Tag: science

300 Beagles Per Week!? US Continues To Fund Dog Experiments in China

Topline: A Chinese lab is continuing to receive funds from the U.S. to conduct cruel studies on beagles, according to contracts obtained by the nonprofit White Coat Waste Project and shared with the New York Post.

Key facts: The $124,200 contract was awarded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences using money from the Pentagon, for the experiments on beagle puppies — as well as mice and rats — at the Beijing-based company’s lab from September 2023 until May 2025.

The Chinese company Pharmaron uses the funds to test pharmaceuticals for neurological disorders on 300 beagles per week, as well as mice and rats, White Coat Waste found. Some of the dogs are as young as eight months. Those that suffer organ dysfunction are euthanized, the contract states.

Pharmaron’s proposal to the NIH promises to comply with the Animal Welfare Act and notes that “Beagle dog is docile, cute and easy to domesticate.”

It describes how the hundreds of dogs, some as young as eight months, “will be reused” throughout the study “to save animals and decrease cost,” while saying those suffering organ dysfunction will be “euthanized.”

The DOD’s Office of Inspector General conducted an audit in June, citing Pharmaron, as well as the Chinese biotech firms WuXi AppTec and Genscript Inc., as so-called “companies of concern” and blacklisted from doing business with U.S. firms. A bill to this effect passed the U.S. House of Representatives but was not voted on in the Senate.

Background: The research contract is just one example of how the U.S. and China fund each other’s medical research, often resulting in payouts for government scientists and potential national security concerns at taxpayers’ expense.

In 2023, 139 foreign companies licensed medical technology invented by NIH scientists, compared to only 102 domestic companies. The businesses included Pokrov Biologics Plant, which researched the weaponization of smallpox for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and WuXi AppTec, a Chinese firm with alleged military ties and alleged access to American genetic information.

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Federal Memo From National Cancer Institute Lists Marijuana As ‘Controversial ‘Topic That Needs Special Approval Before Publication

“Marijuana” is one of nearly two dozen “controversial or high-profile topics” that staff and researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) are required to clear with higher-ups before writing about, according to a newly leaked memo from within the federal agency.

The government directive puts marijuana and opioids on a list along with vaccines, COVID-19, fluoride, measles, abortion, autism, diversity and gender ideology and other issues that are believed to be personal priorities of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump.

NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which itself is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Prior to publishing anything on the specified topics, NCI staff are required to send the materials to an agency clearance team, says the new memo, first reported by ProPublica.

“Depending on the nature of the information, additional review and clearance by the NCI director, deputy directors, NIH, and HHS may be required,” it advises staff. “In some cases, the material will not need further review, but the NCI Clearance Team will share it with NCI leadership, NIH, and/or HHS for their awareness.”

It notes that staff “do not need to share content describing the routine conduct of science if it will not get major media attention, is not controversial or sensitive, and does not touch on an administration priority,” according to the ProPublica report.

The investigative news outlet says the directive “was circulated by the institute’s communications team, and the content was not discussed at the leadership level,” adding that “it is not clear in which exact office the directive originated.”

Experts said the policy could have a chilling effect, slowing publication of important findings and pushing researchers to censor their work.

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Laser Light Transformed Into a Supersolid in Groundbreaking Experiment

An international team of physicists has transformed laser light into a supersolid, marking an entirely new process for achieving this mysterious state of matter.

On the quantum level, matter often exhibits strange behaviors, and the supersolid state is one of the most counterintuitive examples. In this state, atoms arrange into a crystal lattice like a solid but also flow without friction, a property typically associated with liquids.

The Quest to Understand Supersolids

Scientists first proposed the idea of a solid that could demonstrate fluid-like flow in the 1960s, with theoretical exploration intensifying in the 1970s.

Helium was initially considered the most promising candidate for achieving this exotic phase of matter. However, early experiments attempting to produce a solid with superfluid properties yielded disappointing results. In the 1980s, physicist John Goodkind used ultrasound techniques to identify anomalies in matter that suggested supersolids might be feasible.

By the 2000s, new experimental data provided stronger hints of supersolid behavior, though some findings conflicted with theoretical predictions, making the state even more elusive.

Creating a Supersolid With Laser Light

For decades, researchers believed that achieving a supersolid state required ultracold atomic Bose-Einstein condensates combined with electromagnetic fields. This method, which was only successfully demonstrated in recent years, produced a material structured like table salt but also capable of flowing.

The latest research, however, takes an entirely different approach, creating a supersolid without using atoms at all.

The team began with a piece of gallium oxide designed with precise ridges to interact with an incoming laser beam. When the laser light struck the semiconductor’s ridges, it produced a quasiparticle known as a polariton. The shape of the ridges then constrained the polariton’s motion, forcing it into a supersolid state.

