Tag: science

Who Is Wei Cai, German Public Health’s ‘Hidden’ Scientist from Wuhan?

So, who exactly is Wei Cai, the scientific staff member of Germany’s public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), who, as revealed in hitherto hidden minutes of the institute’s “COVID-19 Crisis Group,” comes from none other than Wuhan? And when I say “hitherto hidden minutes,” I mean hidden precisely in the ostensible leak of the unredacted “RKI Files.” For, as I discussed in a recent article, the file in question was not included among the supposedly “complete minutes” assembled by Aya Velazquez, the prostitute-turned-journalist and anti-Covid-measure activist who unveiled the documents at a highly-publicised press conference in Berlin on July 23rd.

As discussed in a postscript to that article, although I have asked her, I have not received a coherent answer from Velazquez as to how she could have overlooked these minutes, which are indeed the minutes of the very first RKI “crisis group” meeting of which we have a public record.

Be that as it may, the reason why the revelation of the RKI’s link to Wuhan is important – and why German authorities may have preferred that it remain secret – is because, as I have documented in, among other places, my ‘The Greatest Story Never Told,’ Germany in fact had a very active publicly-funded research partnership in virology with several research institutions in Wuhan, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Indeed, the German-Chinese virology network, known as the “Sino-German Transregional Collaborative Research Centre” or TRR60, gave rise to a full-fledged German-Chinese virology lab, not only right in Wuhan but indeed right in what is regarded as the area of the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in the city. For this and other (microbiological) reasons outlined in my ‘The Smoking Gun in Wuhan,’ the members of the German-Chinese virology partnership ought to be prime suspects in any genuine investigation into a possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2.  But, instead, they have been completely ignored in favour of suspects in far-off places like Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The below photo shows various members of the partnership, as well as associated German and Chinese luminaries in the field of virology. It was taken in 2015 at a “Sino-German Symposium on Infectious Diseases” in Berlin organised by the German Co-Director of TRR60, Ulf Dittmer. Dittmer is the bald man in the middle of the picture. None other than Christian Drosten, the German designer of the ‘gold standard’ SARS-CoV-2 PCR test, and Shi Zhengli, the WIV’s renowned bat coronavirus expert, can be seen together in the lower left-hand corner of the picture.

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Team presents first demonstration of quantum teleportation over busy internet cables

Northwestern University engineers are the first to successfully demonstrate quantum teleportation over a fiberoptic cable already carrying internet traffic.

The discovery introduces the new possibility of combining quantum communication with existing internet cables—greatly simplifying the infrastructure required for distributed quantum sensing or computing applications.

The study is published on the arXiv preprint server and is due to appear in the journal Optica.

“This is incredibly exciting because nobody thought it was possible,” said Northwestern’s Prem Kumar, who led the study. “Our work shows a path towards next-generation quantum and classical networks sharing a unified fiberoptic infrastructure. Basically, it opens the door to pushing quantum communications to the next level.”

An expert in quantum communication, Kumar is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where he directs the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing.

Only limited by the speed of light, quantum teleportation could make communications nearly instantaneous. The process works by harnessing quantum entanglement, a technique in which two particles are linked, regardless of the distance between them. Instead of particles physically traveling to deliver information, entangled particles exchange information over great distances—without physically carrying it.

“In optical communications, all signals are converted to light,” Kumar explained. “While conventional signals for classical communications typically comprise millions of particles of light, quantum information uses single photons.”

Before Kumar’s new study, conventional wisdom suggested that individual photons would drown in cables filled with the millions of light particles carrying classical communications. It would be like a flimsy bicycle trying to navigate through a crowded tunnel of speeding heavy-duty trucks.

Kumar and his team, however, found a way to help the delicate photons steer clear of the busy traffic. After conducting in-depth studies of how light scatters within fiberoptic cables, the researchers found a less crowded wavelength of light to place their photons. Then, they added special filters to reduce noise from regular internet traffic.

“We carefully studied how light is scattered and placed our photons at a judicial point where that scattering mechanism is minimized,” Kumar said. “We found we could perform quantum communication without interference from the classical channels that are simultaneously present.”

