Tag: science

Researchers Successfully Reverse Alzheimer’s in Mice: Peer-Reviewed Study

Scientists have reversed Alzheimer’s disease in mice, potentially showing a pathway to treat the illness among humans, according to a Dec. 22 peer-reviewed study published in the Cell Reports Medicine journal.

Alzheimer’s is traditionally considered irreversible. In the study, researchers treated two groups of mice with P7C3-A20, a pharmacologic agent. One group carried human mutations related to amyloid processing, while the other carried a tau protein mutation. Both amyloid and tau pathologies are two major early events of Alzheimer’s.

Researchers say that as mice develop brain pathologies resembling Alzheimer’s, they are ideal subjects to test how P7C3-A20 affects Alzheimer’s in humans.

Among the amyloid mice, treatment with P7C3-A20 was found to have resulted in restoring the proper balance of Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), which is a cellular energy molecule and a major driver of Alzheimer’s disease. As people age, NAD+ levels decline in their bodies, including the brain. Without proper NAD+ balance, the cells are unable to execute critical processes necessary for proper functioning.

The treatment was found to have reversed blood-brain barrier deterioration, DNA damage, oxidative stress, and neuroinflammation, researchers wrote. The blood-brain barrier maintains nutrient and hormone levels in the brain while protecting the organ from toxins and pathogens.

The treatment enhanced synaptic plasticity and hippocampal neurogenesis, a process in which new functional neurons are generated.

Keep reading

Tinker, tailor, publisher, spy: how Robert Maxwell created the academic peer review system

Publication of research results, theoretical propositions and scholarly essays is not a free-for-all. As shown by the dogmatism around climate change and Covid-19, sceptics struggle to get papers in print. The gate-keeper is the peer-review system, which people take for granted as a screening process to ensure rigour in scientific literature.

But it is not always been that way. Until at least the 1950s, the decision to publish was made by the editors of academic journals, who were typically eminent professors in their field.

Peer review, by contrast, entails the editor sending an anonymised manuscript to independent reviewers, and although the editor makes a final decision, the reviews indicate whether the submission should be accepted, revised or rejected. This may seem fair and objective, but in reality peer review has become a means of knowledge control – and as we argue here, perhaps that was always the purpose.

You may be surprised to know that the instigator of peer review was the media tycoon Robert Maxwell. In 1951, at the age of 28, the Czech emigree purchased three-quarters of Butterworth Press for about half a million pounds at current value. He renamed it as Pergamon Press, with its core business in science, technology and medicine (STM) journals, all of which instilled peer review.

According to Myer Kutz (2019), ‘Maxwell, justifiably, was one of the key figures — if not the key figure — in the rise of the commercial STM journal publishing business in the years after World War II’.

Maxwell’s company stole a march on other publishers and its influence was huge. By 1959 Pergamon was publishing 40 journals, surging to 150 by 1965. By 1996, one million peer reviewed articles had been published. Yet despite the increase in outlets, opportunities for writers with analyses or arguments contrary to the prevailing narrative are limited.

Maxwell was instrumental to peer review becoming a regime to reinforce prevailing doctrines and power.

Back in 1940, Maxwell was a penniless 16 year-old of Jewish background, having left his native land for refuge in Britain. His linguistic talents attracted him to the British intelligence services. On an assignment in Paris in 1944 he met his Huguenot wife Elisabeth. After war ended in 1945 he spent two years in occupied Germany with the Foreign Office as head of the press section.

Four years later, with no lucrative activity to his name, this young man found the money to buy an established British publishing house. According to Craig Whitney (New York Times, 1991), Maxwell made Pergamon a thriving business with ‘a bank loan and money borrowed from his wife’s family and from relatives in America’.

But how was he able to acquire Butterworth Press, initially? A clue is given by a BBC video clip (2022) on Maxwell’s links to intelligence networks. While operating as a KGB agent in Berlin, he presented himself to MI6 as having ‘established connections with leading scientists all over the world’. According to investigative journalist Tom Bower, ‘unbelievably what he really wanted was for M16 to finance him to start a publishing company’.

