Tag: science

Cognitive Neuroscientist Claims ‘Gut Feeling’ Could Be a Memory From the Future

Precognition can have a scientific basis, according to some researchers. The assertion is shocking, as the practice is typically not associated with logic. The practice is essentially “gut feelings” that a human has about an incident that could happen in the future, according to Popular Mechanics. Across decades, many people have come forward with their claims of being able to predict the future. Many have believed, but several have responded with scepticism. Cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge herself claims to have this capability. Now, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has entered this debate by declassifying its extensive research on the topic, and the results support the believers. 

Examples of Precognition

Fatih Ozcan claimed in 2012 that he and his boss won a lottery due to his precognition dream, according to The Guardian. Other remarkable stories include Daz Smith using his psychic skills to predict cryptocurrency trends, and Michael D Austin hiring several “remote viewers” for his company, Soul Rider, to offer financial advice. Mossbridge has been recording her psychic dreams since the age of seven. These skills also have roots in ancient times, with several cultures, like the Tibetans, using precognition from shamans for various purposes.

CIA’s Take

CIA’s documents detailed several psychics who were using “remote viewing” to search for certain targets to help authorities, in both the past and present. These documents came to light in 1995 and were related to a project called “Stargate,” which spent around $20 million on this methodology for around two decades, since the 1970s. One of the major successes of this method was noted in 1976, when a psychic called Rosemary Smith found the location of a lost Soviet plane. The files concluded with a glowing review of the process and stated, “remote viewers can be used as collectors in conjunction with other intelligence sources.”

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The “Wow!” Signal Was Likely From An Extraterrestrial Source, And More Powerful Than We Thought

Anew study has re-examined the famous “Wow!” signal, finding that it likely has an extraterrestrial origin after all, and may have been even more intense than previously believed.

On August 15, 1977, at the Big Ear radio telescope observatory at Ohio State University, a narrowband radio signal was received. A few days later, astronomer Jerry Ehman reviewed the data and noticed the signal sequence, which lasted for a full 72 seconds. In the margin next to the printout, he simply wrote “Wow!”, and thus the puzzling signal had a name that would stick for the next 43 years at least.

The signal has, so far, defied explanation, and that’s not for a lack of trying. Researchers argued the case for it being a comet passing through the area Big Ear was listening to, only for that to be completely refuted about two days later by the team that detected the Wow! signal in the first place, as a comet would have produced a diffuse signal given the large area they cover, rather than the abruptly cut-off signal that was received.

The signal has been a source of speculation in the “aliens are out there” community, and not without reason. No other signal like it has been detected before or since. It was in a range of frequencies close to the hydrogen line, which is relatively free from background noise, making it a good range to pick were we to try and communicate with other civilizations ourselves. On top of that, the team themselves believed it to be a good candidate for extraterrestrial life.

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Yale’s Censored Vaccine Injury Research and the Urgent Need for Scientific Reform

One premier research group has bravely studied the vaccine-injured and provided many critical details about their multi-year illnesses.

•Unfortunately, despite their excellent research, medical journals have refused to publish their results, including the most recent study which showed clear differences exist between long COVID and COVID-19 vaccine injuries.

•Science is ultimately predicated upon the methods we use discern what is actually true (epistemology). As this subject has been neglected, our epistemological standards frequently result in existing dogmas and vested interests being reaffirmed while critically important data never reaches the public awareness (e.g., due to widespread medical journal censorship).

•During COVID-19, the severe abuses of the scientific community (which ultimately resulted from it having no accountability for failing to uphold its social responsibilities) broke the public trust in science, and allowed something previously inconceivable—MAHA to gain control of our corrupt scientific apparatus and have a mandate to reform it.

•NIH director Jay Bhattacharya has announced his commitment to fixing the scientific apparatus and has engaged in a variety of NIH initiatives and public discussions which are vital to allowing science to serve the people rather than vested-interests.

