Tag: science

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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Conflicts of Interest in Climate Science: A Systemic Blind Spot

The field of climate science has long been presented as an objective, data-driven discipline, immune to the biases and financial conflicts that plague other scientific domains. However, a recent preprint study by Jessica Weinkle et al, Conflicts of Interest, Funding Support, and Author Affiliation in Peer-Reviewed Research on the Relationship between Climate Change and Geophysical Characteristics of Hurricanes, challenges this assumption, shedding light on an alarming lack of conflict of interest (COI) disclosures in climate research, particularly in studies linking hurricanes to climate change​. She also has an excellent write up of the study on her Substack, Conflicted.

The study’s findings reveal a disturbing trend: not a single one of the 331 authors analyzed disclosed any financial or non-financial conflicts of interest​. Moreover, the research found that funding from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was a significant predictor of studies reporting a positive association between climate change and hurricane behavior​.

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Breakthrough as Oxford scientists say they’ve achieved teleportation

Scientist claim they achieved a massive breakthrough in teleportation by beaming data between quantum computers.

Researchers at the University of Oxford successfully teleported logical gates – the basic components of a computer algorithm – between two quantum processors separated by more than six feet.

Using particles of light (or photons), the scientists were able to form a shared quantum link between the two separate devices. 

This allowed two processors to work remotely, sharing the same algorithm to complete their computing tasks.

The breakthrough may solve the ‘scalability problem’ that has plagued the construction of usable quantum computers.

Currently, however, a single computer capable of processing millions of qubits would need to be gigantic in size – making them impossible for most people to have. 

Qubits (or quantum bits) replace the traditional bits of a standard computer. 

The new breakthrough changes all that, allowing scientists to move data between a series of smaller devices – instead of building one enormous machine.

The team explains that any quantum device powerful enough to be a game-changing innovation in computer science would need to be able to process millions of qubits. 

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‘Scientific Socialism’ Has Come to Pacific Palisades

“You can’t rebuild the same. We have to rebuild with science. We have to build with climate reality in mind,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom told CNN last week in an interview about rebuilding the burned-out Pacific Palisades. “We have to look at infrastructure or redundancy systems. Ingress, egress, as it relates to emergency management and planning materials.”

The interview seems to have flown under the radar, but when I caught it this morning, a bit belatedly, my alarm bells went off left and right.

Well, to be honest, they were all on the left.

Whatever happened to Newsom’s promise that he’d eliminate red tape and accelerate the rebuilding of one of L.A.’s nicest and most historic neighborhoods? The former homeowners of Pacific Palisades who were hoping to quickly rebuild from the ashes now understand to their very cores what Otter told Flounder in “Animal House”: “You f***ed up, you trusted us.“

Anyone dumb enough to believe Newsom’s promise to get people rebuilding within six or nine months… well, they probably voted for him. Gooder and harder, California.

What Newsom says needs to be done before lots can be cleared and construction begins looks to me like a huge, centralized process involving an awful lot of well-connected and high-priced “experts” empaneled to redesign Pacific Palisades according to “scientific” principles involving all the techno-babble Newsom went on about in that CNN sit-down. Instead of, you know, letting people build the homes they want in the kind of city they like. 

If the temporary council to name the permanent council has completed its initial studies on who should conduct the actual studies that will someday mandate a Scientifically Perfect Palisades in terms of those “infrastructure or redundancy systems, ingress, egress, as it relates to emergency management and planning materials” has finished finding a list of acceptable names in six months, I’d be shocked. 

If you think it’s expensive and time-consuming just to get permission to add a small deck on the back of a Pacific Palisades home (which it is), just wait until a panel of experts gets together to redesign the entire neighborhood from the ashes up.

None of this boondogglery (hey, I made up another new word!) comes as a surprise to Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers™. It wasn’t even two weeks ago that I covered Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s plan to rebuild the Palisades in her own image (shudder), led by philanthropist, “chief recovery officer,” and former LAPD commissioner Steve Soboroff. They’ll hire “an outside consultant to handle a significant rebuilding contract for areas devastated by this month’s Palisades fire,” as the Los Angeles Times put it, and Soboroff promised that “they’re going to represent you and make sure that everybody does exactly what they say they’re going to do.”

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