Tag: science

Scientists Create the First Synthetic Cells That Grow, Reproduce, and Undergo Natural Selection

Scientists at the University of Minnesota have engineered the building blocks of artificial life from nonliving materials in a disturbing, first-of-its-kind experiment. They call them SpudCells.

For the first time, scientists have created artificial cells that can grow, reproduce, and pass advantageous genetic traits to future generations, allowing some cells to outcompete others.

They assembled these synthetic cells from fatty membranes, engineered DNA, ribosomes, and protein-producing enzymes. The cells contain a 90,000-base-pair DNA genome that helps them manufacture proteins, copy their genetic material, and grow by absorbing smaller, nutrient-filled bubbles.

These artificial cells can divide into daughter cells and pass their genetic material to their offspring. Researchers demonstrated five generations of DNA replication, feeding, growth, and mechanically assisted division.

The cells compete for limited resources. Those carrying an advantageous genetic variant grow faster and produce more offspring, allowing that variant to become increasingly common. In just five generations, the advantageous variant increased from 10% to 38% of the population.

Although these artificial cells still require specialized laboratory conditions to reproduce, this experiment represents a major step toward creating autonomous synthetic organisms.

Just because scientists can push the boundaries of life itself does not mean they should. Playing God comes with major consequences, and we are entering dangerous territory.

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Plant Biology Textbooks Seeded With Insidious Misogyny, Claims Gender-Expansive Academic

As the political commentariat is awash in hyperbole, dismissing the oft-noted truism that the progressive left and their sponsors in academia/corporate America/government are “at war with nature/reality” as hyperbole is easy.

How hyperbolic is it, though, really?

Exhibit A:

Contexts is an ostensibly, self-styled professional journal that “makes cutting-edge sociology research accessible to journalists, policymakers, sociologists, and general readers,” released recently a progressive missive masquerading as a scientific study documenting and denouncing, in one go, the “rape culture” endemic to the textbook publishing industry, specifically as it pertains to plant descriptions in biology textbooks.

Cutting-edge!

Via Contexts:

“Scientific stories about plant reproduction often draw on gender stereotypes and myth, making such myths appear natural. Based on an analysis of introductory biology textbooks, the authors demonstrate how the authors of these books cast male plants and plant parts as active heroes while portraying their female counterparts as passive, reluctant, or sometimes even deceptive…

Although we often describe plant reproduction in human terms, its biological reality in fact differs dramatically from our own…

However, popular and even scientific accounts of plant reproduction rarely depict the process in this manner. Instead, biology textbook authors describe plant reproduction through a set of habitually repeated stories that reliably draw on conventional gender stereotypes, reflecting those found in mainstream accounts of human reproduction. In doing so, they cast male plants and plant parts as active heroes—delivering, competing, accomplishing—and portray their female counterparts as passive, reluctant, or sometimes even deceptive.

When textbook authors rely on everyday narratives about women and men to explain plant sex, they make myths about gender difference appear inevitable and natural…

These patterns reflect broader systems of power and inequality that we often take for granted as normal or commonsensical. When scientists repeatedly link activity, independence, and success with masculinity, and passivity, dependence, or even failure with femininity, they communicate these gender myths to students, scientific communities, and the public.”

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Scientists Trapped an Antimatter Particle for Months to Study Its Secrets

Antimatter is not known for being easy to get ahold of. That’s part of why these particles remain so cryptic. But recently, a team of physicists at Northwestern University managed to trap a single antimatter particle for months. Cooling it to temperatures near absolute zero, they could control its quantum states with great precision without even touching it. The experiment, published in Physical Review Letters, represents a breakthrough in our understanding of one of the great mysteries of physics.

In theory, antimatter should be everywhere. Mathematics predicts that every particle of matter has an equivalent antiparticle, a fact that scientists have verified experimentally. The universe should therefore contain similar amounts of both, but almost everything we observe is made up of ordinary matter, and we still don’t know why.

