Science vs. Scientism…
Tag: science
U.S. government wants to move conversation around UFOs from speculation to science
Unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, have captured the imagination of Americans for decades. But much of the conversation has been confined to science fiction movies and novels.
In the absence of government commentary on the topic, conspiracy theories have run rampant. A big one suggests the U.S. has been concealing alien life and technology in secret compounds like Area 51 in Nevada. A 2019 poll found 68% of respondents believed the U.S. government knows “more about UFOs than it is telling us.”
The government is trying to change the narrative. In an attempt to be more transparent and address potential national security questions, Washington, D.C. has taken up the charge to publicize and legitimize the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, as the military has rebranded UFOs.
Building blocks of life found in OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample
An initial analysis of the sample collected from the asteroid Bennu has yielded some promising results.Back in September 2016, NASA sent a spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, to rendez-vous with Bennu – a huge 500-meter-wide asteroid with the potential to strike the Earth sometime in the future.
After arriving there in 2018, it spent over two years investigating the asteroid and collecting sample material before heading back home. Following a further two-year journey through the solar system, it finally arrived back on Earth last month, much to the delight of NASA’s science team.
Now, at last, an initial analysis of the sample it collected has provided some preliminary results.
Most notably, the material appears to contain water and large amounts of carbon – a prime indicator that Bennu may be carrying the building blocks of life.It has long been theorized that asteroids and comets may have played a key role in delivering the necessary materials needed for life to develop on Earth billions of years in the past.
“The OSIRIS-REx sample is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever delivered to Earth and will help scientists investigate the origins of life on our own planet for generations to come,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
Blacklight Studies Reveal That Most Mammals Secretly Glow
WITH ITS ELECTRORECEPTOR-SPOTTED BILL, HORNED pads where you might expect teeth, and status as one of only five species of mammals that lay eggs, the platypus was already one of the most unique creatures on Earth. And now researchers in the U.S. and Australia have found the animal exhibits another curious characteristic: fluorescence.
This intrigued Kenny Travouillon, the curator of mammalogy at the Western Australian Museum, and his colleagues, including research associate Linette Umbrello. “It was the first Australian mammal found to be fluorescent,” Travouillon says. Science has already uncovered how frogs light up the night and birds glow under a blacklight, but this discovery entered new animal territory. They decided to shine a UV light on their museum’s mammal collection (including preserved and frozen specimens), to see if any others glowed in the dark. The platypus wasn’t the odd one out, after all—they found the majority fluoresced.
“In some ways, this study confirms what’s been long suspected: fluorescence is the rule rather than the exception,” says Lisa Gershwin, the founder of Glow Show Tasmania and a marine biologist who’s conducted research on fluorescence. She says others, including herself and zoologist Linda Reinhold, have published papers about the topic, “but this study shows it on a massive scale.”
NEW JERSEY ‘SHAKEN BABY SYNDROME’ RULING PUTS ‘JUNK SCIENCE’ DIAGNOSIS UNDER FIRE
Darryl Nieves’s wrongful prosecution began as many Shaken Baby Syndrome cases do—with a call for help.
On February 10, 2017, Nieves’s 11-month-old son, D.J., appeared to be having a seizure, Nieves told The Appeal. He called 911. The paramedics arrived, administered oxygen, and D.J. regained consciousness. They took him to St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the same hospital where D.J. had been born prematurely, at just 25 weeks gestation, according to a brief filed by Nieves’s attorneys with the Office of the Public Defender. (The Appeal is using the child’s nickname to protect his privacy.)
Despite D.J.’s well-documented medical conditions—he’d spent the first seven months of his life hospitalized and had already undergone two cardiac surgeries—a child abuse pediatrician at the hospital diagnosed him with abusive head trauma, or AHT, “as occurs with a shaking event with or without impact.” This diagnosis is often known as Shaken Baby Syndrome.
Nieves was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and child endangerment. He was released after about four days in jail but was not allowed to have any contact with his son, he said. It would be more than four years until he could see D.J. again.
“I was thinking the government fails everyone, especially Black African Americans, so I felt it was going to fail me,” Nieves told The Appeal.
Prosecutors offered him probation if he pleaded guilty, according to Danica Rue, a member of Nieves’s legal team at the public defender’s office. Nieves turned it down.
The then-26-year-old father appeared to be on the same catastrophic path that has sent many parents and other caregivers to prison based solely on a doctor’s “shaken baby” diagnosis.
“Detectives were saying the doctor has proof; the doctors are never wrong,” Nieves said. “That’s what they were saying to me. Basically trying to scare me into admitting something I didn’t do.”
But then something happened that changed the course of Nieves’s case and future Shaken Baby Syndrome prosecutions in New Jersey.
On January 7, 2022, after years of delays, a trial judge sided with Nieves’s defense and ruled that prosecutors could not introduce testimony on Shaken Baby Syndrome in the case. The judge declared the controversial theory “akin to junk science” and, a few weeks later, dismissed the indictment against Nieves.
The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office appealed to the Superior Court of New Jersey. In a decision last month, the superior court affirmed the trial judge’s ruling.
“The very basis of the theory has never been proven,” Judge Greta Gooden Brown wrote in the court’s opinion. “The State has not demonstrated general acceptance of the SBS/AHT hypothesis to justify its admission in a criminal trial.”
500,000x Smaller Than a Human Hair: Game-Changing Electronic Sensor the Size of a Single Molecule
Australian researchers have developed a molecular-sized, more efficient version of a widely used electronic sensor, in a breakthrough that could bring widespread benefits.