This point is corroborated by Desmond Bristow, former M16 officer, who states that Maxwell asked the secret security service to finance his venture. Seven years after launching Pergamon Press, Maxwell moved into Headington Hill Hall, a 53-room mansion in Oxford, which he leased from Oxford City Council.

Keep reading

Bermuda Mystery Surfaces with Discovery of Massive Underground Structure, Revealing a New Deep-Earth Anomaly

A new seismic analysis has revealed an unusually thick structure beneath Bermuda, a geological oddity that defies conventional models and may rewrite scientists’ understanding of how the island chain emerged.

The unusual feature consists of a 12.4-mile-thick layer of rock beneath the crust, located within the tectonic plate beneath Bermuda. Scientists have never detected such a thick layer of rock under similar tectonic conditions, where the mantle is typically found.

Bermuda Mystery

The 181-island chain of Bermuda has long puzzled geologists. The oceanic crust beneath the islands sits at a higher elevation than the surrounding seafloor due to a mysterious swell. Typically, volcanic activity would account for such uplift, yet geologists believe the region hasn’t experienced an eruption in 31 million years—a discrepancy that has fueled decades of speculation.

The newly discovered structure may help resolve that puzzle. Despite the extreme age of Bermuda’s last known eruption, the massive rock layer suggests that ancient volcanic activity could have injected a significant volume of mantle material into the crust. That slab now appears to be pushing the ocean floor upward by nearly 1,700 feet relative to nearby areas.

Similar mantle quirks may explain the formation of other islands worldwide. At certain locations known as mantle hotspots, rising plumes of hot material generate volcanic activity that builds islands from below—Hawaii being a prime example. In most cases, however, the crust eventually moves away from the hotspot, causing the uplift to subside over time.

Bermuda’s uplift, persisting for more than 31 million years, defies that pattern. What exactly is occurring beneath the island remains the subject of active debate.

Imagining the Bermuda Rock

The team behind the discovery, spread across multiple U.S. institutions, including Yale and Smith College, reported their findings in a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters. They relied on seismic data to make their discovery, drawing from a seismic station located on Bermuda, which collected the data by observing large earthquakes occurring at great distances from the island. 

These observations allowed scientists to image the Earth below Bermuda to a depth of 31 miles. Changes in the signal received as the tremors reached Bermuda enabled the teams to identify the anomalous rock layer, which varied in density, thereby altering the seismic waves.

Earlier research on Bermuda’s geology revealed that the archipelago’s ancient lava was low in silica, indicating that it was produced from high-carbon rock. Further analysis of the material’s zinc content revealed that the lava originated deep in the mantle. Geologists believe that the rock originally entered the mantle during the formation of the Pangea supercontinent some 900 to 300 million years ago.

Keep reading

Health Canada says drag performances promote science and vaccination

What began as a routine Access to Information request quickly spiralled into something stranger and more wasteful than expected.

When Health Canada was asked for all invoices tied to Public Service Pride Week 2025, their response seemed straightforward on the surface. A hundred dollars for rainbow lanyards, another hundred for intersex-inclusive progress flag sticks, a $560 charge to raise and lower a flag, and over $800 for another flag-raising ceremony.

But buried in the paperwork was something far more revealing.

Invoices show that Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions, a Carney-adjacent facilities management giant, billed taxpayers $1,550 plus HST just to raise a Pride flag on August 14. Then take it down for a Truth & Reconciliation flag on September 27. Then take it down again on October 16 — complete with new anchors and eyebolts for next year.

The revolving door of symbolic flag choreography, all at the taxpayers’ expense, was becoming clear.

Even more striking was Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada’s choice of “science outreach.” During federal service Pride Week, the agencies quietly hired a group called Science is a Drag™ — yes, that is a real trademark. According to invoices, the troupe cost taxpayers over $2,500. Their pitch? To use drag performances to promote ‘science literacy and public health.’