It is possible to produce antimatter particles in laboratories, but studying them is still incredibly difficult. When an antiparticle comes into contact with ordinary matter, the two annihilate each other and release energy. To prevent research facilities from exploding, scientists use vacuum chambers and electromagnetic fields that suspend the antiparticles in isolation. But this only partially solves the problem. Studying these particles, especially experimenting with their behavior on a quantum scale, remains challenging.

For this experiment, researchers at Northwestern trapped a positron, the antimatter counterpart of electrons. The team, led by Gerald Gabrielse, developed a device known as a single-positron quantum cyclotron, which used electric and magnetic fields to hold the positron in a vacuum at a temperature close to absolute zero. This means the antimatter particle was at its lowest energy state, allowing the researchers to induce controlled changes in its quantum behavior. Unlike other methods in particle physics, this approach didn’t destroy the particle. The researchers were therefore able to keep the single antiparticle trapped for months, allowing them to repeat measurements.

So what can taming antimatter particles actually teach us? Scientists know that matter and antimatter have very similar properties. For example, an electron and a positron have exactly the same mass, although their electric charges are opposite. However, questions still remain about exactly how similar these two forms of matter are and whether there are small differences that have gone unnoticed in experiments conducted to date.

To this end, researchers want to compare the magnetic properties of both particles. Physicists have already made very precise measurements with electrons, but achieving the same level of precision with positrons has proven more difficult. According to the American Physical Society, the new device could enable measurements of antimatter particles about 30 times more precise than scientists were capable of before.

So far, the experiment has not revealed any unexpected differences between the two particles. What the researchers have achieved is an improvement in their ability to detect these differences in antimatter particles. If future measurements find that a positron responds to magnetic fields differently than an electron, scientists would have to revise some of the laws they use to explain the behavior of matter and antimatter.

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Why Are Scientists Suddenly So Concerned About An Asteroid Hitting Earth?

Authorities assure us that we are perfectly safe and that no giant space rocks are heading our way. If that is true, why is a scenario that has been developed for the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference “based around a hypothetical impact threat” from a very large asteroid? And why are scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory studying how to destroy a giant asteroid that is heading toward Earth using nuclear weapons? If there is no threat anywhere on the horizon, wouldn’t you think that those scientists would have something better to do with their time? On top of everything else, NASA recently concluded a secretive operation known as “OSIRIS-REx” in which a spacecraft visited an asteroid, plucked a piece off of it, and returned it to Earth. While the general public is being told that we are safe for decades to come, a tremendous amount of time, money and energy is being poured into preparing for a potential asteroid threat.

Do they know something that the rest of us do not?

I am convinced that there is far more going on behind the scenes than we are being told.

They never say anything that will alarm the general public, but at the same time they are pumping vast resources into “sophisticated planetary defense efforts” that are intended to protect our planet “from potentially hazardous asteroids”…

Would we be prepared if a potentially life-threatening object from space were on a collision course with Earth? And how much damage could an incoming asteroid actually cause?

Such questions remain at the forefront of increasingly sophisticated planetary defense efforts aimed at protecting our planet from potentially hazardous asteroids. Yet even if astronomers are able to identify a space object that might pose a threat, a significant number of uncertainties remain: the object’s size, composition, structure, and potential impact locations all must be considered, as these factors can dramatically influence what happens once an asteroid enters Earth’s atmosphere.

If there are no near-Earth objects that are a threat, why spend so much money on this?

We certainly have a lot of other very pressing matters that do require funding right now.

NASA is either wasting our money, or something else is going on.

Interestingly, NASA is a participant in the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference. An exercise is underway that simulates how authorities would respond to a “Tunguska-sized object” that is headed toward Earth…

Additionally, NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) regularly participates in planetary defense exercises designed to test these assessment methods, with current scenarios under development for the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference that take a cue from one of history’s most concerning airburst events.

“The current exercise that is underway for the 2027 Planetary Defense Conference is based around a hypothetical impact threat from a roughly Tunguska-sized object,” Wheeler told The Debrief.

