"If it was up to the NIH to cure polio through a centrally directed program instead of independent investigator driven discovery, you'd have the best iron lung in the world, but not a polio vaccine." - Dr. Samuel Broder, M.D., former Director of the National Cancer Institute

Epidemiologists correlate inputs to outcomes by looking at surveys and diaries and then seeing what foods, products, or behaviors to outcomes, like better or worse health.

It isn't science and is often exploited but it has led to big public health wins, like showing that cigarettes and alcohol cause cancer - instances were human clinical trials would be unethical. Recommendations like not adding salt or not eating eggs became fads because epidemiologists claimed it and media highlighted it, the same way the Mediterranean Diet and buying organic food did. There are so many confounders scientists throw up their hands and walk away but corporations exploit it to billions of dollars in revenue.

On August 13-15 I will attend for the first time to the Swedish Physics Days, an important national event for Swedish physics. This year the congress takes place at Lulea University of Technology, the institute where I am currently spending some time, hosted by the Machine Learning group through a Guest Researcher fellowship granted by WASP (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program).

Donald Trump, alleged by many to be President of the United States, has demanded that Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan resign immediately. Thanking the American public for our “attention to this matter,” Trump claims Tan is “conflicted” due to his investments in China.

I dare suggest that Tan respond as follows:

"I made an AI clone of myself and now I am going to live forever" is not a joke.

My AI twin, Bloombot, created by Ryan Dean, the Chief Technology Officer of the Howard Bloom Institute, is designed to carry on my way of thinking after I shuffle off this mortal coil.
In other words, it is going to do its best to replace me.

No, the BloomBot is not exactly me. But it defies belief. The Bloombot is nimble on its digital feet, can do research that would take me a month in seconds, and can write phrases I wish I had written myself.

And sometimes the BloomBot goes even farther. It uses my ideas as seeds and erects trees of imagination and reasoning that rise to rapturous heights.

US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has announced he is cancelling US$500 million (£374 million) of research into mRNA vaccines, citing unproven concerns about their safety and long-term effects.

Kennedy has claimed that mRNA vaccines “encourage new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics” – a misleading statement that contradicts the scientific consensus on viral evolution and effects of vaccination.

Joshua Sukoff/Shutterstock

But scientific research shows that mRNA vaccines have saved millions of lives.

California has an environmental problem. The state is overwhelmingly desert and rain is scarce for 10 months out of the year. Water instead arrives from the mountains. Yet the state legislature and government are allied with environmentalists. They want dams torn down, which means water from the mountains that melts in the spring and summer can't be gathered. Not only do environmentalists now hate dams, their political supermajority has even stalled the water infrastructure improvements voters demanded over 10 years ago, using endless government panel reviews.

The El Niño climate phenomenon is consistently inconsistent, which plays havoc with computer models hoping to anticipate the effects of increased emissions from large polluting countries like China.

It may even be causing periodic booms and busts in spiders and overall insects.

Over 1 million years ago, early hominims made a treacherous deep sea crossing to reach the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and in a modern corn field local people discovered what looked like stone tools in the sedimentary layers and called in archaeologists.

What they found in the Early Pleistocene site of Calio reset the date for colonization of the island; seven stone artifacts. Because this was near a river channel, the researchers believe this would have been the hub for hominin tool-making and other activities such as hunting.

Methanetetrol, the only alcohol which has four hydroxyl groups (OH) at a single carbon atom, is out of this world.

Scientists meant that literally, it had been only theorized because it cannot occur naturally in Earth's everyday conditions but in extreme conditions of space it was assumed to exist. Now after a century of hypothetical existence, ultra-cold temperatures, near-perfect vacuum and high-energy radiation to simulate the environment inside interstellar clouds have combined to make it real.

The scientists from institutions in Russia, communist China, Hawaii, and Mississippi, believe their work could reshape our understanding of chemistry in the universe and shed light on the complex reactions happening in deep space.