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Government Claims Victory Over Virtual Vaping

Government Claims Victory Over Virtual Vaping

Mar 14 2025 | comment(s)

Imagine if I put out a claim that I had prevented teens from playing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II" and therefore saving billions in dollars in future mental health care costs.

Well, I can, because COD:MWII has dropped a lot in usage from a few years ago. Sure, critics might claim it is an older game and new games come along and people switch to those, but if I am at FDA, none of that matters.
No Patchwork Regulations In 50 States: OpenAI Wants Federal AI Rules For Everyone

No Patchwork Regulations In 50 States: OpenAI Wants Federal AI Rules For Everyone

Mar 13 2025 | comment(s)

When a tourist visits California, the first thing they notice getting off of the airplane is a warning sign that the material they are near will give them cancer. Then another one. Then another. Soon, they become invisible but not before people do searches to see how much more cancer Californians develop than everyone else.(1)


Not only will most things in Walmart have a cancer warning, the building itself can give you cancer. Photo: Hank Campbell
Unscientific And Illegal WOTUS Agenda May Finally Die

Unscientific And Illegal WOTUS Agenda May Finally Die

Mar 12 2025 | comment(s)

After a decade of being thrown out by the courts and being slightly modified and enacted again, changes drastically expanding the definition of Waters of the United States (WOTUS) to include man-made ponds on family farms may finally be ending.
Legacy Survey of Space and Time Gets Closer

Legacy Survey of Space and Time Gets Closer

Mar 12 2025 | comment(s)

The Trump administration announced a major milestone for the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory with the installation of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera on the telescope.

Next up is the final phase of testing before capturing "first look" images and then the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time will begin.
Cheminformatics: NIH Funds A More Scientific Mosquito Repellent

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.
100 Days: Patient Goes Home With Single Moving Part Titanium Heart

100 Days: Patient Goes Home With Single Moving Part Titanium Heart

Mar 12 2025 | comment(s)

 St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, founded by Catholic nuns in 1857, reports implant of Australia’s first BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart. Invented by Dr. Daniel Timms, it is a single moving part, no valves, and a no-contact suspension system, which means no mechanical wear, and the patient lasted over 100 days while waiting for an artificial heart. He even went home with it installed.

The work was led by Dr. Paul Jansz and the anonymous patient was sent home in February. He then received a donor heart early in March.
Epidemiologists Blame 15th Century Science For Modern Brain Tumors

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

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

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

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.
Wealthy People, Stop Buying That Elite Raw Pet Food, You Are Killing Your Cat

Wealthy People, Stop Buying That Elite Raw Pet Food, You Are Killing Your Cat

Mar 03 2025 | comment(s)

The right-wing may have co-opted anti-vaccine beliefs from the left and changed Science Is a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy hysteria into Science Is A Vast Big Pharma Conspiracy but luckily most of the wealthy people are still in states like California, so the right hasn't taken up overspending on chickens that never had medicine and never will, or raw milk, or raw pet food.

Those are three giant preventable disease vectors for and the west coast is still doing all of them. The latest disease spreader for wealthy progressive elites is Wild Coast Raw of Olympia frozen Boneless Free Range Chicken Formula raw pet food for cats. It is probably contaminated with Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 also known as bird flu.  
Messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA) Vaccine Shows Promise For Pancreatic Cancer

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?

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

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

Female Physicians 50% More Likely To Commit Suicide

Feb 26 2025 | comment(s)

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data have revealed an alarming trend: female physicians were 53% more likely to commit suicide than females in the general population. Women are still only 25% of physician suicides, men are 80% of doctors who kill themselves, and the obvious risk factor is mental health issues and a key cause for that is legal issues. The American legal system allows unlimited liability and lawyers have successfully blocked all efforts at tort reform.
PFAS: Environmental Working Group Is Thrilled Republican Allies Are in Power

PFAS: Environmental Working Group Is Thrilled Republican Allies Are in Power

Feb 26 2025 | comment(s)

With new analyses created by their employees to 'detect' chemicals in water, plus their war on seed oils, Environmental Working Group have joined Natural Resources Defense Council in becoming Republican allies.

Welcome to politicization of science in the 2020s. Just a few years ago, Republicans were the enemy of anti-science activists, but now the Trump administration has an environmental conspiracy theorist in the Cabinet. Science won't matter and that's good for environmental lawyers.
Scientization Of Politics: Seed Oils Are The Latest Nocebo Fad

Scientization Of Politics: Seed Oils Are The Latest Nocebo Fad

Feb 24 2025 | comment(s)

You may suddenly have read a lot about the dangers of seed oils - e.g. sunflower and canola oil - and wonder why this is just being discovered. 

The harms weren't recently discovered, they've still never been discovered. They're not harmful so nothing has changed except the demographic criticizing them flipped from endorsing them. They were never healthier for you either, despite claims by people touted as experts, because those claims were also based on mouse studies and food surveys. It is just the pendulum of money-driven nutrition culture that goes where political winds take them.
Basically No chance 2024 YR4 will hit Earth.

Basically No chance 2024 YR4 will hit Earth.

Feb 24 2025 | comment(s)

Recent observations have virtually eliminated any concern about an impact from asteroid 2024 YR4. With a series of new data points collected over the past months, NASA has refined its understanding of the asteroid's path, reducing the predicted risk from the initially calculated 1% to nearly zero.

Alternate Representations for Impact Probability = 2.7e-5
0.0027% chance of Earth impact
Anti-Science Epidemiologists Have A New Friend In Government

Anti-Science Epidemiologists Have A New Friend In Government

Feb 18 2025 | comment(s)

In September, epidemiologists out to scare people about homeopathic - "detectable" - levels of pesticides published a paper hoping to get journalists promoting fear and doubt about agriculture.

Being the opposition to science in academia is a good place to be. They can get a publication to check off that annual box and nothing much will change. They won't get any blame.
Prop 65 Is A California Gimmick That Raises Prices For The Poor

Prop 65 Is A California Gimmick That Raises Prices For The Poor

Feb 13 2025 | comment(s)

Proposition 65 was a voter referendum that stated if a chemical was correlated to cancer, it needed to have a cancer warning label. Lawyers who were behind the public relations effort to get it passed assured consumers it would not be abused. Yet a few years later, epidemiologists inside the once-credible International Agency for Research on Cancer in France set out to gain "expert witness" contracts from lawyers and began to create more and more "correlations" - no science needed, just a possible link in mice - and now over 80,000 products carry these labels.

Not only will you find warning labels on nearly every product inside a Walmart, a warning label is on the outside, to warn you that the brick and glass has been "linked to" cancer.