Tag: science

Don’t Even Go There

A policy of deliberate ignorance has corrupted top scientific institutions in the West. It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies—especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior—no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups.

American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory. The source at issue, the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), is an exceptional tool, combining genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income. It is indispensable for research on how genes and environments combine to affect human traits. No other widely accessible American database comes close in terms of scientific utility.

My colleagues at other universities and I have run into problems involving applications to study the relationships among intelligence, education, and health outcomes. Sometimes, NIH denies access to some of the attributes that I have just mentioned, on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” Sometimes, it demands updates about ongoing research, with the implied threat that it could withdraw usage if it doesn’t receive satisfactory answers. In some cases, NIH has retroactively withdrawn access for research it had previously approved.

Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.

What is NIH’s justification? Studies of intelligence do not pose any greater threat to the dignity of their participants than research based on non-genetic factors. With the customary safeguards in place, research activities such as genetically predicting an individual’s academic performance need be no more “stigmatizing” than predicting academic performance based on an individual’s family structure during childhood.

The cost of this censorship is profound. On a practical level, many of the original data-generating studies were set up with the explicit goal of understanding risk factors for various diseases. Since intelligence and education are also risk factors for many of these diseases, denying researchers usage of these data stymies progress on the problems the studies were funded to address. Scientific research should not have to justify itself on those grounds, anyway. Perhaps the most elemental principle of science is that the search for truth is worthwhile, regardless of its practical benefits.

NIH’s responsibility is to protect the safety and privacy of research participants, not to enforce a party line. Indeed, no apparent legal basis exists for these restrictions. NIH enforces hundreds of regulations, but you will search in vain for any grounds on which to ban “stigmatizing” research—whatever that even means.

The restrictions appear to be invented to impede research on certain topics that anonymous bureaucrats with ideological motivations have decided are out of bounds. It’s impossible to know whether senior NIH officials have instigated the restrictions or merely accepted them tacitly. Perhaps they are unaware of the problem; officials far down the bureaucratic ladder are responsible for approving specific applications.

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Sign of the End? Lab-Grown Human Brain Cells ‘Exhibit Sentience’ When Scientists Teach Them to Play Pong

According to the 1991 blockbuster “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” Skynet was supposed to have become self-aware 25 years ago, on August 29, 1997.

I know this because I took my wife to see “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” on our honeymoon … which shows you just how self-aware I was in 1991. It’s amazing she’s stuck with me for so long. But I digress.

Skynet, of course, was the huge national-defense artificial intelligence network that kept sending terminator androids back in time so that they could fail to kill Sarah Connor and her son, John. I thought of the film immediately when I saw that Australian scientists recently taught lab-grown brain cells to play Pong.

Now that I write that down, I can see how some might consider it a stretch. Stay with me, here.

According to this report, which does not appear to have been peer-reviewed prior to its publication yesterday, a culture of 800,000 stem-cell-derived human brain cells and embryo-derived mouse brain cells displayed limited “sentience,” in the sense that they were “responsive to sensory impressions.”

The researchers called their human-mouse-brain-hybrid “DishBrain” — and there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.

“DishBrain offers a simpler approach to test how the brain works, and gain insights into debilitating conditions such as epilepsy and dementia,” Cortical Labs CEO Dr. Hon Weng Chong explained. KOAM described Cortical Labs as a biotech start-up.

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Ratman: Human Brain Cells Grown In Rats

Scientists have transplanted human brain cells into the brains of baby rats, where the cells grew and formed connections.

It’s part of an effort to better study human brain development and diseases affecting this most complex of organs, which makes us who we are but has long been shrouded in mystery.

“Many disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are likely uniquely human” but “the human brain certainly has not been very accessible,” said said Dr. Sergiu Pasca, senior author of a study describing the work, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Approaches that don’t involve taking tissue out of the human brain are “promising avenues in trying to tackle these conditions.”

The research builds upon the team’s previous work creating brain “organoids,” tiny structures resembling human organs that have also been made to represent others such as livers, kidneys, prostates, or key parts of them.

To make the brain organoids, Stanford University scientists transformed human skin cells into stem cells and then coaxed them to become several types of brain cells. Those cells then multiplied to form organoids resembling the cerebral cortex, the human brain’s outermost layer, which plays a key role in things like memory, thinking, learning, reasoning and emotions.

Scientists transplanted those organoids into rat pups 2 to 3 days old, a stage when brain connections are still forming. The organoids grew so that they eventually occupied a third of the hemisphere of the rat’s brain where they were implanted. Neurons from the organoids formed working connections with circuits in the brain.

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CIA Funding Wooly Mammoth De-Extinction Company

While the CIA is not generally known for dealing with ancient animals, the agency is one of the multiple entities financially backing Dallas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to bring the wooly mammoth back from extinction.

