Tag: science

The 3 Myths Supporting NIH Funding

The Trump administration’s proposal to cut National Institutes of Health (NIH) indirect funds has been widely attacked, with heated claims it will annihilate biomedical scientific research in the United States. Leading with a picture of a 12-year-old child with muscular dystrophy, Shetal Shah, a neonatology professor, argued in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the cuts would “hobble” vital medical research, and a Time magazine interviewee went as far as to call it the “apocalypse” of U.S. science writ large. While the funding cut has been blocked by federal judges for now, the future fiscal status of the NIH, and the university researchers that depend on it, remains uncertain.

Pundits discussing the cuts nearly universally agree that federally funded science is a crucial component of lifesaving medical therapies, innovative technology, and the ongoing status of the U.S. as a scientific superpower. These assertions are repeated ad nauseam despite history telling a different story. Promulgating three core myths, advocates for maintaining the status quo of public funding have been active in the media, but none of their key assertions withstand considering the historical record.

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After Trump’s Election, Several NSF-Funded Censorship Tools Go Missing

The National Science Foundation (NSF) claims to be the place “where discoveries begin” — but it funded programs where free speech ends. When The Federalist asked if it still funds anti-“misinformation” tools, a representative simply pointed to its public grants database, which lists censorship projects funded during the Biden administration.

The public-interest law firm Alliance Defending Freedom sent NSF records requests in February to uncover any coordination between the federal agency and internet communications monopolies such as Google and Facebook.

NSF funds one-quarter of all federally funded academic fundamental research projects at U.S. higher education institutions, and funds technology development at approximately 400 “small businesses” each year. It has an annual budget of $8.5 billion. It also funds programs that exclude recipients based on race, according to an NSF factsheet.

The NSF’s “Convergence Accelerator,” which funds special research projects, launched a “cohort track” in 2021 for “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.” Recipients developed software to control online speech labeled “misinformation” about politically sensitive topics including Covid-19 treatments and election integrity.

Twelve “teams” were selected for “phase 1” of the project, according to the House Judiciary Committee, and six were selected for “phase 2” funding at $5 million each. In total, the NSF awarded $39 million total to projects in this “track” of the program.

The NSF-funded projects include the Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust (ARTT), Co-Designing for Trust, Co:Cast, Co-Insights, CommuniTies, CourseCorrect, Expert Voices Together, Search Lit, TrustFinder, and WiseDex. Projects had ties to infamous pro-censorship organizations including Google, Meta, Snopes, Wikimedia, the World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organization.

The Federalist asked NSF how much total funding each project received from the agency, and if there have been any “cohorts dedicated to developing anti-misinformation projects since ‘track F.’” An NSF spokesman replied that, “in recent years,” Congress asked NSF to “identify and address issues of safety, ethics and adversarial influence online” through funding bills and the IOGAN Act. So the Convergence Accelerator “initiated Track F.”

“This program has not made an award since 2021 and will not be making any awards in the future,” the representative said. “NSF invests in research, innovation, and workforce development that accelerates the development, testing, and understanding of technology. NSF plays no role in content policies nor content regulations.”

The Federalist again asked “how much total NSF funding each project received” and “whether NSF helped develop other anti-misinformation projects aside from Track F.” The spokesman simply pointed to the agency’s “award search page,” and said, “[o]ther than that, I don’t have anything else to add.” A search for active NSF awards regarding “misinformation” yields more than 100 results.

ADF also filed public records requests for documents regarding the NSF Convergence Accelerator, as The Federalist previously reported. Mathew Hoffman, legal counsel for ADF’s Center for Free Speech, said at the time the group was investigating “where our tax dollars are being spent to fund censorship” — and “if anyone’s rights have been violated by the censorship-industrial complex, that litigation will certainly be an option.”

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Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine

Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? Why do so few drugs that enter clinical trials receive regulatory approval? And why is the waiting list for organ transplantation so long? These challenges stem in large part from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically sourced human bodies. 

It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress.