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CNN Retracts Fact-Check Over Trump’s Transgender Mice Claim

Following President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, CNN attempted to issue a fact-check on his claim of government spending on experimentation with transgender mice; the network was subsequently forced to make a retraction.

As the Daily Caller reports, President Trump revealed during the speech – his first address to Congress as the 47th President – that his administration had uncovered $8.2 million in funding at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to use “gender-affirming” treatments on mice. 

CNN’s Deidre McPhillips tried to claim this was false, and that only about $500,000 was spent on these experiments.

“Trump falsely claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency identified government spending of ‘$8 million for making mice transgender,’” said CNN’s original statement.

The White House responded by issuing a statement confirming that the original amount of $8.2 million was accurate.

“Last night, President Donald J. Trump highlighted many of the egregious examples of waste, fraud and abuse funded by the American taxpayers, including $8 million spent by the Biden Administration ‘for making mice transgender,’” the statement from the White House declared. 

“The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).”

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Is Science Rigged for the Rich?

A recent paper published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research, titled “Access to Opportunity in the Sciences: Evidence From the Nobel Laureates,” found that 67 percent of science Nobel Prize winners have “fathers from above the 90th income percentile in their birth country.” The authors, affiliated with Imperial College London, Dartmouth College, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, claim that their paper reveals extreme inequality in the science world and suggests that undiscovered geniuses from poor backgrounds never had the chance to show what they could do for humanity.

The study received considerable press attention, including a piece in The Guardian claiming that it showed “a lot of talent wasted…and breakthroughs lost.”

“The Nobel prizes highlight that we have a biased system in science and little is being done to even out the playing field,” wrote scientist Kate Shaw in Physics World. “We should not accept that such a tiny demographic are born ‘better’ at science than anyone else.” 

This study contains several statistical and conceptual errors, making its findings meaningless. It provides no evidence that unequal opportunity in science limits human progress. 

For starters, how did the authors determine who was “born better” and thus had a better chance of winning a Nobel Prize? The study examined what their fathers did for a living. It found that since 1901, people with scientists for fathers had 150 times the chance of winning a science Nobel than the average person. 

Scientists earn more on average, which allegedly shows that coming from a wealthier family gave them a boost. But it’s common sense that the children of scientists will have an advantage in winning Nobel Prizes. Children of successful people often excel in the same fields as their parents. The size of the advantage may seem surprising, but this is typical when you look at the extremes of the bell curve. Even small initial advantages can result in extreme differences in outcome.

Suppose instead of Nobel Prizes in science we were talking about an Olympic gold medal for the 100-meter dash. Suppose everyone in the world got to participate. There would be thousands of people a step or two behind the winner.

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CNN Embarrasses Itself Yet Again: Trump Was Right About Transgender Mice Studies

CNN went on a fact-checking frenzy after Trump’s Tuesday night speech to a joint session of Congress, but they forgot to do one thing: check the facts. In one of the epic diatribes of the address, the president lambasted the waste in the federal government that has been uncovered by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and pointed out many of the most ridiculous examples—including transgender studies on mice.

Trump:

Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified: $22 billion from HHS to provide free housing and cars for illegal aliens, $45 million for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma, $40 million to improve the social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants. Nobody knows what that is. $8 million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of, $60 million for indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian empowerment in Central America. $60 million. $8 million for making mice transgender. [Laughter.]

This is real.

Well, it didn’t take long for CNN to get their knickers in a twist and try to trip up the president, but they failed badly:

CNN’s Deidre McPhillips initially tried to dispute the claim, arguing only about $500,000 had been allocated for similar research in monkeys — she was later forced to issue a correction after the White House proved CNN’s “fact check” inaccurate in a statement. 

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Hoping to revive mammoths, scientists create ‘woolly mice’

Scientists have genetically engineered mice with some key characteristics of an extinct animal that was far larger — the woolly mammoth.

This “woolly mouse” marks an important step toward achieving the researchers’ ultimate goal — bringing a woolly mammoth-like creature back from extinction, they say.

“For us, it’s an incredibly big deal,” says Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas company trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth and other extinct species.

The company announced the creation of the woolly mice Tuesday in a news release and posted a scientific paper online detailing the achievement. Scientists implanted genetically modified embryos in female lab mice that gave birth to the first of the woolly pups in October.

“This is really validation that what we have in mind for our longer-term de-extinction project is really going to work,” Shapiro told NPR in an interview. The company says reviving extinct species like the mammoth, the dodo and others could help repair ecosystems. Critics, however, question whether de-extinction would be safe for the animals or environment.