For those of you that are not familiar, in 1908 the Tunguska event flattened approximately 2,000 square kilometers in Siberia…

Tunguska event, enormous explosion that is estimated to have occurred at 7:14 AM plus or minus one minute on June 30, 1908, at an altitude of 5-10 km (15,000-30,000 feet), flattening some 2,000 square km (500,000 acres) and charring more than 100 square km of pine forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia (60°55′ N 101°57′ E), Russia. The energy of the explosion is estimated to have been equivalent to the explosive force of as much as 15 megatons of TNT – a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945.

Why hold an exercise of this nature if there is absolutely no threat of this sort of event occurring for decades to come?

And why did NASA just send a small spacecraft to grab a piece of an asteroid known as Bennu and bring it back to Earth?…

On Sept. 30, NASA formally concluded OSIRIS-REx, the historic first U.S. mission to pluck a pristine piece of an asteroid and deliver it safely back to Earth.

The van-sized OSIRIS-REx spacecraft – whose name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer – visited and sampled Bennu, an ancient space rock holding pristine remnants from the dawn of our solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. Among those cosmic relics are raw organic building blocks, the kind that may have seeded life on Earth.

“I have known this day was coming for a long time, but it is still difficult to see it arrive,” OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta, who’s based at the University of Arizona, said in a post on LinkedIn. “I feel enormous pride in what we accomplished together, and real sadness that this journey has come to an end.”

That was certainly an impressive scientific achievement.

But it also cost a lot of money to do that.

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The Epistemic Corruption of Biomedical Science

Health sciences today all too often function as a sophisticated propaganda system for pharmaceutical products, as the Covid‑19 vaccine rollout showed on an unprecedented scale. Since at least the 1980s, scientific institutions, journals, regulators, and mainstream news media have been gradually restructured to align knowledge production, communication, and censorship with corporate interests. This is an argument not against biomedical science but for a science of integrity, honesty, and humanity.

The Blind Spot of Science Studies

Science was once idealized as a norm-governed route to truth, corrected by peer review and open debate – though those norms were always aspirational., The “critical turn” in science studies, from Thomas Kuhn’s account of how proponents of dominant paradigms decide what counts as legitimate evidence and dismiss anomalies to Thomas Gieryn’s examination of how scientists marginalize unwelcome challengers, recast science as a social practice shaped by institutions, interests, and power.,

Yet the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that emerged from this turn has largely ignored the most consequential force on science today: commercial interests. The field has said remarkably little about how actors with concentrated material stakes gain leverage over chokepoints in the research pipeline – funding, design, data, publication, dissemination, retraction – and steer what gets studied, which “knowledge” reaches the public, and what becomes scientific fact and consensus. The field has preferred deconstructing scientific truth to studying its hijacking and destruction by corporate and financial interests.

Epistemic Corruption, Propaganda and Institutional Capture

One prominent exception is STS scholar Sergio Sismondo, who has written widely about how pharmaceutical companies built a vast, industry-controlled pipeline of knowledge production that underpins medical practice. He calls the result “epistemic corruption:” a knowledge system that “loses integrity, ceasing to provide the kinds of trusted knowledge expected of it,” because it has been co‑opted by interests at odds with its central goals.

Unlike bribery or vote-rigging, epistemic corruption arises from dense financial, organizational, and reputational dependencies linking universities, journals, regulators, clinicians, and industry – all of it legal. Science thus becomes less an impartial arbiter of truth than part of a propaganda apparatus through which dominant actors frame problems, filter evidence, and orchestrate consent.

One lynchpin is “ghost management,” in which companies shape every step of the research-to-publication pipeline, with nominally independent academics serving as front‑stage “authors.” This misrepresentation of source is a tacit admission by the real source of its own limited credibility.

Epistemic corruption also shapes which scientific “advances” the news media publicize and which they ignore. Most remarkable is not the corporate influence itself but how thoroughly generations of highly intelligent scientists and physicians have accepted and normalized it. The rare scientists who protest risk career suicide, are branded heretics, and publicly character-assassinated, so the problem seldom penetrates mainstream news coverage.

