Tag: science

The Top Five Climate Science Scandals

Science is science because it is self-correcting. That means that when researchers go down a dead end path they turn around and look for another route. However, science in highly politicized situations can face obstacles to self-correction, meaning that it can be more difficult to change course when science gets off track. This is especially so when bad science becomes politically important.

That’s where climate science finds itself in 2024. Long time readers here at THB will know that climate change is real and poses risks. At the same time, the climate science community appears to have lost its collective ability to call out bad science and get things back on track. Today, particularly for the many new readers that THB has gained this year, I summarize the top 5 climate science scandals covered here at THB over the past few years.

I define a scandal as a situation of objectively flawed science — in substance and/or procedure — that the community has been unable to make right, but should.

Let’s jump right in . . .

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Olympic Committee Chairman Complains There is ‘No Scientifically Solid System’ to Identify Men From Women

The head of the International Olympic Committee has complained that there is “no scientifically solid system” of identifying a man from a woman.

IOC Chairman Thomas Bach made the comments after being asked about recent controversy surrounding a female boxing match in which one of the fighters had abnormally elevated testosterone levels.

“We have said from the very beginning, if somebody is presenting us a scientifically solid system how to identify men and women, we are the first ones to do it,” Bach said. “We do not like this uncertainty. We do not like it for the overall situation for nobody.

“So, we would be more than pleased to look into it,” he continued. “But what is not possible is that somebody is saying, you know, ‘this is not a woman’ just by looking at somebody or by falling prey to a defamation campaign by not a credible organization.” 

Bach’s remarks come amid controversy at the Paris games surrounding two allegedly female boxers, Imane Khelif of Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, were at the center of these debates.

Both athletes were reportedly born as biological women and were cleared to compete in the Olympics. However, they had previously been excluded from other competitions due to their high testosterone levels.

On Friday evening, Khelif took the gold medal in women’s boxing after defeating China’s Yang Liu, a victory that will inevitably spark further debate about fairness in women’s sports.

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Scientists are getting serious about UFOs. Here’s why

For millennia, humans have seen inexplicable things in the sky. Some have been beautiful, some have been terrifying, and some — like auroras and solar eclipses before they were understood scientifically — have been both. Today’s aircraft, balloons, drones, satellites and more only increase the chances of spotting something confounding overhead.

In the United States, unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, came into the national spotlight in the late 1940s and early ’50s. A series of incidents, including a supposedly crashed alien spaceship near Roswell, N.M., generated something of an American obsession. The Roswell UFO turned out to be part of a classified program, the remnants of a balloon monitoring the atmosphere for signs of clandestine Russian nuclear tests. But it and other reported sightings prompted the U.S. government to launch various projects and panels to investigate such claims, as Science News reported in 1966 (SN: 10/22/66), as well as kicking off hobby groups and conspiracy theories.

In the decades since, UFOs have often come to be dismissed by scientists as the province of wackos and thus unworthy of study. The term UFO has a smirk factor to it, says Iain Boyd, an aerospace engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the school’s Center for National Security Initiatives.

But government agencies and officials are trying to change that attitude. Among the biggest concerns is that the stigma associated with reporting a sighting has the side effect of stifling reports from pilots or citizens who might have valuable information about potential threats in U.S. air space — such as the Chinese spy balloon that traversed North America and made headlines last year.

“If there’s something interfering with flights, people or cargo, that’s a problem,” Boyd says.

To help reduce the stigma, many serious investigators now refer to UFOs as “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs, coined by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2022. “The term UAP brings science to the issue,” Boyd says. It also rightly broadens the view to include natural atmospheric phenomena as well as things outside the atmosphere, such as satellites and particularly bright planets such as Venus.

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Engineering Toxoplasma gondii secretion systems for intracellular delivery of multiple large therapeutic proteins to neurons

Delivering macromolecules across biological barriers such as the blood–brain barrier limits their application in vivo. Previous work has demonstrated that Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that naturally travels from the human gut to the central nervous system (CNS), can deliver proteins to host cells. Here we engineered T. gondii’s endogenous secretion systems, the rhoptries and dense granules, to deliver multiple large (>100 kDa) therapeutic proteins into neurons via translational fusions to toxofilin and GRA16. We demonstrate delivery in cultured cells, brain organoids and in vivo, and probe protein activity using imaging, pull-down assays, scRNA-seq and fluorescent reporters. We demonstrate robust delivery after intraperitoneal administration in mice and characterize 3D distribution throughout the brain. As proof of concept, we demonstrate GRA16-mediated brain delivery of the MeCP2 protein, a putative therapeutic target for Rett syndrome. By characterizing the potential and current limitations of the system, we aim to guide future improvements that will be required for broader application.