Shapiro and her colleagues started by trying to identify the genes responsible for making mammoths distinctive. They compared ancient samples of genetic material from mammoths with genetic sequences of African and Asian elephants, the mammoth’s closest living relative.

These included long, woolly hair and a way of metabolizing fat that helped the animals survive well in the cold.

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Hydrogen Breakthrough: New Palladium Nanosheet Tech Could Accelerate Green Energy Revolution

Scientists have developed a cost-effective alternative to platinum for use in hydrogen production, replacing the expensive metal with palladium nanosheets to reduce costs and accelerate the shift to clean energy.

As global temperatures surpass the preindustrial benchmark outlined in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the need for large-scale hydrogen production has become more urgent to accelerate the transition to zero-emission alternatives. However, the widespread adoption of hydrogen technology has been hindered by its dependence on costly platinum-based catalysts, making it economically unfeasible for everyday use.

Novel Hydrogen Development

Dr. Hiroaki Maeda and Professor Hiroshi Nishihara of the Tokyo University of Science (TUS) led a team consisting of other researchers from TUS, as well as contributors from Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute, Kyoto Institute of Technology, RIKEN SPring-8 Center, and the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan. The team produced a breakthrough in hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) technology with their bis(diimino)palladium coordination nanosheets (PdDI), nearly duplicating platinum’s efficiency at a significantly lower cost.

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MOON FEVER – Three Private Landers Are Headed to the Lunar Surface, With the First, Blue Ghost, Set To Touch Down Early Sunday

‘Fly me to the Moon, and Let me Play Among the Stars…’

While Planet Earth is teeming with geopolitical activity, three different groups of men and women are engaged in an Odyssey that is to take their spacecrafts to the surface of the Moon.

It’s definitely a big moment in the human race’s spaceflight saga.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was launched on Thursday (Feb. 27), carrying Intuitive Machines’ ‘Athena’ spacecraft, so now there are three different private lunar landers currently on their way to the moon.

It’s an unprecedented surge in exploration, with the three missions operated by private companies.

Space reported:

“’Athena joining a historic wave of lunar landers on their way to the moon is an extraordinary moment’, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said in a statement this morning (Feb. 28).

‘While the most vital part of this mission lies ahead, we believe this is a signal that lunar services are rapidly advancing alongside civil and commercial intent to establish a foothold on the moon to reach further into the solar system’, he added.”

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Einstein’s General Relativity with a Twist: Teleparallelism

It might not be obvious to those of us only grappling with more mundane concerns, but for cosmologists bent on unlocking the universe’s deepest secrets, there’s no shortage of problems keeping them up at night. “Dark matter” is the shorthand explanation for stars and galaxies moving much more quickly than the gravity of their luminous matter should allow. Let’s not forget “dark energy,” too—the preferred solution to the mystery of the universe expanding faster than anyone expected and doing so at an accelerated rate. Meanwhile a hypothesized “evolving” form of dark energy might resolve something called the Hubble tension—the term used for a major disagreement among researchers about the present-day cosmic expansion rate.

Cosmologists have been losing sleep over such quandaries for generations, wondering what missing ingredients they need to add to their models to fix what seem to be glaring gaps in their understanding. But what if the answer to some—maybe even all—of these problems isn’t a radical new theory but rather an old one, devised almost a century ago by none other than Albert Einstein himself? It’s called teleparallel gravity, and according to a loose collection of theorists who study it, this theory deserves a closer look by the wider scientific community.

Dark matter, dark energy, the Hubble tension: underpinning these theories is Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which treats space and time as a unified “spacetime” and considers gravity as spacetime’s curvature. Perhaps, then, the answer is to modify, change or update relativity itself to gain a new understanding of gravity rather than hypothesizing mysterious dark substances and forces. But across the decades, theorists pursuing this general approach have delivered mixed results at best.

The best example may be Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), an effort to banish dark matter that, according to some research, still has to allow for the existence of some dark matter. A more recent addition, dubbed “timescape” cosmology, seeks to account for dark energy by asserting that gigantic, matter-sparse “voids” in the cosmos are much larger than most other measurements say they can be. None of these possible solutions come without their own problems.

So if these new ideas aren’t working out, why not return to the old master? In 1928, about a decade after completing his greatest scientific achievement, general relativity, Einstein began work on an alternative form of this cherished idea. His dream was to find a single set of equations that could describe both gravity and electromagnetism. His idol James Clerk Maxwell achieved such a feat in the early 1860s, using a single set of equations to describe electricity, magnetism and radiation, and Einstein hoped to follow in Maxwell’s footsteps.

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