Health Canada’s justification reads like a government committee’s fever dream: drag “aligns with the mandates of Health Canada and PHAC by using performance as an innovative, culturally relevant way to promote science literacy.” In practice, this meant federal employees were invited to a glitter-powered show discussing mental health, STI prevention, and vaccination — delivered by cross-dressing performers in sequins and six-inch heels.

Keep reading

House Democrat Files Impeachment Articles Against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Turning ‘His Back on Science’

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), who is running for Senate, filed articles of impeachment on Wednesday against Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying he has turned “his back on science.”

“Today, I formally introduced articles of impeachment against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. RFK Jr. has turned his back on science and the safety of the American people. Michiganders cannot take another day of his chaos,” the Michigan Democrat wrote in a statement.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for HHS, dismissed the articles of impeachment as a political ploy.

“Secretary Kennedy remains focused on the work of improving Americans’ health and lowering costs, not on partisan political stunts,” Nixon said.

Stevens is the second Democrat to recently move to impeach a Trump cabinet official; Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI) just filed articles of impeachment against Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Thanedar has cited the Trump administration’s strikes against vessels that were allegedly taking part in drug trafficking.

“Pete Hegseth has been using the United States military to extrajudicially assassinate people without evidence of any crime,” said Thanedar.

He added, “Former military attorneys have come out and asserted that his conduct constitutes war crimes. We cannot allow his reprehensible conduct to continue, which is why I have filed these articles to impeach him.”

Keep reading

Moving Objects without Touching Them: Scientists Invent Chip that Generates Acoustic Waves as “Invisible Grabbers”

Virginia Tech University Scientists have invented a novel electronic chip that generates acoustic waves capable of moving objects without touching them, like “invisible grabbers.”

Although other methods for moving objects without touching them already exist, the new approach is the first to generate waves directly on the chip capable of manipulating individual objects or fluids without direct contact.

The research team behind the new design believes their acoustic wave-generating chip could benefit scientific and manufacturing processes that rely on moving objects without physical contact, including micro robotics, nanoengineering, and customized drug manufacturing.

According to a statement detailing the acoustic wave-generating chip, Virginia Tech University Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Zhenhua Tian and his team were intrigued by the idea of generating acoustic waves capable of moving objects without touching them. However, when evaluating previous approaches, the team found that the actual generation of the waves was acting as a limiting factor in the approach’s practical applications.

For example, the current standard for producing acoustic waves on electronic chips is an interdigital transducer (IDT). But according to the research team, IDTs do not produce “highly customizable curved and overlapping waves” needed to trap and move objects, including fluids, without touching them.

“Think of it like trying to move a ping pong ball with the flat of your hand; you can roll it along a surface, but you can’t pick it up and freely move it,” they explained.

Funded by a 2024 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Tian and his team worked to develop a chip that can generate crisscrossing acoustic waves, which can be tuned to work together like invisible grabbers. This meant reimagining the wave transmitter’s shape and redesigning the electrodes that create the energy waves emanating from the chip.

Keep reading

Scientists Discover Monkeys Can Keep a Beat—Challenging a Major Theory of Human Evolution

For decades, scientists believed that humans and a handful of musical birds held a near-exclusive claim to one of the most culturally defining abilities on Earth: the ability to move in time with a beat.

However,  a surprising new study now suggests that our sense of rhythm may not be as uniquely human as once thought.

In a series of experiments, macaque monkeys were observed spontaneously tapping along to music, locking onto rhythms even when it offered them no reward.

Published in Science, the study reveals that monkeys can not only perceive a steady beat in real music, but can also anticipate future beats and adjust their tapping accordingly—all skills once thought to emerge primarily in vocal-learning species such as humans and songbirds.

This unexpected finding challenges a long-standing hypothesis about the origins of musicality and opens a brand-new window into how the building blocks of rhythm may have evolved.

“Synchronizing movements to music is a hallmark of human culture, but its evolutionary and neurobiological origins remain unknown,” the researchers write. “Here, we demonstrate that macaques can synchronize to a subjective beat in real music and even spontaneously do so over alternative strategies.”

