Science 2.0

Vegetables have had a lot of foodborne outbreak scandals, but two times since the 1980s they have also impacted meat in a big way. 

Mad Cow disease in 1986 and Listeria in 2019 killed people. Mad Cow disease was due to poor quality control and a lack of coherent meat-chain understanding - the annual Burns Supper is coming up but you still can't buy haggis from Scotland - while more recent Listeria was just sloppy controls. Those can happen anywhere in the food chain but there may be ways to reduce the risk without making the perfect the enemy of the good. 

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Another year just started, and this is as good a time as any to line up a few wishes. Not a bucket list, nor a "will do" set of destined-to-fail propositions. It is painful to have to reckon with the failure of our strength of will, so I'd say it is better to avoid that. Rather, it is a good exercise to put together a list of things that we would like to happen, and over which we have little or no control: it is much safer as we won't feel guilty if these wishes do not come true. 

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You may not drive 250 miles back and forth to work but you may drive 125 on a trip, and that could be all you are getting in an electric vehicle when it is cold. Electric car efficiency plummets below moderate temperature, 40 percent or more, but just like government will go after conventional fuel companies who get their emissions wrong, now electric isn't without scrutiny. And they are getting penalties for not being more truthful about their limits.

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Critics of scientists and science writers who speak plainly usually note it is better to be more neutral in tone, informational - 'show them some slides.'

Yet very little actually gets done that way. A few places can stay in existence writing 'the universe is mysterious' articles but environmentalists know how to move the needle, financially, politically, and cultural. And it is not by being informational. Though their work is often hyperbole and misinformation around a kernel of scientific truth, they see positive results as the goal, not science.

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In 1066, Duke William of Normandy left France on a fleet of ships to fight his cousin and competitor for the vacant English throne, Harold Godwinson, and at the Battle of Hastings, the matter was settled. Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon claimant, was dead, and a new age for England began.(1)

Had the EU existed then, he'd have never had the chance. Given current EU red tape, efforts to make a replica of La Mora, the ship Williams used to become The Conqueror, mean it may still not be ready for the 1,000 year anniversary. Unless Great Britain, having shucked off their two-decade experiment in the EU, build it for them.

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We don't get many new antibiotics in America despite there being a great need. The reason is simple; though 85% of American drug spending is for "generic" - it is off patent, so anyone can make it without doing any work - a lot of people want everything to be generic. And cheap.

There is nothing cheap about science, so companies who don't want to spend $1 billion and 10 years for a new antibiotic only to have some grandstanding populist in Congress declare that medicine should be free. Instead they will tackle more obscure drugs that are less likely to get attention.

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Neither CNN nor ABC will have hosts like Ryan Seacrest and Anderson Cooper firing up cigarettes during this year's New Years Eve broadcasts, watched by millions across the U.S. 

Wait, they did that last year? Of course not(1) but another class 1 carcinogen - determined when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was still a legitimate epidemiology group and not the modern grift for ban-everything trial lawyers - was on the air last year.

That carcinogen is alcohol. 

It makes no sense that we fear cigarettes and the impact on young people if they even appear in movies but the next greatest lifestyle killer is promoted on CNN, basically being endorsed by news personalities like Anderson Cooper.

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Unlike US environmentalists, Belgian greens didn't flip and suddenly regard hydropower as a bad thing, they regard it as a viable part of their renewable energy strategy. All options are on the table, 50 percent of their electricity is even nuclear.  That's smart, nuclear is 2 times the energy capacity of natural gas and obviously an order of magnitude greater and more reliable than wind and solar.

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Going to an area where there are a lot of wind vanes can be shocking. The noise and environmental blight for so little energy isn't worthwhile, and needing to get exemptions from endangered species laws due to deaths of avians like eagles make them a real negative.

Solar panels have a little better cultural response but can still be unattractive. If you are a wealthy elite who doesn't like the appearance, or a government building using taxpayer funds, you may be able to turn architectural constraints into alternative energy without ruining the aesthetic. The archaeological park of Pompeii and the Portuguese city of Evora are creating solar panels that look like ancient Roman tiles or terracotta bricks to match the skyline.

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An account going by the name of Andy Hsieh, there is a lot of astroturf in the anti-science community so it's hard to know if it's even a real blogger, wrote one of those predictable screeds endorsing their political allies, this time against agriculture.

It could have been cell phones or vaccines or nuclear energy - 84% of the time if you see any of those you know every political and scientific position they hold(1) - and the conspiracy tale would be the same.

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Archaeologists in northern Iraq, working on the Mashki and Adad gate sites in Mosul that were destroyed by Islamic State in 2016, recently uncovered 2,700-year-old Assyrian reliefs. Featuring war scenes and trees, these rock carvings add to the bounty of detailed stone panels excavated from the 1840s onwards, many of which are currently held in the British Museum.

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Advent calendars with hidden chocolatey treats, huge tins of Quality Street and steaming cups of hot chocolate festooned with whipped cream and marshmallows are all much-loved wintry staples at Christmastime. But how many of us stop to think about where chocolate actually comes from and how it made its way into our culinary culture?

The story of chocolate has a compelling, rich history that academics like me are learning more about every day.

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In 2017, three researchers from the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE), Denis Bourguet, Benoit Facon and Thomas Guillemaud, founded Peer Community In (PCI), a peer-review-based service for recommending preprints (referring to the version of an article that a scientist submits to a review committee).

The service greenlights articles and makes them and their reviews, data, codes and scripts available on an open-access basis. Out of this concept, PCI paved the way for researchers to regain control of their review and publishing system in an effort to increase transparency in the knowledge production chain.

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'Chestnuts roasting on an open fire' is in a popular Christmas song, but a lot less common now than when it was written. That is due to an invasive species from Asia. It was once common for environmentally woke people to introduce species from Asia in their opposition to chemicals, because they believed all nature is better than any science, but from California (Bradford pear) to Vermont (the American chestnut) what the science community warned them about doing came to pass. Devastation.

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The pandemic must be over because activists are back to complaining about Christmas trees, which means they will also be back to being anti-vaccine as soon as Republicans stop being idiots and it is once again a safe space for progressives to own. Just like every year from 1998 to 2020.

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Inscriptions on the walls and crosses in a grotto first found by grave robbers in Lachish national park of the Judean lowlands west of Jerusalem have led archaeologists to conclude it was dedicated to Salome, associated with the birth of Jesus Christ in early Christian accounts.  The Jewish burial chamber and ossuaries dating back to the Roman period became part of a Christian chapel during the Byzantine era until the region was captured by the Rashidun Caliphate in the middle of the 7th century.

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From insulin to lowering environmental strain to grow food, genetic engineering is one of the marvels of the 20th century. In the 21st, CRISPR-Cas9 or something else may achieve the same lofty status but genetic engineering isn't done yet.

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Giant blue and humpback whales migrate across the ocean to breed and give birth in waters where predators are scarce.

A new analysis of the fossil bed in the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park (BISP) in Nevada’s Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest suggests that nearly 200 million years before giant whales evolved, school bus-sized marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs may have been making similar migrations to breed and give birth together in relative safety.

Nevada is east of the very large state of California, and the study offers a possible explanation why at least 37 of these marine reptiles came to meet their ends in the same locale.

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The Donnan electric potential arises from an imbalance of charges at the interface of a charged membrane and a liquid but detecting it directly has not been possible. Until now.

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How effective are masks at breaking transmission of COVID?

At present we have many studies but mainly observational - and we have a wide range of expert views on how effective or not the best masks really are

With the rapid spread of COVID in China - that's a country that has the motivation to find answers fast, and has a culture that is very accepting of masks.

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