Regulators have come to serve industry rather than the public, bound to manufacturers through user fees, public–private partnerships, and revolving‑door employment., The same revolving door spins between journalism, public relations, media regulators, politics, and lobbying, helping explain how a hegemonic coalition forms and holds power. When industry fees fund most of a regulator’s budget, fast approvals please paying customers while rigorous scrutiny invites backlash. Regulators let companies test drugs against subtherapeutic comparators, switch primary outcomes after the fact, and report results selectively – practices that would be flagged as manipulative in non-commercial research.

Peer-reviewers, the supposed guardians of scientific quality, are themselves deeply entangled with industry. A recent JAMA study found almost sixty percent of peer-reviewers for leading medical journals received payments from drug and device manufacturers, totaling US$1.06 billion between 2020 and 2022. Journals scrutinize authors’ conflicts of interest but rarely reviewers’, opening an opaque channel for industry influence over what gets published and how rigorously it is vetted.

Industry ties shape findings too: in research on mercury and autism, 86 percent of industry-affiliated studies found no association, compared with 21 percent of unaffiliated studies. Medical journals depend on advertising revenue and the prestige of industry-sponsored research; the Lancet’s editor Richard Horton conceded they had “devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” When conflicts of interest pervade gatekeeping institutions, the appearance of neutral science becomes the very medium through which propaganda operates.

The results are well documented: routinely concealed harms; repeated convictions meeting official definitions of organized crime; and whole narratives – from the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression to the benefits of Tamiflu – that proved false or radically overstated.,,, Selective publication does much of the work: of 36 antidepressant trials the FDA judged negative, only 8 percent were published as negative and 31 percent were spun as positive, so 94 percent of published trials appeared positive, against 51 percent in the FDA’s full data. More broadly, diseases are redefined to expand markets, mild symptoms pathologized, and drugs of minimal efficacy marketed as breakthroughs.

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Berkeley Scientist Caught on Video Poisoning Female Co-Worker

A chemical engineer in California was caught on video poisoning his female co-worker.

David Xu, 41, a scientist at Berkeley Engineering and Research, had secretly been poisoning his colleague, Rong Yuan, with cadmium for nearly two years.

Cadmium is a toxic heavy metal. Yuan had suffered vomiting and hair loss for two years before discovering that her co-worker was poisoning her.

Rong Yuan saw countless doctors as her condition worsened.

One day, Yuan’s mother noticed an unusual odor coming from her daughter’s water bottle.

This prompted Yuan to set up a hidden camera at her desk, and that is when she caught Xu pouring the cadmium into her water bottle.

In 2019, Xu was charged with premeditated murder, but in a plea agreement, he pleaded guilty to poisoning, and he was sentenced to two years’ probation.

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COVID Pandemic’s Corruption of Science Threatens Patient Care, Immunologist Warns

The future of patient care is at stake when scientists are discouraged from challenging prevailing views, immunologist Robert Clancy, Ph.D., told medical commentator John Campbell, Ph.D.

“Who would want to go into medicine today?” Clancy asked during an interview last week. “It’s been so controlled, and the bureaucracy is suffocating.”

Clancy, an Australian medical researcher, author of more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, and University of Newcastle emeritus professor, said the pressure extends beyond COVID-19 studies. Medical journals sometimes reject work unrelated to COVID-19 if the researchers have a history of challenging the mainstream pandemic narrative.

“It’s not just that they’re blacklisting articles related to COVID. They’re blacklisting people who [were] foolish enough to write on these topics,” he said.

Clancy’s new book, “COVID and the Corruption of Medical Science: A Quadrant Chronicle,” examines what he sees as the pandemic response’s lasting damage to scientific independence.

The book collects 14 essays he previously published in Quadrant, an Australian literary, cultural and political journal. Clancy said he turned to the publication during COVID-19 because “it tells things as it is.” Other journals and media outlets “would not publish the data and the evidence and the truth,” he said.

Campbell agreed, saying some mainstream medical journals “have been infiltrated by … this dominant narrative that only one way of thinking is allowed. It’s quite an alarming situation,” he said.

Clancy added, “It’s happening … in a not-so-subtle way right across the medical profession.”