This imbalance between supply and demand is the underlying cause of the organ shortage crisis, with more than 100,000 patients currently waiting for a solid organ transplant in the US alone. It also forces us to rely heavily on animals in medical research, a practice that can’t replicate major aspects of human physiology and makes it necessary to inflict harm on sentient creatures. In addition, the safety and efficacy of any experimental drug must still be confirmed in clinical trials on living human bodies. These costly trials risk harm to patients, can take a decade or longer to complete, and make it through to approval less than 15% of the time. 

There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman.

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‘Impossible’ Device Physicists Said Wouldn’t Work Just Generated Electricity from the Earth’s Rotation

Scientists from Princeton University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have invented a device that seemingly generates electricity from the Earth’s rotation.

Although generally accepted theories show that generating electricity from a uniform field like Earth’s magnetic field is impossible, the team believes they have found a “loophole” that allows their device to generate tiny but measurable amounts of electricity.

If independent reviews can confirm the team’s work, they say the next steps to building a practical energy-generating device would involve miniaturization and scaling efforts, as proposed in a new paper detailing their current efforts.

Device That Generates Electricity from the Earth’s Rotation Joins Alternative Energy Revolution

The research joins a list of promising new approaches to generating electricity, ranging from “extreme enzymes” or other living organisms to “smart” windows and triboelectric-driven “rain panels” that generate electricity from raindrops.

Other efforts include generating electricity from radio waves, sweat, advanced metamaterials, and ocean waves, including an effort to produce energy from waves at the grid scale. One particularly novel concept uses the classic “drinking bird” toy to generate power with each dip of its beak.

In an email to The Debrief, Princeton University Professor Christopher Chyba noted that his previous work with study co-author and co-inventor, JPL’s Dr. Kevin Hand, was designed to explore the possible electromagnetic heating of astrophysical objects. That theoretical work, Chyba explained, was not intended to have any practical application.

“Curiosity-driven basic research is often what later leads to practical applications,” the professor said. “A lot of basic research initially seems disconnected from our daily lives—but it’s a key component underlying American science and technology.”

However, Chyba explained that as those theoretical studies progressed, the work “led us to begin asking questions that we then realized could be investigated in the laboratory.”

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World’s first pig to human liver transplant is carried out in major breakthrough

A pig’s liver has been transplanted into a human recipient for the first time in a ‘milestone’ for organ transfers between animals and people.

Scientists in China used a liver taken from a seven-month old Bama miniature pig which had been genetically modified to reduce the risk of rejection.

Once removed, it was kept ‘alive’ using a medical solution and chilled to 0-4C.

During the nine-hour-long surgery the recipient – a 50-year-old clinically dead man whose family had authorised the procedure – had the donor liver stitched to his blood vessels in his abdomen alongside his own liver. 

Over the next 10 days, the donor liver successfully produced bile and maintained a stable blood flow.

The team hope that rather than a long-term solution, their procedure could one day be used as a temporary treatment for patients with liver failure while they wait for a human donor.

In the UK, there are more than 11,000 deaths due to liver disease each year. Around 700 people are currently on the waiting list for a transplant, and the average wait is three to four months.

The announcement follows a slew of recent breakthroughs, including transplanting a pig’s heart into a man and a woman currently living with a pig’s kidney.

Professor Lin Wang, one of the study’s authors from the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi’an, said: ‘The liver collected from the modified pig functioned very well in the human body.

‘It’s a great achievement. This surgery was really successful.

‘We examined the blood flow in the different vessels and arteries. The flow is very smooth. It functioned very well.’

The experiment was terminated after 10 days because of requests made by the patient’s family members.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, suggest modified livers can survive and function in human bodies, but further research on long-term outcomes is needed.

‘We have the opportunity in the future to solve the problem of a patient with severe liver failure,’ Professor Wang added.

‘It is our dream to make this achievement. The pig liver could survive together with the original liver of the human being and maybe it will give it additional support.’

He also expressed a desire to conduct further research on living, non-brain-dead human beings in the future, but stressed the complications and ‘many rules’ around this.

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The bulk of credible science finds vaccines ‘can and do’ cause autism

It’s amazing how many media figures remain so uninformed on the proven links between vaccines and autism. Without knowing the subject thoroughly, they keep falsely claiming the links have been “debunked.”

Quite the opposite.