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Physicists Baffled by Odd Quasiparticle That Seems to Have No Mass—Until It Changes Direction

Scientists report the first known observation of a variety of quasiparticle that exhibits a very peculiar behavior: it appears to have mass, but only while moving in one direction.

Scientists at Pennsylvania State University recently succeeded in detecting the unusual quasiparticle while conducting studies involving a semi-metallic crystalline material. Known as a semi-Dirac fermion, this unique formation of particles was first theorized more than a decade ago, but until now had never been directly observed.

The discovery potentially paves the way toward future advances in a range of emerging technologies that include power storage and novel forms of sensor technologies.

Detecting a Novel Quasiparticle

Quasiparticles are small collections of particles that normally appear within crystal lattices or under other special conditions, which generally possess both momentum and position, and under certain conditions may also be considered particles.

Discovering a novel quasiparticle like a semi-Dirac fermion had not been something Yinming Shao, assistant professor of physics at Penn State and lead author of a new paper revealing the discovery, had anticipated when he and his colleagues began experimenting with ZrSiS, a semi-metal crystal material that became the focus of their efforts.

“We weren’t even looking for a semi-Dirac fermion when we started working with this material, but we were seeing signatures we didn’t understand—and it turns out we had made the first observation of these wild quasiparticles that sometimes move like they have mass and sometimes move like they have none.”

Particles Without Mass

More than a century ago, Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted that anything moving at the speed of light will have no mass. Because of this, physicists already recognize that a particle can essentially be massless under certain circumstances, namely when its energy comes entirely from its motion. Under such conditions, particles are recognized as manifestations of energy moving at the speed of light, such as in the case of photons.

However, quasiparticles moving through solid materials like crystalline structures can sometimes behave differently. In the observations of the Penn State research team, this apparently resulted in the appearance of particles that have mass in only one direction.

Beginning in 2008, it was initially predicted that mass-shifting properties might be observed in certain kinds of quasiparticles, which provided the theoretical framework for semi-Dirac fermions. Based on these initial predictions by scientists with the University of California, Davis and Université Paris Sud in France, such quasiparticles would seemingly be massless when moving in one direction but would almost paradoxically appear to possess mass when moving in another direction.

Shao and the Penn State team happened upon the discovery of such bizarre quasiparticle behavior while utilizing what is known as magneto-optical spectroscopy, which allows researchers to observe infrared light reflected off materials that are placed under the influence of strong magnetic fields.

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New Zealand media’s go-to source for expert opinions supports a bill to deregulate the use of genetic modification; Dr. Guy Hatchard responds

Guy Hatchard, PhD, was formerly Director of Natural Products at Genetic ID (now FoodChain ID) a global food safety testing and certification company. He presented to the original Royal Commission on Genetic Modification in New Zealand in 2000 which helped to clarify the safety ground rules and labelling requirements for genetically modified organisms (“GMOs”) which currently form a part of the New Zealand Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (“HSNO”) legislation. Dr. Hatchard is retired and has no financial interest in the outcomes of the current legislative initiative to deregulate biotechnology experimentation.

The following is his formal response to the Science Media Centre (“SMC”) – an “independent” source of information for the media on all issues related to research, science and innovation – which has published expert opinions in support of the Bill.

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“Nobody Knows How They Can Do This.” New Evidence of Cells “Learning” Upends Past Thinking on Cellular Function

According to groundbreaking new findings, single cells may be capable of learning without the need for complex brains and nervous systems.

Researchers from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona and Harvard Medical School in Boston recently published their work in Current Biology. Their work presents insights that may affect the future of medicine, providing a deeper understanding of how specific ailments can avoid treatment. 

CElls Learning from Their Environment

“Rather than following pre-programmed genetic instructions, cells are elevated to entities equipped with a very basic form of decision-making based on learning from their environments,” explained co-author Jeremy Gunawardena, Associate Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.

The biologists’ observations involved habituation, one of the simplest forms of learning, where an organism acclimates to a repeated stimulus and begins to ignore it. Examples include ticking clocks or flashing lights, stimuli that eventually fade into the background for humans as our perceptions start ignoring them after some time.

Since the early 20th century, biologists have debated studies indicating learning-like behaviors in single-celled ciliates. The search picked up steam in the 1970s and 1980s, and current research provides additional mounting evidence for cell learning capabilities.