Yale’s medical school is widely considered to have one of the top autoimmunity research and treatment programs in America. As long COVID is considered to be immunological in nature, their researchers extensively studied it, and remarkably some of them then pivoted to also studying vaccine injuries (in part because the COVID vaccines rather than curing long COVID patients, sometimes made them much worse). A few days ago, they finished a new research paper on the subject, but like their previous ones, it was immediately summarily rejected by the “reputable” journals it was submitted to (including the one I feel was the most obligated to publish these findings). In this article, I aim to cover the importance of their most recent results and, more important, examine what their habitual censorship reveals about science in general.

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Scientists Find First Evidence of Rare Compounds in Cannabis Leaves

Scientists in South Africa say they have found the first evidence of a rare class of phenolics, called ‘flavoalkaloids’, in leaves from the cannabis plant.

Phenolic compounds, especially flavonoids, are well-known and sought after in the pharmaceutical industry because of their antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-carcinogenic properties.

Researchers from Stellenbosch University have identified 79 phenolic compounds in three strains of cannabis grown commercially in South Africa, of which 25 were reported in the plant for the first time.

Sixteen of these compounds were tentatively identified as ‘flavoalkaloids’, and were mainly found in the leaves of only one of the strains. The findings are published in the Journal of Chromatography A,

First author, Dr Magriet Muller, an analytical chemist in the LC-MS laboratory of the Central Analytical Facility (CAF) at Stellenbosch University, says the analysis of plant phenolics is challenging due to their low concentration and extreme structural diversity.

“Most plants contain highly complex mixtures of phenolic compounds, and while flavonoids occur widely in the plant kingdom, the flavoalkaloids are very rare in nature,” she explains.

“We know that Cannabis is extremely complex – it contains more than 750 metabolites – but we did not expect such high variation in phenolic profiles between only three strains, nor to detect so many compounds for the first time in the species. Especially the first evidence of flavoalkaloids in Cannabis was very exciting.”

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Leaked Emails Show EPA Sought To Discredit Scientist After Ohio Train Derailment Disaster

Leaked emails from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) show that the agency sought to discredit an independent scientist who questioned official data on contamination following the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment and fire in February 2023.

Following the official EPA announcement that were no dangerous levels of toxins in the area and that it was safe for residents to return home, independent testing expert Scott Smith reported finding high levels of dioxins in the soil in East Palestine.

According to News Nation, when Smith’s findings were reported in spring of 2023, former EPA administrator Judith Enck said the agency should pay attention to Smith’s test results.

Instead of taking new samples and doing similar testing, leaked emails show that the EPA began collecting Smith’s personal information and monitoring his actions in an effort to discredit the environmental scientist.

Smith’s personal information and whereabouts were distributed to more than 50 EPA employees, his dog’s picture was circulated and drones were documented hovering near the scientist on multiple occasions.

Lesley Pacey, with the Government Accountability Project, told NewsNation that the EPA’s response was “troubling” since it was a matter of public health.

Pacey said, “What the EPA seems to have done here in East Palestine is that they were more interested in controlling the narrative and controlling what was going out to the community, from the community and back to the community,” adding, “They were definitely controlling the narrative of nothing to see here, no long-term health impacts.”

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California invested millions in STEM for women. The results are disappointing

Ten years ago, it seemed everyone was talking about women in science.

As the economy improved in the years after the Great Recession, women were slower to return to the workforce, causing alarm, especially in vital fields like computing. State and federal leaders turned their attention to women in science, technology, engineering and math, known by the acronym STEM.

Over the next few years, they poured millions of dollars into increasing the number of women pursuing STEM degrees. But the rate of women who attain those degrees has hardly improved, according to an analysis of colleges’ data by the Public Policy Institute of California on behalf of CalMatters.

“The unfortunate news is that the numbers haven’t changed much at all,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the institute who conducted the analysis of California’s four-year colleges using data from the 2009-10 school year and comparing it to the most recent numbers, from 2022-23. The share of women who received a bachelor’s degree increased from roughly 19% to about 25% in engineering and from nearly 16% to about 23% in computer science. In math and statistics, the percentage of women who graduate with a degree has gone down in the last five years.