I understand, because I was surprised, too, at what I learned when I was first assigned to cover the subject of vaccine safety at CBS News in 2001. At the time, I knew nothing about how vaccines work, scientific studies linking them to autism and many side other effects, or the medical and industry complex set up to defend them at any cost.

As an investigative reporter looking into this topic independently for more than two decades, I have helped expose a lot of what many are desperate to cover up. Some of my work on the topic has received journalism awards, and it has been cited favorably in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The news that’s been revealed in this time period, including compelling studies, testimony, court cases, and other evidence, is now easily accessible to any reporter who knows better than to simply google and get the industry and medical establishment approved narratives; or rely upon information from the vast network of groups, organizations, and fake “fact checkers,” ultimately set up by industry to spin us all.

With Donald Trump about to enter a second term in office, appointing and relying upon figures in public health who are familiar with the facts on these controversies (and willing to act upon them), we are already being exposed to incessant and increasingly desperate propaganda.

The propagandists have important connections and plenty of money to spend to wield influence, as they long have, with federal agencies, members of Congress, and in media. They support fake “fact check” groups like Health Feedback and Science Feedback, dominate social media narratives, provide “journalism resources” that give false information, control medical information distributed by our once-esteemed public health agencies, influence medical associations, and back nonprofits that are designed to sound independent but put out industry misinformation.

They have proven they will go to any lengths to protect their billion dollar profits and to try to stop any disruption of the corrupt medical establishment built to support them.

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Ivy League university webinar says science is too male, too hetero, and too fetus-centric

According to a recent article on thecollegefix.com, during a recent online event at Cornell University, feminist ‘scholars’ discussed their concerns about science being too male, too “hetero,” and too “feto-centric.”

Really.

The presentation, titled, “Is Fat Female? Evolution, Feminism, and Getting the Story Right,” featured scholar ‘Cat’ Bohannon and philosophy Professor Kate Manne. (Bohannon is the author of the best-selling book “Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution.”)

During the Cornell Keynotes webinar, Bohannon stated: “The male norm is a thing that we are trying to fix from the ground up right now in biological and biomedical research.”

You’re trying to fix the “male norm?” Can’t have that! Anything most males do can’t be right!

To that end, Professor Kate brought up research that has allegedly been done on elephants’ sexual activities. She claimed that when male and female elephants mate for the purpose of producing offspring, “it’s very fast,” yet when the males are alone together for long periods of time, some will “form these tightly, intimately-bonded relationships and have penetrative sex for up to an hour.” (I don’t even want to know what they are penetrating in the latter example, but it can’t be that good if they can do it for an hour non-stop.)

Bohannon went on to aver that “It’s hard to say whether or not your basic wild elephant is straight,” adding, “Who knows what sexuality is exactly for animal friends, but animals are very queer.”

Objection! Projection! If animals were “very queer” there would be no more animals. There would have been a universal extinction event.

But Bohannon wasn’t satisfied just grousing about traditional, straight human males, no, siree. She also flatly stated that society has been too “feto-centric,” or centered on the fetus.

The Nutty Professor confessed that she worries about the “feto-centric view where our babies matter more than our girls.”

Not done yet, Bohannon bemoaned her belief that society has a poor view of fat, particularly the fat clinging to women, and claimed that new understandings about the different types and functions of fat in the body suggest that fat is actually an organ, ergo removing it via liposuction –- or dieting while pregnant — can be harmful to women and their unborn babies. (Though the latter concern sounds oddly feto-centric to me.)

Bohannon was apparently asked how one could avoid “transphobia while centering female bodies,” to which she replied by saying research should include representative samples of the population in clinical trials while lamenting that “quite a lot” of clinical trials “continue to be white.” Moreover, she said researchers should be specifically studying “transgender females” (biological males).

To recap: males are bad. Straight males are worse. Babies are bad. Fat can be good.

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Ultrasonic Beams Create Private Sound Pockets

Ultrasonic beams fired through a 3D-printed metasurface can create localized pockets of sound that are inaudible to passers-by. The technique could be used to create private speech zones for secure communications or enable personalized audio spaces in public spaces and vehicles.