Examining Cell Learning

“These creatures are so different from animals with brains,” says co-author Rosa Martinez of the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona. “To learn would mean they use internal molecular networks that somehow perform functions similar to those carried out by networks of neurons in brains.”

“Nobody knows how they can do this, so we thought it is a question that needed to be explored,” Martinez said.

Cells process information through biochemical reactions, such as adding or removing a phosphate tag to a protein to switch it on and off like a binary code. The team modeled those chemical interactions in a computer simulation. The biologists chose this method because it allowed them to test many scenarios more rapidly than setting up many observations. Analyzing the math permitted the researchers to decode the cell’s chemical language as responses to repeated stimuli changed over time.

The biologists focused on negative feedback loops and incoherent feedforward loops to help better understand how the cells processed information and reacted. Negative feedback loops describe information that signals a process should end, like a thermostat registering the desired temperature and turning off the heat. In an incoherent feedforward loop, a signal turns a process both on and off, such as when a motion-activated light turns on after registering movement but turns off again after a set amount of time elapses.

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How Scientific American’s Departing Editor Helped Degrade Science

Earlier this week, Laura Helmuth resigned as editor in chief of Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. “I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief,” she wrote on Bluesky. “I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching), but for now I’d like to share a very small sample of the work I’ve been so proud to support (thread).”

Helmuth may in fact have been itching to spend more time bird watching—who wouldn’t be?—but it seems likely that her departure was precipitated by a bilious Bluesky rant she posted after Donald Trump was reelected.

In it, she accused her generation, Generation X, of being “full of fucking fascists,” complained about how sexist and racist her home state of Indiana was, and so on.

“Fuck them to the moon and back,” she said of the dumb high school bullies supposedly celebrating Trump’s victory.

Whether or not Helmuth’s resignation was voluntary, it should go without saying that a few bad social media posts should not end someone’s job. If that were the whole story here—an otherwise well-performing editor was ousted over a few bad posts—this would arguably be a case of “cancel culture,” or whatever we’re calling it these days.

But Helmuth’s posts were symptoms of a much larger problem with her reign as editor. They accurately reflected the political agenda she brought with her when she came on as EiC at SciAm—a political agenda that has turned the once-respected magazine into a frequent laughingstock.

Sometimes, yes, SciAm still acts like the leading popular science magazine it used to be—a magazine, I should add, that I received in print form every month during my childhood. 

But increasingly, during Helmuth’s tenure, SciAm seemed a bit more like a marketing firm dedicated to churning out borderline-unreadable press releases for the day’s social justice cause du jour. In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we’ll be living with for a long time.

When Scientific American was bad under Helmuth, it was really bad. For example, did you know that “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy“? Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented “his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.” That author also explained that “the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.” But the normal distribution doesn’t make any such value judgments, and only someone lacking in basic education about stats—someone who definitely shouldn’t be writing about the subject for a top magazine—could make such a claim.

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Scientists Are Developing CRISPR Gene-editing Tools to Cure Inherited Diseases — But There’s a Catch

CRISPR-based gene-editing tools are being developed to correct specific defective sections of the genome to cure inherited genetic diseases, with some applications already in clinical trials.

However, there is a catch: under certain conditions, the repair can lead to large-scale deletions and rearrangements of DNA — as in the case of targeting the NCF1 gene in chronic granulomatous disease (CGD). This was reported by a team of researchers and physicians from the ImmuGene clinical research program at the University of Zurich.

Their findings have important implications not just for gene editing-based therapy, but also for CRISPR-mediated gene editing of animals and plants, where the same types of large-scale genetic damage could be triggered.

Indeed, because such editing is carried out with much less caution in non-human organisms, the likelihood of such large-scale damage occurring is hugely increased (see below on multiplexing).

The study also shows that attempts to avoid these problems by using adaptations of CRISPR gene editing technologies, such as prime and base editing, may not succeed.

This research on CGD is also only the latest in a series of studies that have repeatedly shown that different types of unintended mutations resulting from gene editing can affect the functioning of multiple gene systems, with potentially damaging consequences.

What is CGD?

CGD is a rare hereditary disease that affects about one in 120,000 people. The disease impairs the component of the immune system responsible for fighting off infections, which can be life-threatening to the patient.