Other individuals and groups with investments in the company include Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton and Winklevoss Capital.

“Biotechnology and the broader bioeconomy are critical for humanity to further develop. It is important for all facets of our government to develop them and have an understanding of what is possible,” Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm told The Intercept.

In-Q-Tel, Colossal’s new investor, is registered as a nonprofit venture capital firm funded by the CIA, according to The Intercept, which said that recently the firm had shown an interest in biotechnology and DNA sequencing.

In-Q-Tel published a blog post on September 22, which said: “Why the interest in a company like Colossal, which was founded with a mission to “de-extinct” the wooly mammoth and other species? Strategically, it’s less about the mammoths and more about the capability.”

It said that “leadership in biotechnology will allow the U.S. to help set the ethical, as well as the technological, standards for the use of this technology.”

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Climate Bombshell: Greenland Ice Sheet Recovers as Scientists Say Earlier Loss was Due to Natural Warming Not CO2 Emissions

A popular scare story running in the media is that the Greenland ice sheet is about to slip its moorings under ferocious and unprecedented Arctic heat and arrive in the reader’s front room any day now (I exaggerate, but not much). Meanwhile back in the scientific world, scientists are scrambling to understand what natural causes lie behind the sudden slow-down in Greenland’s summer warming and ice loss dating back to 2010. The recovery of Arctic summer sea ice has been spectacular of late, with the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center reporting that this year’s September minimum was 1.28 million square kilometres  higher than the 2012 low point of 3.39 million square kilometres.

Three Japanese climatologists have recently published a paper noting that “frequent occurrence of central Pacific El Niño events has played a key role in the [abrupt] slow-down of Greenland warming and possibly Arctic sea ice loss”. Of course such findings play havoc with the simplistic ‘settled’ science notion that carbon dioxide produced by humans burning fossil fuel is the main, if not only, driver of global temperature warming or cooling – a notion that leads many green activists to claim that the climate will stop changing if society signs on to a ‘Net Zero’ CO2 emissions agenda.

For instance, a bizarre ‘fact check’ on a recently published Daily Sceptic article by Facebook partner Climate Feedback claimed there had been no natural climate change for almost 200 years. It quoted Professor Timothy Osborn of the University of East Anglia, who said: “The warming from the late 1800s to the present is all due to human-caused climate change, because natural factors have changed little since then, and even would have caused a slight cooling over the last 70 years rather than the warming we have observed.”

The Japanese scientists argue that they have been able to show that El Niño natural weather oscillations have driven “atmospheric teleconnection” and shifted the tropical rainfall zone to the north. The higher warming up to 2012 was “accelerated” by heat from the Pacific and a phase in the North Atlantic sea current oscillation that favoured warmer conditions over Greenland and enhanced ice melt. Changes around Greenland can be attributed to “natural variability, rather than anthropogenic forcing”, note the scientists, “although most climate models were unable to reasonably simulate the unforced natural variability over Greenland”.

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Major Scientific Publisher Retracting Over 500 Papers

One of the world’s largest open-access journal publishers is retracting over 500 papers, based on the discovery of unethical actions.

London-based Hindawi, which publishes over 200 peer-reviewed journals across multiple disciplines, says its research team in June identified “irregularities” in the peer review process in some of the journals.

“All Hindawi journals employ a series of substantial integrity checks before articles are accepted for publication. Following thorough investigation, we identified that these irregularities in the peer review process were the result of suspicious and unethical activities. Since identifying this unethical activity and breach of our processes, we began proactively adding further checks and improving our processes and continue to do so,” Liz Ferguson, a senior vice president for John Wiley & Sons, Hindawi’s U.S.-based parent company, said in a statement on Sept. 28.

As a result of the investigation, 511 papers will be retracted.

The papers were all published since August 2020.

Sixteen journals published the papers that are being retracted.

Some of the authors and editors who contributed to the articles may have been “unwitting participants” in the unethical scheme, according to Ferguson. She said that the scheme involved “manipulation of the peer review process and the infrastructure that supports it.”

Richard Bennett, vice president of researcher and publishing services for Hindawi, told the Retraction Watch blog that the review uncovered “coordinated peer review rings,” which featured reviewers and editors coordinating to get papers through peer review.

Neither Ferguson nor Bennett identified any of the suspects.

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Scientific Censorship: Climate Fanatics Urge Removal of Study Questioning Evidence of a “Climate Crisis”

Claiming that four Italian scientists who published a peer-reviewed paper earlier this year finding that there is not yet evidence of any “climate crisis” wrote the study in “bad faith,” climate fanatic scientists are urging that the journal that published the study remove it from public view.

