H5N1: Raw Milk And Raw Pet Food Are Unsafe But Raw Cheese Aged 60 Days Is 87% Not Killing You

Mar 14 2025 | comment(s)

The only real way to wipe out H5N1, the bird flu that has been ruining egg prices since last year, is to kill off all the wild birds. That is not practical but what we can do is stop buying raw pet food. All of it. Now. And never start again. You will kill your cat if it is transmitted in that food. And stop buying raw milk. All of it. Now. And never start again.

Cheminformatics: NIH Funds A More Scientific Mosquito Repellent

Mar 12 2025 | comment(s)

Today, the best way to prevent malaria remains DDT. Though banned in the US by a politician over the objections of scientists, it is still recommended by the United Nations for use where malaria has not been wiped out. Our FDA even wrote the book on how to spray it in homes.

Despite 70 years of effort, viable affordable replacements remain elusive but a new program hopes LLMs could help find one. The National Institutes of Health funded a proposal to use machine learning techniques combined with cheminformatics to help generate new mosquito repellents.

Epidemiologists Blame 15th Century Science For Modern Brain Tumors

Mar 11 2025 | comment(s)

Claims about occupational hazards, chemicals correlated to disease, occur every week, from non-stick spatulas to flame-retardant couches, and the group targeted more by those efforts than pregnant women are first responders like firefighters.

A new paper links gliomas in the brain or spinal cords to a specific mutation and then using epidemiological correlation to "suggest" cause from haloalkene, a common chemical in use for 600 years and in the 20th century in nearly every home with fire extinguishers, but then denying they are trying to suggest cause down at the bottom.

Number Theory In The English Department

Mar 09 2025 | comment(s)

(Image by Henry Reich)

One thing, singular. Two or more things, plural.

Subjects must agree with verbs in number: It is, they are.

The Sexual Evolution - Gender And Nature May Be More Complex Than You Believe

Mar 05 2025 | comment(s)

I have a trans flag flying from my house but I completely understand concerns by women that they're being set back 60 years if someone born a biological man starts setting female swimming or boxing records. Women have their own sports because we turned scientific differences into policy. It created fairness.

If you're in a binary world you may have decided one thing about my beliefs in the first eight words of that paragraph and then something else after the rest of it. If you insist there is no binary in biological sex, I hope you at least consider the existence of irony in making sweeping generalizations about the psychology of people based on one issue.

Summer Lectures In AI

Mar 04 2025 | comment(s)

Winter is not over yet, but I am already busy fixing the details of some conferences, schools, and lectures I will give around Europe this summer. Here I wish to summarize them, in the hope of arising the interest of some of you in the relevant events I will attend to.

Messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA) Vaccine Shows Promise For Pancreatic Cancer

Mar 03 2025 | comment(s)

Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a molecule that provides blueprints for cells to make a protein that may be needed by the body. Though around for nearly 60 years before COVID-19 erupted from Wuhan, China, it didn't get a lot of attention from government-funding agencies, where the grant system most often means experiments likely to work rather than anything revolutionary,(1)

That all changed when Moderna said they could make a COVID-19 vaccine fast, they just needed the bloated federal government and its need to make companies spend 18 months getting approval for a font color on a product label to instead get out of the way. The Trump administration did just that and by the end of 2020 it was being rushed to those on the medical front lines.(2)

What Will Become Of Reality?

Mar 02 2025 | comment(s)

For convenience, let’s say it started with Photoshop. That program made it obvious not only that we couldn’t believe our eyes any more, but that photographic evidence could no longer be admissible in court. Socioeconomic implications were even wider, as new industries popped up with products purporting to tell unretouched photos from photoshopped ones. (And the trademarked noun gave rise to a verb!)

Trump Administration Authorizes $100 Million For New Vaccine Research

Feb 26 2025 | comment(s)

In its second year, Avian Influenza has wrecked the U.S. poultry industry and caused egg prices to rise sharply. A month into a new presidential term, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has been given $1 billion to get the problem under control.

Hundreds of millions fewer chickens mean expensive eggs, and poor people who suffered through 44% food inflation were counting on lower prices.

Female Physicians 50% More Likely To Commit Suicide