisions like this are why states are creating truth in labeling laws for broccoli that wants to claim to be rice and plant juice that claims to be milk. While the companies argue no one is fooled by such marketing, and governments argue that if no one believes it the companies shouldn't lie, this settlement shows again it is lawyers who will win at the end.

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I am presently spending a few days in the pleasant island of Crete, in the middle of the Mediterranean, where I am attending the eight edition of the "International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics". Crete is a gorgeous island at the crossroads of three continents, and because of its location it is brimming with relics of ancient to less ancient history. Anyway, this post is rather about physics, so let me go back there. 

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Federal law requires known allergens such as eggs, peanuts and other ingredients to be declared on food labels. Even if they are organic apple cookies from Whole Foods. So frosted “Decorated Red Apple Cookies” have been recalled due to unlabeled allergens, in this case eggs.

The company removed the product from stores in in Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada.

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Scientists have found iron-60 with interstellar origins in Antarctica, likely a distant supernova that occurred millions of years ago. 

The samples came from 1,100 pounds of snow gathered from Antarctica where the high altitude of the sample kept it free of dust contamination. The snow was melted in a German lab and analyzed with an accelerator mass spectrometer, where the rare nuclear iron-60 isotope was detected.

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Though trial lawyers and the environmental groups that stand to benefit financially from more lawsuits are lined up to sue over 5G wireless using shoddy epidemiological massaging, it's a blatant lie to claim non-ionizing radiation is causing brain cancer.

Not "unproven" or other terms that coddle activists who trade in disinformation, it's a lie.

But aesthetics and a distaste for FCC bullying are fine reasons to object. Net neutrality is not the first time the FCC engaged in the kind of 'we are the government' tactics the IRS and the US Post Office engage in, anyone who tried to create a low power radio station and got threatened with jail knows it's a common tactic.

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A new scaremongering story about food and cancer is making the rounds but before you run off to find comfort in the arms of Mark Hyman, Mehmet Oz, or Joe Mercola, keep one thing in mind.

This is in mice. This stuff is always in mice or a statistical correlation, which means without real science showing it in humans, it is not relevant to humans.

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The first analysis of data from the Kardiozive Brno 2030 study examines the association of pet ownership -- specifically dog ownership -- with cardiovascular disease risk factors and cardiovascular health.

It finds that owning a pet may help maintain a healthy heart, especially if that pet is a dog.

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Not so long ago it was thought that Amazonian forests and other tropical rainforest regions were completely immune to fires, thanks to the high moisture content of the undergrowth beneath the protection of the canopy tree cover. But the severe droughts of 1997-98, 2005, 2010, and currently a large number of wildfires across northern Brazil have forever changed this perception.

These severe ‘mega-droughts’ in the Amazon were most likely driven by interacting large-scale climatic events, with the warming of the Atlantic increasingly outweighing the drying effects of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events in the Pacific.

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Members of the United States military who are injuried abroad often return to the U.S. for treatment and must be transported by aeromedical evacuation between medical facilities.

Evacuations can lead to their own chronic and acute stress, on top of the injuries and potential psychological trauma. 

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