The study in question comes to the conclusion that the so-called “climate crisis” that the mainstream media say is already upon us is not evident — at least yet — and that it is counterproductive to claim that such a crisis exists.

The study, done by four Italian scientists — physicist Gianluca Alimonti, professor of agrometeorology Luigi Mariani, atmospheric physicist Franco Prodi, and physicist Renato Angelo Ricci — states that “the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”

Further, the Italian study calls into question the wisdom of leaving such a “crisis” for our children without the necessary tools — fossil fuels, etc. — they will need to adapt to such a crisis should it ever come to bear.

“Leaving the baton to our children without burdening them with the anxiety of being in a climate emergency would allow them to face the various problems in place (energy, agricultural-food, health, etc.) with a more objective and constructive spirit, with the goal of arriving at a weighted assessment of the actions to be taken without wasting the limited resources at our disposal in costly and ineffective solutions,” the Italian study states.

The study was first published in January, and has been cited by mainstream media outlets such as Sky News Australia. Only now are other scientists, interviewed by French news service AFP, calling for the paper to be memory-holed.

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Biologists Create a New Type of Human Cells

Professor Vincent Pasque and his colleagues at KU Leuven have used stem cells to create a new kind of human cell in the lab. The new cells closely mirror their natural counterparts in early human embryos. As a result, scientists are better able to understand what occurs just after an embryo implants in the womb. The was recently published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

A human embryo implants in the womb around seven days after fertilization if everything goes correctly. Due to technological and ethical constraints, the embryo becomes unavailable for study at that point. That is why scientists have already created stem cell models for various kinds of embryonic and extraembryonic cells in order to investigate human development in a dish.

Vincent Pasque’s team at KU Leuven has developed the first model for a specific type of human embryo cells, extraembryonic mesoderm cells. Professor Pasque: “These cells generate the first blood in an embryo, help to attach the embryo to the future placenta, and play a role in forming the primitive umbilical cord. In humans, this type of cell appears at an earlier developmental stage than in mouse embryos, and there might be other important differences between species. That makes our model especially important: research in mice may not give us answers that also apply to humans.”

The model cells were created by the researchers using human stem cells, which can still grow into all cell types in an embryo. The new cells closely resemble their natural counterparts in human embryos and hence serve as an excellent model for that cell type.

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Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Vaccinate a Human

A box full of genetically modified mosquitoes successfully vaccinated a human against malaria in a trial funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The study involved about 200 hungry mosquitos biting a human subject’s arm. Human participants placed their arms directly over a small box full of the bloodsuckers.

“We use the mosquitoes like they’re 1,000 small flying syringes,” said researcher Dr. Sean Murphy, as reported by NPR.

Three to five “vaccinations” took place over 30-day intervals.

The mosquitoes gave minor versions of malaria that didn’t make people sick, but gave them antibodies. Efficacy from the antibodies lasted a few months.

“Half of the individuals in each vaccine group did not develop detectable P. falciparum infection, and a subset of these individuals was subjected to a second CHMI 6 months later and remained partially protected. These results support further development of genetically attenuated sporozoites as potential malaria vaccines,” researchers concluded.

Carolina Reid was one of twenty-six participants in the study.

“My whole forearm swelled and blistered. My family was laughing, asking like, ‘why are you subjecting yourself to this?’”

Reid enjoyed her experience so much that she says she wants to participate in as many vaccine trials as she can. For this research, each participant received $4,100 as an incentive.

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THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS: ODD NEW METASURFACE MATERIAL IS A “DOORWAY” TO STRANGE QUANTUM PHENOMENON

A phenomenon that often accompanies technological innovations involves how they tend to become smaller with their improvement over time. From televisions and communication devices like telephones to computers and microchip components, many of the technologies we use every day occupy a fraction of the space in our homes and offices that their predecessors did just decades ago.

In keeping with this trend, it is no surprise that a new tech developed by scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, may soon replace cumbersome technologies than once required an entire room to operate, thanks to an ultrathin invention that could change the future of computation, encryption, and a host of other technologies.

At the heart of the invention and its function is a peculiar phenomenon that has perplexed physicists for decades, known as quantum entanglement.

Entanglement involves particles (photons, in this case) that are linked in such a way that any changes that affect one of them will affect the other. Strangely, the distance between entangled particles does not affect the way such changes occur, a peculiarity first described by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen in 1935, which Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

Although physicists have difficulty reconciling this mainstay of the quantum mechanical world with our concepts of classical mechanics, scientists have nonetheless succeeded in tapping the strange phenomenon of entanglement in developing new information technologies, improving encryption technologies, and even correcting errors in the burgeoning field of quantum computing.

Now, the creation of an all-new material by the Sandia Labs and Max Planck Institute team could further improve efforts to harness quantum entanglement in the production of innovative new technologies.

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