Tag: science

Trans Drugs Bad? Block the Study!

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading advocates for “gender-affirming care” for kids, refuses to release a ten-million-dollar taxpayer-funded study because the results don’t support continued trans-medical intervention. However, full disclosure is necessary for the trans community to make important life decisions.

The nine-year study, bought and paid for by hardworking Americans, essentially revealed that after receiving puberty-blockers, these young children did not improve in the area of mental health.  This is important information because these children most certainly were diagnosed with some mental illness prior to being seen for gender dysphoria (the belief that one’s body is the wrong sex), another psychiatric diagnosis.

Dr. Olson-Kennedy has refused to release the study because she believes that it could be “weaponized” and used as proof that “we shouldn’t use blockers.”  The puberty-blocker “treatments” supposedly delay physical development, so the body feels more like the gender identified with.

What the Olson-Kennedy study revealed was that despite being on puberty-blockers, the kids were no better off with their mental health.  In a nutshell, kids thought they’d be happy if they could be the sex they identified with, but in fact, this was not reflected in the study.  After two years, despite the treatment, there was no significant improvement in the kids’ mental health.

For those of us who follow psychiatric drugging, it is of interest that the research data are being withheld because too often these studies fail to consider the psychiatric drugging that occurred prior to the request for “transition” “treatment.”  In other words, how many of these kids were on psychiatric mind-altering drugs prior to feeling the need to transition?  What psychiatric diagnoses were involved, and what drugs were prescribed prior to the child’s belief that becoming another sex would be more in line with what they identify with?  We may never know if the Olson-Kennedy study even considered psychiatric drug use prior to trans-treatments.  It matters.

It’s no secret that psychiatric drugs can elicit strong adverse reactions, especially in children.  For example, let’s consider Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale.  Hale had been receiving psychiatric “treatment” for twenty of her twenty-eight years, and Hale had been prescribed cocktails of psychiatric drugs.  So what role did the psychiatric drugs play in Hale’s desire to “transition”?  Further, did Hale receive puberty-blockers and psychiatric drugs as a cocktail of “treatment?”  It’s anyone’s guess at this point, as Hale’s extensive mental health records have not been made publicly available.  Do we see a pattern of data-withholding among the trans-medical community?

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Scientists Were Wrong: Plants Absorb 31% More CO2 Than Previously Thought

New research shows plants absorb 31% more CO2 than previously estimated, raising the global GPP to 157 petagrams per year. Using carbonyl sulfide as a proxy for photosynthesis, this study highlights tropical rainforests’ critical role as carbon sinks and stresses the importance of accurate photosynthesis modeling for climate predictions.

A new assessment by scientists reveals that plants worldwide are absorbing about 31% more carbon dioxide than previously believed. Published in the journal Nature, this research is expected to enhance Earth system models used to forecast climate trends and underscores the critical role of natural carbon sequestration in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

The amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere via photosynthesis from land plants is known as Terrestrial Gross Primary Production, or GPP. It represents the largest carbon exchange between land and atmosphere on the planet. GPP is typically cited in petagrams of carbon per year. One petagram equals 1 billion metric tons, which is roughly the amount of CO2 emitted each year from 238 million gas-powered passenger vehicles.

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Woke doc refused to publish $10 million trans kids study that showed puberty blockers didn’t help mental health

A prominent doctor and trans rights advocate admitted she deliberately withheld publication of a $10 million taxpayer-funded study on the effect of puberty blockers on American children — after finding no evidence that they improve patients’ mental health.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy told the New York Times that she believes the study would be “weaponized” by critics of transgender care for kids, and that the research could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”

Critics — including one of Olson-Kennedy’s fellow researchers on the study — said the decision flies in the face of research standards and deprives the public of “really important” science in a field where Americans remain firmly divided.

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Your consciousness could travel multiverse when you dream, claim scientists

Scientists have suggested that dreams sometimes act as portals to alternate realities, connecting a person to another version of themselves in a parallel world. 

“Dreams have been historically perceived as mirrors reflecting our conscious waking life, laden with symbolic representations of our desires, fears, and experiences,” they claimed in their research article. 

“Conversely, a riveting conjecture exists that dreams might also function as conduits to alternative dimensions or elevated states of consciousness, suggesting a more profound and expansive role than traditionally conceived,” they added.

This hypothesis takes inspiration from the “many worlds interpretation of quantum theory,” which is sometimes also referred to as the multiverse theory. 

It suggests that for a quantum event, there are multiple possibilities or outcomes. Each of these outcomes plays out in separate universes. So, for example, if you played a football match, your team may have won in this universe, but in some other universe, your team may have lost the game. 