“It’s not nothing, but at this pace it would take a very long time to reach parity,” Johnson said.

Girls are also underrepresented in certain high school classes, such as AP computer science, and while women make up about 42% of California’s workforce, they comprise just a quarter of those working in STEM careers, according to a study by Mount Saint Mary’s University. Fewer women were working in math careers in 2023 than in the five or 10 years before that, the study found.

“It’s a cultural phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon,” said Mayya Tokman, a professor of applied mathematics at UC Merced. She said underrepresentation is a result of perceptions about women, the quality of their education, and a lack of role models in a given field.

Science and technology spurs innovation and economic growth while promoting national security, and these jobs are often lucrative and stable. Gender parity is critical, especially as U.S. science and technology industries struggle to find qualified workers, said Sue Rosser, provost emerita at San Francisco State and a longtime advocate for women in science. “We need more people in STEM. More people means immigrants, women, people of color as well as white men. There’s no point in excluding anyone.”

She said that recent cuts by the Trump administration to California’s research and education programs will stymie progress in science, technology and engineering — and hurt countless careers, including the women who aspire to join these fields.

Over the last eight months, the federal government has made extensive cuts to scientific research at California’s universities, affecting work on dementia, vaccines, women’s issues and on health problems affecting the LGBTQ+ community. The administration also ended programs that support undergraduate students in science. In June a federal judge ruled that the administration needs to restore some of those grants, but a Supreme Court decision could reverse that ruling.

More recently, the administration halted hundreds of grants to UCLA — representing hundreds of millions in research funding — in response to a U.S. Justice Department investigation into allegations of antisemitism. Now the Trump administration is asking for a $1 billion settlement in return for the grants. A California district judge ruled on Tuesday that at least some of those grants need to be restored.

‘The cultural conversation has changed’

In the past five years, attention has shifted away from women in science. Nonprofit leaders and researchers across the state say that many lawmakers and philanthropists turned away from women in STEM during the COVID-19 pandemic and focused more on racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd.

Since 1995, women have been outpacing men in college, and women are now much more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree. The unemployment rate for men is higher, too, and men without college degrees are opting out of the labor force at unprecedented rates.

On July 30 Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order saying the state needs to do more to address the “growing crisis of connection and opportunity for men and boys.” It’s not a “zero-sum” game, he wrote: the state can, and should, support everyone.

But some state investments for women’s education are lagging.

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Scientists Say This “Strange Physics Mechanism” Could Enable Objects to Levitate on Sunlight

Designed for flight forty-five miles above the Earth’s surface, Harvard SEAS researchers have devised a nanofabricated lightweight structure capable of sunlight-driven propulsion through a process called photophoresis, capable of monitoring one of Earth’s most challenging locations to navigate.

Stretching between 30 and 60 miles above the Earth’s surface, the mesosphere has proven extremely difficult to study, as the altitude is too high for planes and balloons, yet too low for satellites. Achieving regular direct access to this long-out-of-reach portion of the atmosphere could be a major boon to improving weather forecasts and climate model accuracy.

Now, a new breakthrough technology could make it possible, by allowing lightweight structures to reach largely unexplored heights powered by sunlight alone.

Photophoresis

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the University of Chicago, and other institutions worked on the project, which was revealed in a new paper published in Nature.

“We are studying this strange physics mechanism called photophoresis and its ability to levitate very lightweight objects when you shine light on them,” said lead author Ben Schafer, a former Harvard graduate student at SEAS, now a professor at the University of Chicago.

Photophoresis is a physical process where gas molecules bounce off of an object’s warmer side more forcefully than its cooler side in extremely low-pressure environments. One such environment is the difficult-to-reach mesosphere.

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The Top 200 Cannabis-Related Studies Published in 2025

Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies on marijuana and its components have been published in the first seven months of 2025, marking a surge in new research. In this article, we break down the 200 most important of these studies.