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‘Digital Twin’ Of Earth Being Created To Predict The Future, Micro-Manage Everything

How do you know when a small-scale farmer in Africa, Latin America or Asia has sufficiently adapted to longer droughts or shifts in traditional monsoon seasons?

The complexity of this question means it is often left unanswered, with funding for such adaptation in developing countries dropping to around just a quarter of total climate finance provided by developed countries.

Delegates gathering at the Bonn Climate Change Conference to prepare for this year’s UN climate talks will be anticipating such questions, with COP29 already dubbed the “finance COP”.

In Baku, Azerbaijan, later this year, countries are expected to discuss a new climate finance deal after reaching the target of $100 billion (€93.2bn) a year in finance for developing countries two years later than agreed.

Historically low-emitting countries across much of the Global South desperately need more financial support to improve their climate defences across key sectors such as agriculture.

Less than 1% of international climate finance was spent helping smallholder farmers adapt to climate change in 2021, with many forced to spend up to 40% of their own incomes to cope with floods, droughts and crop pests.

However, in addition to more finance, countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America also need ways of measuring adaptation to direct investments more effectively.

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Study Confirms — Trans Fats Policy Killed Millions

For the past six decades, saturated fats and cholesterol have been wrongly vilified as the central culprit of heart disease, stroke and peripheral vascular disease. However, research has demonstrated that it’s actually trans fats and processed vegetable oils found in many processed foods that are the real enemy.

In the decades saturated fats were demonized, the food industry responded by replacing saturated fats with more shelf-stable trans fats and a new market of low-fat (high-sugar) foods was born.

Americans’ health has plummeted ever since, and millions have been prematurely killed by this mistake. Making matters worse, genetically engineered soy oil, which is a major source of trans fat, can oxidize inside your body, thereby causing damage to both your heart and your brain.

One of the first articles published exonerating saturated fats was in 1957 by the late Dr. Fred Kummerow,1 who spent eight decades absorbed in the science of lipids and heart disease. In 2013, Kummerow sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for not withdrawing trans fats from the market.2 It was Kummerow’s lifetime work that revealed the dangers of trans fat and oxidized cholesterol and the relationship to heart disease.

Not surprisingly, trans fat is also linked to dementia as the arterial changes that occur in the heart muscle also occur in the brain, triggering neurological damage. Research has demonstrated the dangers to health and a great financial burden that eating a diet with trans fat has placed on the American public.

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Government Conducts Brutal Dog Experiments, Congress Writes Strongly Worded Letter

Nothing exceeds like excess, the U.S. government being the largest flusher of taxpayer cash — confiscated at gunpoint, by the way — down the toilet in world history.

But it’s not just wasted money — it’s wasted money used to torture innocent animals with no discernible public benefit, all in the name of The Science™, In Which We Trust.

          Related: Washington Post Admits It Lied About Fauci’s Beagle Torture Regime — For Years

Via White Coat Waste Project (emphasis added):

“Since the 1980s, DOD policy has banned the use of dogs (and cats and primates) in trauma training and weapons experiments, but we’ve exposed a loophole that’s allowed the agency to continue torturing dogs in other testing.

Now, we’re setting our sights on the DOD’s dog abuse and have exposed how it’s wasting $1 million to butcher beagles in completely unnecessary and cruel drug tests.

According to federal spending databases, the U.S. Army has recently commissioned a $949,108 experiment on beagles in which the animals will be forced to ingest massive doses of an experimental drug for the alleged purpose of winning FDA approval.  These tests typically abuse dozens of puppies and they’re killed and dissected at the end…

However, the FDA has stated clearly that it, ‘does not mandate that human drugs be studied in dogs’ And the DOD even admits, ‘animal models have limited relevance to humans and poorly predict effects in humans.’”

The letter penned by 25 Congressional members reads as follow (emphasis added):

“We are writing to obtain additional information regarding the Department of Defense’s (DoD) funding of seemingly unnecessary and inhumane experiments on dogs.