A new challenge to a long-held theory

For years, the dominant explanation for why humans can keep a beat has been the “vocal-learning hypothesis.” The theory proposes that rhythmic synchronization evolved as a side effect of complex vocal learning. Under this view, species like humans, parrots, and songbirds can lock onto a beat because they possess advanced vocal-mimicry abilities, while most mammals—including our closest primate relatives—cannot.

However, this new study’s findings disrupt that clean evolutionary story.

Two adult macaques, previously trained to tap in time with metronomes, were introduced to something far more complex: real music. Unlike metronomes, songs lack clean, repeating onsets and pose a much greater cognitive challenge. Yet the macaques learned to extract and follow the beat—sometimes even preferring to tap in sync with the music despite easier options.

The findings suggest that rhythm perception and synchronization may exist on a continuum across species—one that doesn’t require advanced vocal mimicry as a prerequisite.

How do you teach a monkey to “feel” the beat?

In the study, researchers placed monkeys in front of a screen equipped with an infrared tap sensor and an audio playback system. Once they initiated a trial by touching a holding bar, a song would start, prompting them to start tapping.

Three musical excerpts with well-established human tapping consensus were used, each presented at a distinct tempo. To earn a reward, the monkeys needed only to maintain consistent intervals between taps—not to tap at any particular phase relative to the music.

This distinction is crucial: the monkeys were never trained to tap on the beat. Yet, that’s exactly what they did.

Even more impressively, when the researchers shifted the onset of the song’s audio—misaligning the cue that normally triggered tapping—the monkeys’ taps shifted accordingly.

In humans, this kind of “phase shift” response indicates genuine beat tracking rather than a rote reaction to visual signals. In the monkeys, the same behavior suggested they were following something in the music itself.

“The monkeys were never trained or rewarded to produce a particular phase,” researchers wrote. “Despite this, both monkeys produced a consistent tapping phase for all three musical exercises.”

To test whether monkeys were really hearing and responding to rhythm—rather than simply learning a behavior—the researchers introduced scrambled music.

They chopped the original songs into tiny 30-millisecond fragments and rearranged them, destroying the temporal structure while preserving the same acoustic frequencies. The result was a burst of noise with no beat.

When listening to scrambled music, the monkeys still tapped consistently to receive rewards—but their taps no longer aligned with the audio, suggesting that synchronization emerged only when the stimulus contained meaningful rhythmic structure.

“With the exception of one scrambled song for each animal, the tapping phase distributions now did not differ between the original 0 and π versions of these scrambled stimuli… indicating that although monkeys were perfectly capable of ignoring the auditory stimulus,” the researchers explained. “They chose to synchronize to some feature in the stimulus when the temporal structure was informative.”

This was one of the clearest signs that macaques weren’t just performing a trained behavior—they were actually listening.

Keep reading

Cleaning the Augean Stable of University-Based Scientific Research

Science’s reputation has taken a pretty strong hit in recent years – and it’s not undeserved. 

All throughout Covid, a class of people who should have known better revealed themselves as Quislings to their field as they publicly embraced politically and socially fashionable positions on supposed mitigation measures incongruent with long–held scientific consensuses despite often finding such measures risible at the pandemic’s start. Then, not having embarrassed themselves enough with Vonnegutesque absurdity, many went on to position once rudimentary components of mammalian reproductive biology as questions more complex than the development of multicellular life or the rise of human consciousness and best outsourced to the wisdom of gender theorists, confused teenagers, and the aptly named clownfish.

Consequently, many normal people stopped trusting “The Science” and became more skeptical of science as a whole. They started questioning what they had been told about psychotropic drugs. Worrying about the safety of vaccines went mainstream. Concerns about our diet partly gave rise to a movement and a Presidential commission.

Furthermore, many aspects of the scientific enterprise came under increased scrutiny, the most prominent perhaps being the US government’s role in funding scientific research, large portions of which seemed ideologically motivated.

A 2024 report from Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) highlighted $2.05 billion from the National Science Foundation that appeared to go to STEM-based DEI projects. Later, NSF grants for such projects, along with those examining the effects of alleged misinformation, were targeted by efforts aimed at reducing government waste, as were payments for indirect costs to the institutions of those receiving grants from the National Institutes of Health.

