Tag: science

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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Can Consciousness Exist Without A Brain?

“As a neurosurgeon, I was taught that the brain creates consciousness,” said Dr. Eben Alexander, who wrote in detail about his experiences with consciousness while in a deep coma.

Many doctors and biomedical students may have been taught the same about consciousness. However, scientists are still debating whether that theory holds true.

Imagine a child observing an elephant for the first time. Light reflects off the animal and enters the child’s eyes. Retinal photoreceptors in the back of the eyes convert this light into electrical signals, which travel through the optic nerve to the brain’s cortex. This forms vision or visual consciousness.

How do these electrical signals miraculously transform into a vivid mental image? How do they turn into the child’s thoughts, followed by an emotional reaction—“Wow, the elephant is so big!”

The question of how the brain generates subjective perceptions, including images, feelings, and experiences, was coined by Australian cognitive scientist David Chalmers in 1995 as the “hard problem.”

As it turns out, having a brain may not be a prerequisite for consciousness.

‘Brainless’ but Not Mindless

The Lancet recorded a case of a French man diagnosed with postnatal hydrocephalus—excess cerebrospinal fluid on or around the brain—at the age of 6 months.

Despite his condition, he grew up healthy, became a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant.

When he was 44 years old, he went to the doctor due to a mild weakness in his left leg. The doctors scanned his head thoroughly and discovered that his brain tissue was almost entirely gone. Most of the space in his skull was filled with fluid, with only a thin sheet of brain tissue.

“The brain was virtually absent,” wrote the lead author of the case study, Dr. Lionel Feuillet, of the Department of Neurology, Hôpital de la Timone in Marseille, France.

The man had been living a normal life and had no problem seeing, feeling, or perceiving things.

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Geology is racist as it is ‘linked to white supremacy’ claims Queen Mary University of London professor

A geography professor at a leading British university has described the study of rocks and the natural world as racist and linked the academic field to ‘white supremacy’.

Kathryn Yusoff, who lectures at the prestigious Queen Mary University of London, said that the geology as a subject was ‘riven by systematic racism’ and influenced heavily by colonialism.

The study of prehistoric life through fossils was also branded as an enabler for racism, with the professor referring to the field of palaeontology as ‘pale-ontology’.

Arguing that geology began as a ‘colonial practice’, Professor Yusoff stated in her book ‘Geologic Life’ that the extraction of metals such as gold and iron had created hierarchies, pushed materialism, ravaged environments and was the route cause of climate change.

Claiming that ‘geology continues to function within a white supremacist praxis’, the academic referenced the theft of land, mining and other geological practices as having led to the creation of white supremacy and a resulting ‘geotrauma’.

Professor Yusoff’s new book focuses on geology between the 17th and 19th centuries and puts forward the notion that non-white people have a closer relationship to land than white people.

‘Broadly, black, brown, and indigenous subjects… have an intimacy with the earth that is unknown to the structural position of whiteness,’ she wrote. 

Ms Yusoff is described as a professor of ‘inhuman geography’ on the official Queen Mary University website.

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U.S. Advocates Urge White House Support for ‘RISE’ Initiative to Keep U.S. Ahead in ‘Edge Science’

A coalition of scientists and former intelligence officials is urging White House support for an initiative to advance U.S. research in ‘edge science’ and controversial fields like quantum computing and consciousness studies, The Debrief has learned.

As American advancements in technology and science rapidly evolve amid global competition, officials from the Executive Office of the President at the White House in Washington, D.C. recently met with a group of scientists and former intelligence officials advocating for a groundbreaking new initiative, Research and Innovation at the Scientific Edge (RISE), which aims to push the boundaries of scientific exploration.

RISE seeks support for projects dedicated to unconventional or cutting-edge research areas, such as quantum computing, consciousness studies, remote viewing, micro-psychokinesis (PK), time-agnostic cryptography, evidence-based tools informed by Indigenous knowledge, and potential applications for the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). RISE advocates argue that pursuing these fields is essential to maintain America’s competitive edge against rapidly advancing nations like China.

The initiative’s proponents further argue that the U.S. can overcome obstacles and stigma surrounding unconventional research with Chief Executive support, allowing the U.S. to develop game-changing advantages related to everything from national security to human resilience.

The organization consists of heavy hitters from not only the science community, but former internal government officials with a diversity of agency insights, including Neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, Ph.D.; Chitra Sivanandam from the National Security Institute; Daniel “Rags” Rasgdale, Ph.D., Former Assistant Director for Cyber in the Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (Research & Technology); and Carmen Medina, a retired Senior Federal Executive with more than three decades in the Intelligence Community, including work with the CIA.

“During my more than 30 years in national security, too many times we were surprised by things that others claimed could never happen,” Medina said in a recent statement announcing the initiative. “The best way to prevent that in the future in the science and technology domains is to have a dedicated program to scan the horizon for new discoveries.”

Discussions about foreign adversaries gaining a technological edge have recently intensified, with reports suggesting that China is investing significantly in fields like quantum computing, photonics, and brain-machine interfaces.

In July, the Chinese government announced an ambitious goal to set a new world standard for brain-machine interfaces. Parallel to these efforts, China has already invested $15.3 billion in quantum technology compared to the U.S.’s $3.7 billion, an investment gap that highlights the urgent need for the U.S. to prioritize advanced research.

Along similar lines, a February 2022 RAND Corporation report comparing the U.S. and Chinese industrial bases with relation to advancements in quantum technology emphasized that Chinese efforts are primarily concentrated in government-funded laboratories, some of which have made rapid progress.

Given such concerning advancements by adversary nations, a related area of focus for RISE also involves problems associated with over-classification within the U.S. intelligence community, which even U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has said potentially “undermines critical democratic objectives” by limiting access to information that could help advance U.S. capabilities.

“Over-classification is a considerable burden,” said neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, Ph.D., in an email to The Debrief. “Even just bureaucratically, it weighs down government functioning. But beyond that, it has a dampening effect on science and technology ecosystems, any form of exploration, and democracy itself.”

Mossbridge told The Debrief that problems like over-classification are paralleled by separate issues that include stigmas that have long hampered serious studies into unconventional research topics.

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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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