An investigation by the watchdog group White Coat Waste Project reported in May 2024 that the DoD recently spent approximately $949,000 to commission a three-month-long drug toxicity study using beagle dogs. This kind of drug toxicity testing typically involves forcing puppies to ingest large doses of experimental compounds daily for 13 weeks, after which they are killed. With the contract beginning on August 1, 2023, and scheduled to end on July 31, 2024.

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Pyramid Power: Technology Resembling World’s Most Famous Ancient Structure Leads to Game Changer in Optical Communication

A potentially revolutionary new technology that could greatly advance optical communications, surveillance, and photonic device isolation has something in common with the most captivating construction design of the ancient world: the pyramid.

Researchers at UCLA have produced a revolutionary new design for diffractive deep neural networks, or D2NNs, that they say significantly enhances unidirectional image magnification and demagnification. Dubbed Pyramid D2NNs, the new design architecture lives up to its name by introducing a pyramid-structured network that offers high-fidelity image formation while reducing refractive features, all by aligning its layers in the same direction of image magnification and demagnification.

What Are Diffractive Deep Neural Networks?

D2NNs are constructed from individual transmissive layers that are optimized through deep learning, allowing them to perform computation almost entirely through the use of optics.

In their recent research, the UCLA team, led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan, worked with a pyramid-shaped diffractive optical network, a design that allowed the team to achieve unidirectional imaging with fewer diffractive degrees of freedom.

The result is a design that helps to ensure high-fidelity image formation, but only in one direction. By contrast, significant image inhibition occurs in the opposite direction, conditions that are key for use with applications where imaging in one direction (i.e., unidirectional imaging) is required. Such fields include defense and security technologies, telecommunications applications, and systems used for privacy protection.

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US, UK accelerate quantum computing programs after China breakthrough

Scientists and lawmakers in the United States, United Kingdom and European Union are ramping up efforts to advance quantum computing in the West after scientists in China observed what appears to be the world’s first room-temperature time crystals.

A team of physicists hailing primarily from Tsinghua University in China, with contributions from scientists in Denmark and Austria, published peer-reviewed research on July 2 detailing the creation and observation of room-temperature time crystals.

In the month since the paper was published, quantum research labs in the West have announced numerous initiatives to extend existing efforts in the field of quantum computing and to create new research partnerships.

Room-temperature time crystals

Time crystals are a unique state of matter originally proposed by physicist Frank Wilczek in 2012. They work similarly to other crystals, such as snowflakes or diamonds, which are created when specific molecules form lattice-like bonds that repeat through space.

In time crystals, however, the molecules bond in time. Instead of locking into a crystalline structure that repeats, a time crystal’s molecules flicker back and forth between different configurations like a GIF on a loop. 

Back in 2021, an international team of scientists working with Google’s quantum computing lab simulated time crystals using a quantum computer. This breakthrough demonstrated the potential for quantum computers to explore exotic states of matter and set the stage for the convergence of quantum tech and time crystals.

Now, in July 2024, the Tsinghua team appears to have created time crystals at room temperature. This, theoretically, allows time crystal technology to be employed in non-laboratory equipment and could serve as a massive accelerator for the development of useful quantum computers.

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Former NASA Scientist Doing Experiment to Prove We Live in a Simulation

Could we be trapped inside a simulated reality, rather than the physical universe we usually assume?

It’s a tantalizing theory, long theorized by philosophers and popularized by the 1999 blockbuster “The Matrix.” What if there was a way to find out once and for all if we’re living inside a computer?

A former NASA physicist named Thomas Campbell has taken it upon himself to do just that. He devised several experiments, as detailed in a 2017 paper published in the journal The International Journal of Quantum Foundations, designed to detect if something is rendering the world around us like a video game.

Now, scientists at the California State Polytechnic University (CalPoly) have gotten started on the first experiment, putting Campbell’s far-fetched hypothesis to the test.

And Campbell has set up an entire non-profit called Center for the Unification of Science and Consciousness (CUSAC) to fund these endeavors. The experiments are “expected to provide strong scientific evidence that we live in a computer-simulated virtual reality,” according to a press release by the group.

Needless to say, it’s an eyebrow-raising project. As always, extraordinary claims will require extraordinary evidence — but regardless, it’s a fun idea.

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