The authors suggest that in dreams, one can travel to these other universes. However, this isn’t the the primary scientific basis they used to support their hypothesis.

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Scientists Uncover a Hidden “Sixth Sense” in Geckos, Prompting Questions About Human Extrasensory Potential

Researchers at the University of Maryland have uncovered a hidden and unexpected auditory “sixth sense” in geckos. 

In a study published in Current Biology, scientists revealed that geckos use a specialized part of their inner ear, known as the saccule, to detect low-frequency vibrations—a trait previously unrecognized in reptiles. 

Researchers believe other species could have a similar sixth sense. This would offer new insights into how animals perceive their environment and could have significant implications for evolutionary biology.

“The ear, as we know it, hears airborne sound. But this ancient inner pathway, which is typically linked to balance, helps geckos detect vibrations that travel through mediums like the ground or water,” study co-author and Professor of Biology at UMD, Dr. Catherine Carr, said in a press release. “This pathway exists in amphibians and fish, and now it’s proven to be preserved in lizards as well. Our findings shed light on how the auditory system evolved from what you see in fish to what you see in land animals, including humans.”

Typically associated with balance, the saccule is a part of the inner ear that allows geckos to sense vibrations through mediums like the ground or water rather than through airborne sounds like traditional hearing. 

The saccule’s sensitivity to vibrations between 50 and 200 Hz complements the gecko’s regular auditory system. This finding is significant when considering other reptiles, such as snakes or different species of lizards. 

Traditionally, many reptiles are believed to be “deaf” or “mute” because they do not vocalize sounds or respond well to airborne noise. However, the ability to detect vibrations offers a new explanation. Reptiles may communicate through vibrational signals, challenging long-held assumptions about their sensory perception.

“A lot of snakes and lizards were thought to be ‘mute’ or ‘deaf’ in the sense that they do not vocalize sounds or hear sounds well,” lead study author and PhD candidate Dawei Han explained. “But it turns out they could potentially be communicating via vibrational signals using this sensory pathway instead, which really changes the way scientists have thought about animal perception overall.”

This “sixth sense” in geckos also offers fresh insights into the evolution of hearing mechanisms across species. The saccule, present in both amphibians and fish, now shows its role in reptiles, suggesting that auditory systems may have developed more gradually and with greater complexity than previously believed. These findings highlight how hearing mechanisms likely adapted during the shift from aquatic to terrestrial environments, revealing a more nuanced evolutionary pathway than was once assumed.

The surprising discovery of an auditory “sixth sense” in geckos also raises intriguing questions about the potential for unexplored sensory abilities in humans. It opens the door to new research into the human auditory system, prompting scientists to consider whether we have similar undiscovered pathways that contribute to our perception of the world.

“Think about when you’re at a live rock concert,” Dr. Carr said. “It’s so loud that you can feel your whole head and body vibrate in the sound field. You can feel the music rather than just hearing it.”

“That feeling suggests that the human vestibular system may be stimulated during those loud concerts, meaning our sense of hearing and balance may also be linked closely.” 

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AI scans RNA ‘dark matter’ and uncovers 70,000 new viruses

Researchers have used artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover 70,500 viruses previously unknown to science1, many of them weird and nothing like known species. The RNA viruses were identified using metagenomics, in which scientists sample all the genomes present in the environment without having to culture individual viruses. The method shows the potential of AI to explore the ‘dark matter’ of the RNA virus universe.

Viruses are ubiquitous microorganisms that infect animals, plants and even bacteria, yet only a small fraction have been identified and described. There is “essentially a bottomless pit” of viruses to discover, says Artem Babaian, a computational virologist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Some of these viruses could cause diseases in people, which means that characterizing them could help to explain mystery illnesses, he says.

Previous studies have used machine learning to find new viruses in sequencing data. The latest study, published in Cell this week, takes that work a step further and uses it to look at predicted protein structures1.

The AI model incorporates a protein-prediction tool, called ESMFold, that was developed by researchers at Meta (formerly Facebook, headquartered in Menlo Park, California). A similar AI system, AlphaFold, was developed by researchers at Google DeepMind in London, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this week.

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Chemists rips ‘feminism’ STEM class proposal

An academic journal article about “feminism” and “dysconscious racism in STEM” never should have been published, according to two chemistry professors.

Professors John Landrum and Joseph Lichter questioned why the Journal of Chemical Education allowed a paper that vaguely touched on “white supremacy” to be published.

“Overlooking the obligation to provide clear definitions and valid evidence for such terms, especially ‘White Supremacy’ which was deemed sufficiently important to include in the abstract, is hard to rationalize for a journal that ascribes to upholding reasonable standards of scientific rigor,” the two Florida International University professors wrote.