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Why So Many Social Science Claims Are False

One of the most urgent questions facing society today is the potential impact of AI on education and labor markets. So it’s no surprise that two scientists attempted to provide an answer, producing a meta-analysis suggesting that incorporating ChatGPT in schooling dramatically improved student outcomes. Social media and online sources promoted the 2025 study as a beacon of bright light.

The problem is that the researchers’ conclusions were later found to be unreliable, and the study was retracted in April – another blow to the public’s faith in science.

Scientists are increasingly chasing answers to big questions in fields from health care to climate change to AI. The academic research industry incentivizes them to produce the biggest possible findings that make for splashy headlines and career promotions. But such discoveries are rare in science, and too often, the result is widespread exaggeration, dodgy methods, and miscommunication.

“The incentive structure of modern science is such that a ‘simplify, then exaggerate’ strategy has become dominant, even if only tacitly,” according to a recent academic review. “To get published in leading journals, to be awarded grants and to be hired as a postdoc or faculty member, a system-wide bias for novelty, exaggeration and storytelling has emerged.”

As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, an alarming amount of poor-quality academic and scientific research has been discovered in recent years. Hindawi, formerly a part of major science publisher Wiley, had to retract thousands of science articles, many of them alleged to have been produced by paper mills that generate reams of reports of studies that never existed.

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Rep. Nancy Mace Moves to Ban Lab Puppy Mills After White Coat Waste Tracks 1,500 Dogs Sent into Taxpayer-Funded Experiments

The animal testing watchdog organization White Coat Waste has published a new report showing that Oak Hill Genetics, an Ewing, Illinois, breeder and the nation’s second-largest lab-dog supplier, shipped 1,518 hound-mix dogs to 44 laboratories between January 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026.

Some of the animals were only about three months old.

Recipients included universities and contract labs that hold National Institutes of Health money.

Earlier this month, White Coat Waste’s spending review found more than $225 million in NIH awards for dog and cat experiments since mid-February 2025, including more than $98 million in new dog-testing money at pharmaceutical companies and $11.7 million in new cat work.

The lab list WCW obtained is specific.

The University of Utah took dogs for heart work that WCW says includes tied-off arteries, pacemakers, and electric shock before the animals are killed; Utah has drawn nearly $12 million for those studies and received 50 Oak Hill dogs in the 18-month window. Washington University in St. Louis, with more than $1.2 million for laryngeal-nerve work, took 32. Vanderbilt has taken more than $109 million over decades for obesity, diabetes, and liver studies. The University of Washington implants tumor cells in prostates. The University of Chicago induces severe strokes. The University of Cincinnati kills dogs to harvest larynxes.

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Microsoft Claims a Quantum Breakthrough That Physicists Still Debate As DARPA Tests It

Microsoft says it has made one of quantum computing’s hardest problems dramatically easier.

Some physicists aren’t convinced.

Now DARPA gets to put its hands on the hardware.

Microsoft announced Tuesday that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will receive direct, on-site access to its latest quantum system at a new Maryland research center. The arrangement gives government evaluators something far more useful than another presentation about Microsoft’s roadmap. They can examine and test the technology itself.

The machine centers on Microsoft’s Majorana 2 technology. Microsoft says its newest topological qubits are more than 1,000 times more reliable than the previous generation. Their average lifetime is about 20 seconds, with some lasting more than a minute. The company says those advances have allowed it to cut its timetable in half and target a scalable quantum computer by 2029.

From Microsoft:

To create Majorana 2, the Microsoft Quantum team improved Majorana 1’s material stack to create a more stable topological phase. Majorana 2 replaces Majorana 1’s superconductor, aluminum, with lead, and also updates the semiconductor active region to a combination of indium arsenide and indium arsenide antimonide. This change in materials results in significant increases in performance, which are reflected in the improved robustness of the topological phase. The topological gap, which protects the topological qubits from environmental noise and errors, is more than double that of the previous quantum processor.

The gate-defined devices in our quantum processors are composed of tetrons, a type of topological qubit consisting of two superconducting nanowires with Majorana Zero Modes (MZMs) at their ends. MZMs are the building blocks of topological qubits, storing quantum information through parity, the evenness or oddness of the number of electrons in a topoconductor wire.

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