These studies cover a wide spectrum of conditions, from autoimmune disorders and mental health issues to gastrointestinal diseases and metabolic dysfunction. In addition, researchers are increasingly turning their attention to cannabinoids beyond THC and CBD, such as CBG, THCV, and CBC. Many studies also focus on novel delivery systems—like oral dissolvable films, skin patches, and advanced emulsions—while investigating how marijuana may affect pain regulation, sleep quality, immune response, and emotional health.

What follows is a detailed roundup of more than 200 marijuana-related studies released so far this year.

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Report: “1 In 7 Scientific Papers is Fake, Suggests Study That Author Calls ‘Wildly Nonsystematic’”

In 2009, a now highly-cited study found an average of around 2% of scientists admit to have falsified, fabricated, or modified data at least once in their career. 

Fifteen years on, a new analysis tried to quantify how much science is fake – but the real number may remain elusive, some observers said. 

The analysis, published before peer review on the Open Science Framework on September 24, found one in seven scientific papers may be at least partly fake. The author, James Heathers, a long-standing scientific sleuth, arrived at that figure by averaging data from 12 existing studies — collectively containing a sample of around 75,000 studies — that estimate the volume of problematic scientific output. 

“I have been reading for years and still continue to read this 2% figure which is ubiquitous,” Heathers, an affiliated researcher in psychology at Linnaeus University in Vaxjo, Sweden, said. “The only minor problem with it is that it’s 20 years out of date,” he added, noting that the last dataset that went into the 2009 study was from 2005. 

So Heathers tried to come up with a more up-to-date estimate of scholarly literature containing signs of irregularities. “A lot has changed in 20 years,” he said. “It’s been a persistent irritant to me for a period of years now to see this figure cited over and over and over again.”

Past studies predominantly focussed on asking researchers directly if they had engaged in dishonest research practices, Heathers said, “which I think is a very bad approach to being able to do this.” But he noted that it was probably the only method available to use when the research was conducted. 

“I think it’s pretty naive to ask people who are faking research whether or not they’ll honestly answer the question that they were dishonest previously,” Heathers said. 

Heathers’ study pulls data from 12 different analyses from  the social sciences, medicine, biology, and other fields of research. All those studies have one thing in common: The authors of each used various online tools to estimate the amount of fakery taking place in a set of papers. 

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Fraud Hunters: Sniffing Out Bogus Science

Molecular biologist Mike Rossner, who has committed his life to following the science, now finds himself playing an unexpected if urgent role – exposing the fraud of his fellow scientists. 

Rossner is part of a network of experts that sniff out researchers who intentionally or recklessly fabricate, falsify, or plagiarize evidence. Rossner, a consultant specializing in identifying manipulated and duplicated images in journal papers – a telltale sign of deceit – has been dismayed by his findings at U.S. research centers. Scientists often have deleted the data underlying the images, making misconduct harder to prove and casting doubt on the validity of the research. 

“Science is about finding the truth, and an inaccurate representation of what was actually observed means that you are not representing the truth,” said Rossner, a former managing editor of The Journal of Cell Biology. “This is harmful to the progress of science and to our society that depends on it.”

In recent years, research misconduct has tainted the country’s most venerable universities, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins. To date, more than 20 Nobel Prize winners have had papers retracted by the journals that published them, a move often associated with misconduct, according to Retraction Watch. The watchdog group says that retractions worldwide increased fivefold in the last decade.

That a profession with noble intentions finds itself beset by a surprisingly high incidence of not just honest errors but fraud – estimated at about 1% to 2% of all research papers – is a complicated story. Experts say it reflects a breakdown in ethics by scientists under intense pressure to frequently publish to keep their jobs. This problem was highlighted by a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the growth of clandestine “paper mills,” which exploit the “publish or perish” culture of research. The operators of mills produce low-quality and fake papers – giving authorship to scientists at a price – that are published in “predatory journals” without peer review, fueling the growth of retractions and fraud.

The problem runs deeper. Lax oversight at some universities and research centers, which are required by federal agencies to police themselves and yet depend on the grants that published research brings in, allows wrongdoing to go unchecked. 

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