One variant of CGD is caused by the absence of two letters in the DNA base unit gene sequence which codes for the NCF1 protein. This error results in the inability of blood cells known as neutrophils to produce an enzyme complex that plays an essential role in the immune defense against bacterial, yeast, and fungal infections.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Embarrasses Himself as Bill Maher Exposes Him as ‘Part of the Problem’

Famous astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson exposed himself as a clueless buffoon Friday night when Bill Maher confronted him about a year-old Scientific American article. The piece made the baffling claim that the “inequity” between male and female athletes isn’t due to natural biological differences but rather to how they’re treated in sports.

The article, approved a year ago by former editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth, was emblematic of the “woke mind virus” taking precedent over scientific reality. Tyson, however, dismissed the controversy, relying on the fact Helmuth was recently fired for an expletive and unhinged anti-Trump post to justify the piece as no big deal.

The astrophysicist’s baffling failure to grasp the significance of the issue left Maher visibly frustrated, leading him to lose faith in Tyson as a credible scientist.

MAHER: “But engage with the idea here. What I’m asking is, Scientific American is saying basically that the reason why a WNBA team can’t beat the Lakers is because of societal bias.”

TYSON: “What you’re saying is not Scientific American says that. An editor for Scientific American says that, who no longer has the job. So don’t indict a 170-year-old magazine because somebody—”

MAHER: “Okay, this is called Scientific American, and they’re printing something. Why can’t you just talk about science? Why can’t you just say this is not scientific and Scientific American should do better?”

TYSON: “Well, does she still have her job?”

MAHER: “No, not because of this. I said the scandal is not her tweet. I think a year ago [when this was printed], women still couldn’t beat men in basketball or any other sport. And it wasn’t because of society. You don’t see a problem?… Well, I’m gonna file you under part of the problem.”

Maher’s confidence in Tyson sank even lower when he was challenged on vaccines and medical doctors, leaving him no choice but to school the astrophysicist on “trusting the Science™.” The exchange left viewers in shock, capped off by Maher delivering an unexpected zinger at the end.

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Scientist who battled for COVID common sense over media and government censors wins top award

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award.

The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats.

That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics.

All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area.

It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

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What Science Can Say About Vaccines: And What It Can’t Say

Interesting times for science are in store given the incoming administration. RFK, Jr. has been tasked to make America Healthy Again. He will fail where he encourages women to kill the lives inside them, because killing (in case you’ve forgotten) is the opposite of health.

But he might have some success with vaccines. For instance, at a recent interview he said he is against mandatory vaccinations. This brings up the excellent question of what can Science say about vaccines, and what it cannot. The answer will turn out to the same, with only small differences, for many questions similar to vaccination.

Science can answer questions like these, all with more or less certainty, depending on circumstance:

What is the projected range of vaccine protection in a population of given or assumed characteristics? If the vaccine is given in this group at this location, how and with what speed might the disease it protects against progress or decline? What is the range of symptoms and maladies the unvaccinated will experience? What is the protective benefit in the source of these diseases of naturally acquired immunity? How much better is that acquired immunity than the vaccine?

What is the proper dose, perhaps tailored by biology, to achieve the claimed effect?

What are the projected harms caused by the vaccine? Does the vaccine cause other diseases? In what distribution will injuries and other diseases be found?

Science cannot answer questions like these:

Who should get the vaccine? When should it be administered? Where should it be administered? What is the population that will receive the vaccine?

Is it better or worse to suffer the disease? What level of vaccine injury is acceptable? What level of risk of vaccine injury is acceptable? How much better or worse are the symptoms of the disease than the vaccine?

At what level of protection, adjusted by whatever circumstance, should the vaccine be administered? What level of risk for the disease is acceptable and what unacceptable? Is naturally acquired immunity better or worse than the vaccine?

Should it be made mandatory? For all ages in all circumstances? All doses? Should people be made to carry proof of their vaccination? Should a person be fired or otherwise hounded from society for preferring naturally acquired immunity, or because this person does not care about the disease? Should people be forced to care about a disease? Should people be barred from worship until they are vaccinated?

What should be done to scientists who are wrong in their predictions? What about those scientists who lie or are caught exaggerating?

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