The ability to deliver sounds to a specific listener without the need for headphones, known as directional sound, has been a long standing area of research in audio engineering. But achieving this typically requires large and complicated sound sources and it is often possible to hear the audio signal along the path of the beam.

A new approach from researchers at The Pennsylvania State University gets round these limitations by combining a compact array of ultrasonic emitters with a specially patterned 2D structure, which is designed to manipulate the properties of waves. This structure, known as a metasurface, creates “self-bending” ultrasound beams that are inaudible to humans and can steer round obstacles. When two of these beams cross paths they interact in a way that generates sound in a human’s audible range but confined to a spot just a few centimeters across, which the researchers call an “audible enclave.”

“The key innovation is that sound is only generated where two beams intersect, making it possible to deliver audio to a precise spot while keeping the beams themselves silent,” says Jia-Xin Zhong, a postdoctoral research at Penn State and lead author of a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that describes the new approach.

Previous research has demonstrated audible self-bending beams that can curve around obstacles. But the long wavelengths of audible sound mean the sources typically have to be on the scale of meters and it is possible to hear the signal anywhere along the path of the beam.

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Bureaucrats Defy Trump’s Cuts: Nearly 40 Transgender Animal Experiments, $400M in Tax Dollars, Still Active

Despite early intervention efforts on the part of the Trump Administration [and its Department of Governmental Efficiency] to revoke, freeze, and eliminate a number of unorthodox government-sponsored experiments involving transgender hormone testing on animals, nearly 40 such federal grants – including one disbursed via the Department of Veteran’s Affairs – remain active according to the most recent data available.

Last week, among the sweeping cuts outlined as part of the administration’s efforts to increase government efficiency and tamp down government waste, included seven grants funding such animal experiments, but three programs similarly recognized and named by the White House press release remain active with almost $4 million taxpayer dollars still slated to flow into these experiments.

These programs include Duke University’s $455,000 grant allocation for the purposes of injecting mice with cross-sex hormones to study the impacts of gender-affirming estrogen therapy and how it might impact HIV vaccine response. Additionally, Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was awarded a currently active grant just shy of $300,000 to study how testosterone therapy might support female mice induced with breast cancer. Finally, Indiana University continues to benefit from over $3.1 million in taxpayer funding for the purposes of studying how transgender hormone therapy in animals may impact their risk of asthma.

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Transgender Brain Studies are Fatally Flawed

Earlier this week, City Journal published the tragic story of Yarden Silveira, a young detransitioner—someone who pursues hormonal and/or surgical “sex change” procedures but then seeks to reverse course—whose life ended abruptly after suffering severe complications from a gender-related genital surgery. What led Yarden to adopt a transgender identity in the first place? In 2014, after encountering the growing wave of pro-trans narratives in popular culture, Yarden told his family that he believed he had a “female brain.” Though initially uncertain, his mother was ultimately convinced by scientific papers that suggested that her son could have a female brain trapped in a male body, and that this mismatch caused him unimaginable distress.

“A trans woman (such as myself) was born with a male body, but she has always had her female brain. Literally born with a female brain,” Yarden wrote in 2016.

This belief was widespread back then—and it still is. On January 31, Wisconsin Public Radio featured an interview with a mother, Carri, concerned about President Trump’s new executive order banning federally funded medical and surgical “sex change” procedures for minors. Carri spoke about her daughter, who identified as transgender at 15 and was allowed to medically transition. She said, “Those hormones really helped match his brain with his body which, to me, that’s just the basic level of care we can provide individuals that identify as trans.”

The power of this narrative in persuading people to pursue, or to allow their children to pursue, irreversible medical procedures cannot be overstated. But the notion that males can have “female brains,” and vice versa, rests on a flawed interpretation of “brain sex” studies that in no way demonstrate or even suggest a definitive biological basis for “gender identity.” Little effort has been made to correct this misleading assertion.

The theory is advanced for relatively straightforward reasons. Civil rights lawyers, activists, and researchers contend that people who identify as transgender possess a “brain sex” misaligned with their physical body, thereby establishing a biological basis for “gender identity” akin to immutable traits like race. This framing carries significant legal weight, as U.S. civil rights law offers strong protections for characteristics considered “innate” or rooted in biology.

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