Piezoresistors are commonly used to detect vibrations in electronics and automobiles, such as in smartphones for counting steps, and for airbag deployment in cars. They are also used in medical devices such as implantable pressure sensors, as well as in aviation and space travel.
Breakthrough in Piezoresistor Technology
In a nationwide initiative, researchers led by Dr. Nadim Darwish from Curtin University, Professor Jeffrey Reimers from the University of Technology Sydney, Associate Professor Daniel Kosov from James Cook University, and Dr. Thomas Fallon from the University of Newcastle, have developed a piezoresistor that is about 500,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Dr. Darwish said they had developed a more sensitive, miniaturized type of this key electronic component, which transforms force or pressure to an electrical signal and is used in many everyday applications.
5 Abuses of Science for Power, Profit and Political Gains
In relation to abuses of science, tailor-made corporate-sponsored pseudoscience has been used as a cover arm for profits that tie in with advancements of dictated political agendas. Like the political agendas the shady science can be decided before any real scientific research begins.
Remember, however, no scientist, scientific, academic or related corporate institution or politician regardless of monied interests has a monopoly on truth. With this approach, how could integrity be maintained, using science for “ownership” by its scientific overlords, abusing their powers along the way?
Alien life in Universe: Scientists say finding it is ‘only a matter of time’
Many astronomers are no longer asking whether there is life elsewhere in the Universe.
The question on their minds is instead: when will we find it?
Many are optimistic of detecting life signs on a faraway world within our lifetimes – possibly in the next few years.
And one scientist, leading a mission to Jupiter, goes as far as saying it would be “surprising” if there was no life on one of the planet’s icy moons.
Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently detected tantalising hints at life on a planet outside our Solar System – and it has many more worlds in its sights.
Numerous missions that are either under way or about to begin mark a new space race for the biggest scientific discovery of all time.
“We live in an infinite Universe, with infinite stars and planets. And it’s been obvious to many of us that we can’t be the only intelligent life out there,” says Prof Catherine Heymans, Scotland’s Astronomer Royal.
“We now have the technology and the capability to answer the question of whether we are alone in the cosmos.”
THE SCIENCE IS CLEAR: MARIJUANA IS SAFER THAN TOBACCO
Nearly twice as many Americans believe that smoking cigarettes is more hazardous to your health than smoking marijuana. They’re right.
Numerous studies assessing the long-term health impacts of cannabis smoke exposure belie the myth that marijuana is associated with the same sort of well established, adverse respiratory hazards as tobacco.
For example, federally funded research at the University of California, Los Angeles compared the lifetime risk of lung cancer among more than 2,000 long-term marijuana smokers, tobacco smokers, and non-smokers.
Investigators determined that those who regularly smoked cigarettes possessed a 20-fold higher lung cancer risk than non-smokers. Those who only smoked marijuana had no elevated risk.
“We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer,” the study’s lead author explained. “What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect.”
More recently, a team of health experts writing in the journal Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases reported that neither former nor current cannabis smoking “of any cumulative lifetime amount” was associated with COPD progression or development.
Other studies indicate that cannabis smoke and tobacco smoke aren’t equally carcinogenic and that subjects who exclusively smoke cannabis have less exposure to harmful toxicants and carcinogens than tobacco smokers. Some researchers have also theorized that cannabinoids’ anti-cancer activities may offset some of the harms otherwise associated with inhaling smoke.
According to the findings of recent paper published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, “It is increasingly clear that cannabis has different effects on lung function [compared] to tobacco and the effects of widespread cannabis use will not necessarily mirror the harms caused by tobacco smoking.”
A separate review paper, published recently by researchers affiliated with the University of Arkansas, is even more blunt. “The data on marijuana contrast starkly with the consistent demonstration of injury from tobacco, the greatest legalized killer in the world today,” they concluded. “Any possible toxicity of marijuana pales in comparison.”
Male or Female: There’s Nothing In Between
The male and female sexes are ancient, having emerged on the evolutionary landscape more than a billion years ago. This is much older than humans, older than most plant and animal species, older than most marine life, and even older than the brain itself.
More than just keeping an individual alive, as food and water do, the two sexes keep entire species alive by producing more genetically unique individuals through sexual reproduction: the mixing of genomes and the fusion of sex cells called gametes. The evolution of male and female sexes is a major reason why the diversity of plant and animal species exists. It’s why we humans exist. It’s why you exist.
More than 99.9 percent of animal species that have developed since the emergence of male and female sexes reproduce sexually. And 95 percent of those animal species—including humans—have male and female sexes in separate individuals, whereby organisms are either male or female for their entire lives.
It may be surprising, but the two sexes follow a universal biological definition that applies to all species with male and female systems: the male sex is the phenotype (or structure) that produces the smaller gametes (i.e., sperm), while the female sex is the phenotype (or structure) that produces the larger gametes (eggs). The sperm are numerous and fast, contributing half the genetic material of the parent, but no resources for the survival of the fertilized egg (zygote). The eggs are relatively few, and very slow, contributing half the genetic material of the parent and all the resources for the zygote’s survival. Combine these two different gamete types together and a genetically unique individual is formed.
The technical term for this system is known as anisogamy (from the Greek aniso, meaning unequal; and gámos, meaning marriage), which involves the fusion of two gametes with different size and form. It is so efficient for reproduction and producing genetic diversity that it has evolved independently in nearly all lineages of multi-cellular organisms.
Biologists consider the evolution of the two sexes mathematically inevitable, because this system maximizes the efficiency of sexual reproduction—providing resources to the offspring through investment in large, nutrient-heavy eggs, while also maximizing gamete fusion through the production of many sperm that can quickly find an egg. This efficiency explains why the same system has evolved independently so many times.
Hellbound and Down 
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