A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Katrin Link for APPEC, the Astro-Particle Physics European Consortium. APPEC is a consortium of 19 funding agencies, national government institutions, and institutes from 17 European countries, which is responsible for coordinating and funding national research efforts in astroparticle physics.
The interview stems from the help that the JENAA group (a joint effort of APPEC, NuPECC and ECFA) is trying to offer to the research plan of the MODE collaboration, a group of physicists and computer scientists for which I am serving as the scientific coordinator.
In 1946, with World War II over, archaeologists got back to work and over 10 years found discarded Hebrew Bible manuscripts in 12 Ein Feshkha Caves near the Dead Sea in the West Bank. Fragments o these "Dead Sea Scrolls" include the Apocrypha, except for the Book of Esther, which may not have survived over time.
No one knows who printed most older works, for the Christian Bible it was anonymous monks, and the Dead Sea Scrolls also contain no attribution, but there has been speculation about who may have written them. Some sought to at least connect them by handwriting.
In 2019, Christiansburg, Virginia's 22,000 residents became the first place in the U.S. to have a residential drone delivery service.
Yellow-winged drones with small cardboard boxes owned by Wing, a company owned by Alphabet (basically, Google) are now one of numerous trial services operating today. But regulations for giant planes full of fuel are not ready for delivery of the future, and the only way to make government get ready is public interest. Without proactive guidelines, the public will be stuck with activists doing to drones what they did to agriculture and cell phones.
Unidentified sources made their way
into the Wall Street Journal a short while ago and by stating that the Biden administration was going to ban menthol cigarettes the article caused tobacco stocks to plummet.FDA has until the end of the month to do what the President wants, it was said.
It's entirely believable but what is interesting is the new reason for the ban; the government has pivoted from claiming menthol cigarettes "target" people of color to instead claiming they are used by children.
Mosquitoes like Aedes aegypti don't have any value ecologically. If Thanos snapped them out of existence tomorrow there is nothing they do that won't immediately be taken up by 3,000 other mosquito species, not to mention 25,000 bee species when it comes to pollination.
The only thing they are great at is killing people; by being a leading source of vector-borne dengue disease. Not far behind is Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, which carry malaria. Malaria kills nearly as many people each year as COVID-19 did in 2020 but there is no Warp Speed program to keep poor people in developing nations from dying. Environmental activists (overwhelmingly white and wealthy) instead spend $2 billion a year scaring people of color in other countries about science.
Throughout the pandemic, millions of Americans wondered: “Is the cure worse than the disease?”
The question implies a trade-off between “the cure,” in the form of economic shutdowns, and “the disease,” COVID-19. This debate dominated headlines in the first months of the pandemic. More than a year later, it continues to be a partisan lighting rod.
But our research shows that mortality during the pandemic in America has never fit the narrative that pits economic shutdowns against COVID-19.
The recent announcement that scientists have made human-monkey embryos and cultured them in the lab for two weeks made international headlines.
The technology to make animals that contain cells from other species has been available for decades and used extensively in research. These organisms are called “chimeras”.
But this latest advance highlights the need to broaden the discussion around the possible benefits of such research and, specifically, how inter-species chimeric research should be conducted in future.
Design and purpose are definitely not two things that scientists consider as their guiding ideas in trying to decypher the fabric of our Universe, or of natural phenomena in general. So teleology should not belong to this blog, I agree.
Are you being monitored all of the time? You certainly are, by both corporations and the government. It just may not be obvious in the U.S., whereas in London you are filmed by government 300 times each day, and that concerns privacy advocates.
What if the spying were more obvious? Like a webcam that looks like human eye?
A few years ago, much of the academic science community finally turned on the anti-science progressives that dominated the coasts of the U.S. and who refused to vaccinate their children.
Standing up to their political allies definitely turned the tide, even California Governor Gavin Newsom grudgingly conceded and signed a law banning the arbitrary vaccine exemptions for kids that had become common in places like San Francisco, where he'd been the mayor, and Los Angeles. Some schools there had vaccination rates under 30 percent.(1) Pretending the problem did not exist set California back, especially when coastal cities had more vaccine exemptions than the rest of the US combined, but scorn so long after it was common likely did not make much difference.