The function, utility, and integrity of the peer-review process and peer-reviewed journals likewise came under scrutiny. At the start of the year, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician best known now as one of the primary co-signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, wrote of how publication in a peer-reviewed journal became a stamp of approval that even shoddy research can enjoy if dragged across the right finish line, how publication in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal became a surrogate for article quality, and how the desire to get published in the right journal can motivate all sorts of questionable behaviors on the part of researchers. In October, Anna Krylov, a University of Southern California chemistry professor and prominent critic of DEI’s infiltration of STEM, lambasted the prestigious Nature Publishing Group for using its publications to further DEI-related goals through its publication policies and the threat of censorship. 

Similarly, the competence and basic integrity of researchers, perhaps especially those in academia, came into question with some critics, such as the authors of a recent report from the National Association of Scholars, blaming the replication crisis plaguing modern science on ineptitude, irresponsibility, and statistical tomfoolery.

Subsequently, it seems that some have come to question whether we should have academic science at all.

Keep reading

How Epstein Channeled Race Science and ‘Climate Culling’ Into Silicon Valley’s AI Elite

ewly released Jeffrey Epstein files reveal that an apocalyptic worldview – blending racial hierarchy, genetic “optimisation” and even climate-driven population culling – was circulating inside the elite, founder-linked networks shaping Silicon Valley’s rise.

These ideas appear most starkly in the convicted sex offender’s private exchanges with the AI theorist Joscha Bach, and sit alongside the longtermist and transhumanist philosophies championed by other influential figures in the same circles.

Joscha Bach, whose work on cognitive architectures and machine consciousness has shaped advanced AI research and influenced figures such as Elon Musk, appears in the documents engaging Epstein in sweeping discussions about race, hierarchy, genetic engineering and the supposed ‘utility’ of mass death, including under conditions of climate stress.

Meanwhile, another philosopher whose ideas underpin much of modern longtermism and whose work helped shape Silicon Valley’s early thinking on artificial general intelligence, Nick Bostrom, moved through the same intellectual and institutional ecosystem.

His published arguments on eugenics, selective population strategies and existential “optimisation” reveal a parallel strand of thinking within that milieu, financed and legitimised by many of the same networks.

Both men were also financed by Epstein.

Taken together, the Bach correspondence and the longtermist ideas circulating in this environment show that human hierarchy, population thinning and genetic destiny were not fringe provocations, but part of the ambient intellectual air inside the circles designing the next generation of AI.

Keep reading

Acoustic Levitation Breakthrough Uses Sound to “Float” Multiple Objects in Midair

Austrian scientists working to perfect acoustic levitation have broken through a critical barrier by using electrical charges, allowing them to lift several objects simultaneously while maintaining their separation.

The researchers behind the breakthrough suggest that their new approach will offer researchers in micro robotics, materials science, and other emerging fields that rely on creating dynamic structures from small building blocks an unprecedented capability of simultaneously manipulating several objects in mid-air without them clumping together.

Scott Waitukaitis, now an assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), began evaluating acoustic levitation in 2013 when the technology was still in its nascent phases.

“While acoustic levitation was being used in acoustic holograms and volumetric displays, it was essentially geared toward applications,” the professor explained in a statement detailing the ISTA team’s work. “I had the impression that the technique could be used for much more fundamental purposes.”

A central limitation to expanding acoustic levitation beyond these applications is a phenomenon the team called “acoustic collapse.” Although individual particles can be levitated and manipulated in mid-air with sound, the ISTA team said that when researchers tried to levitate multiple particles simultaneously, they tend to “snap together like magnets in mid-air.”

“This ‘acoustic collapse’ occurs because the sound scattering off the particles creates attractive forces between them,” they explain.

When hunting for solutions, Sue Shi, a PhD student in the Waitukaitis group and the first author of the study, said they initially tried to separate levitated particles individually so they would form into repetitive patterns.

“Originally, we were trying to find a way to separate levitated particles so that they would form crystals,” Shi explained.

Keep reading