Science 2.0

The US Department of Agriculture believes that foreign countries may own up to 40,000,000 acres of farm land.

No one really knows despite the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 requiring it. 

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Like most of the Biden economic initiatives during his first term, the Inflation Reduction Act, along with trillions of dollars of other subsidies, were primarily geared toward wealthy elites.

If you want to buy a fancy electric car, government, using taxes and fees on poor people, will pay you to do so. They pay car companies to make them and mandate car companies had to make them.

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California Democrats: Childhood obesity is up, we need more government regulations to protect people from themselves.

Also California Democrats: Let's start by banning sports for kids.

By the end of this month, California Democrats will decide if they should ban youth football. Sports are dangerous. It's for the children.

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A population-based cohort study sought to examine a controversial epidemiological claim about assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and the body mass index (BMI) of children.

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Marijuana industry trade groups are ecstatic that a Department of Health and Human Services report  stated there is one indication that medical marijuana is legitimate.

But news outlets reporting that federal scientists are saying medical marijuana is legitimate are doing the public a disservice; it was not scientists, it was epidemiologists, and the review was of papers where people anecdotally said it helped them feel less pain.

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It is an unfortunate reality in America that medical societies have an outsized influence on government policy.

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When you are making a model it is common to make assumptions about the physical systems often assume that measurable features of the system. Temperature or chemical potential can be specified. The real world is messier than that, and uncertainty is unavoidable. Temperatures fluctuate, instruments malfunction, the environment interferes, and systems evolve over time.

Statistical physics address the uncertainty about the state of a system that arises when that system interacts with its environment but a new paper says that uncertainty in the thermodynamic parameters themselves — built into equations that govern the energetic behavior of the system — may also influence the outcome of an experiment.

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University of Kentucky political science Professor Stephen Voss, who was plagiarized by Harvard President Claudine Gay, said it was no big deal. It was even expected she would use his work without attribution? He seems to think so. “It would have been quite natural for her to borrow ideas from me."

He didn't tell me that personally. I instead cited the source. Like you are supposed to do. It ain't that hard. She could have done it but did not, and yet he has no issue with that. He seems to be more upset that her plagiarism is going to lead to more investigations of humanities scholars' academic work, including by people 'not qualified' to do so.

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Sarah Green Carmichael, in a Bloomberg News item titled “You don’t need more resilience, you need friends, and money” debunks the business gurus who tell us all resilience comes from inside us. Sarah’s thesis is that our environments determine our resilience, or at least can shield us from the traumas that necessitate resilience.

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From tomorrow onwards (once or twice a week until February 5), I will be giving an online course on the topic of "Statistical Methods for Fundamental Science" for the INSTATS organization. This is a 5-day, 15-hour set of lectures that I put together to suit the needs of students and researchers who work in any scientific discipline, who wish to improve their understanding and practice of statistical methods for data analysis.

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A job interview, some years back, at No Name University (NNU). I was the candidate. The diversity question, pitched right on schedule. The surprise was who asked it. Of the seven search committee members (plus the search firm rep) only one was a person of color, and guess who they stuck with asking the diversity question? A clear signal I would not want to work at their institution, but I gave it my best game anyway.

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With the Biden administration throwing taxpayer money at wealthy elites, manufacturers, and companies willing to roll the dice on electric cars, Hertz enthusiastically gushed that they were going to be 25 percent electric by this year.

Instead, they have decided to sell 20,000 of them and go back to gas engines.

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Tsukuba, Japan - A team of scientists led by Associate Professor Haruka Ozaki of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Research at the University of Tsukuba in collaboration with Dr. Koichi Takahashi from RIKEN used mathematical algorithms to optimize the schedule of automated biology laboratory robots. By analyzing the needs of time-sensitive samples that require investigation using multiple instruments, the researchers were able to maximize the number of experiments that can be performed within time and laboratory resource constraints.

Study is most comprehensive of its kind and included more than 70,000 adults in the UK hospitalised with severe COVID-19 disease. Of these, half (36,367 of 73,197) developed one or more health complication during their hospitalisation.

Most common complications included renal, complex respiratory, and systemic complications, but cardiovascular, neurological, and gastrointestinal and liver complications were also reported.

What The Study Did: Researchers examined the diversity and representation by race/ethnicity and sex in select health care occupations in the United States from 2000 to 2019.

Authors: Anupam B. Jena, M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School in Boston, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.17086)

What The Study Did: Among the few New York state public school districts providing full-time in-person elementary school instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, most districts served predominately white students, rural/suburban students and children who were not disadvantaged (children who were not from a low-income family, were not English language learners, did not have homelessness, and did not have a disability).

Authors: Ashley M. Fox, Ph.D., M.A., of the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), is the corresponding author.

Social networks among animals are critical to various aspects of their lives, including reproductive success and survival, and could even teach us more about human relationships.

What The Study Did: In this observational study using data from the Veterans Health Administration for 2,344 U.S. veterans hospitalized with COVID-19, remdesivir treatment was associated with prolonged hospitalization but wasn't associated with improved survival.

Authors: Michael E. Ohl, M.D., M.S.P.H., of the Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, is the corresponding author.

What The Study Did: This community-engaged qualitative study describing Black and Latinx participants' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic found that fear, illness and loss experienced during the pandemic motivated information seeking and mitigation behaviors, while vaccine skepticism was high, as was the demand for clearer information. Among Black participants, racism and medical experimentation were associated with distrust.

Authors: Manuel E. Jimenez, M.D., M.S., of the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is the corresponding author.

BOSTON - The unprecedented increase in overweight and obesity in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has led to an alarming rise in diabetes in these regions. Of the estimated 463 million people with diabetes worldwide, 79% live in LMICs.