They also called the paper a “deeply flawed work of scholarship.” Only two academic publications cited the paper – the Landrum (pictured, left) and Lichter (pictured, right) reply, and a subsequent response from the original author to these criticism.

The 2022 paper argued for “teaching science with a feminist framework.” “This article presents a pedagogical model for implementing a special topic class on science and feminism for chemistry students at East Carolina University,” Professor Michelle Reyes originally wrote. She teaches at ECU.

Landrum and Lichter criticized the proposed topics, saying they “have little to do with chemistry and more to do with medical or STEM-related historical events dealing with racial and gender inequality.”

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Insights into Early Modern Human Activity in the Jungles of Southeast Asia

Studying microscopic layers of dirt dug from the Tam Pà Ling cave site in northeastern Laos has provided a team of Flinders University archaeologists and their international colleagues further insights into some of the earliest evidence of  Homo sapiens in mainland Southeast Asia.

The site, which has been studied for the past 14 years by a team of Laotian, French, American and Australian scientists, has produced some of the earliest fossil evidence of our direct ancestors in Southeast Asia.

Now a new study, led by PhD candidate Vito Hernandez and Associate Professor Mike Morley from the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, has reconstructed the ground conditions in the cave between 52,000 and 10,000 years ago.

“Using a technique known as microstratigraphy at the Flinders Microarchaeology Laboratory, we were able to reconstruct the cave conditions in the past and identify traces of human activities in and around Tam Pà Ling,” says Hernandez. “This also helped us to determine the precise circumstances by which some of the earliest modern human fossils found in Southeast Asia were deposited deep inside.”

Microstratigraphy allows scientists to study dirt in its smallest detail, enabling them to observe structures and features that preserve information about past environments and even traces of human and animal activity that may have been overlooked during the excavation process due to their minuscule size.

The human fossils discovered at Tam Pà Ling were deposited in the cave between 86,000–30,000 years ago but until now, researchers had not conducted a detailed analysis of the sediments surrounding these fossils to gain an understanding of how they were deposited in the cave or the environmental conditions at the time.

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Scientists Unveil Haunting Soundscape of Mysterious 41,000-Year-Old Magnetic Field Reversal Event

Close to 41,000 years ago, Earth underwent a magnetic field reversal where, for a short period, the planet’s natural magnetic protective shield diminished to just 5% of its current strength.

During this sudden and extreme magnetic field reversal event, the temporary weakness of Earth’s magnetic barrier allowed a significant influx of cosmic rays to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. Now, for the first time, a team of scientists have produced a sound visualization of this mysterious ancient occurrence.

The Laschamp Event

Between 42,200 and 41,500 years ago, Earth’s magnetic field underwent a sudden and dramatic decrease in the intensity, along with a shift in pole orientation by about 45 degrees.

Known as the Laschamp event, this was a type of geomagnetic excursion—an anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field and the first of its kind to be identified. During geomagnetic excursions, the weakened magnetic field provides less protection from cosmic radiation, which researchers believe may have caused significant effects on Earth including extreme changes to Earth’s biosphere.

Scientists are able to identify periods of heightened cosmic ray bombardment by examining radionuclides found in places that include marine sediment cores and ancient ice deposits. The isotopes produced by the interaction between Earth’s atmosphere and cosmic radiation serve as markers for times when cosmic rays were able to penetrate more easily and reach the planet.

Now, scientists at the Technical University of Denmark and the German Research Centre for Geosciences have used Laschamp event data, including new information obtained by the ESA’s Swarm mission, to create the first visualization of the mysterious event with sound.

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Academic teases announcement about discovery of alien life

Two groups of rival astronomers are allegedly vying to publish confirmed evidence of an intelligent alien civilization.Various news outlets this week have picked up on the story that British academic Professor Simon Holland is claiming that an announcement about intelligent alien life is imminent.

Holland, who has previously produced documentaries for NASA-funded projects, claims to have received a tip-off from an insider with the Breakthrough Listen project – an alternative to SETI that aims to scour the cosmos for signs of extraterrestrial communications.

“We have found a non-human extraterrestrial intelligence in our galaxy, and people don’t know about it,” Holland told The Mirror. “They found the evidence of a non-human technological signature a few years ago, using the Parkes telescope in Australia.”

Holland maintains that a second group of astronomers in China have also discovered the same evidence and that there is now some sort of race behind the scenes to publish the information.

“This is breaking news, as of yesterday, but the Chinese might be pipping them to the post, with their, FAST [Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope] program,” he said.

“It’s the largest telescope in the world since Arecibo.”

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