Tag: science

Transfusion of brain fluid from young mice is a memory-elevating elixir for old animals

For a human, one of the first signs someone is getting old is the inability to remember little things; maybe they misplace their keys, or get lost on an oft-taken route. For a laboratory mouse, it’s forgetting that when bright lights and a high-pitched buzz flood your cage, an electric zap to the foot quickly follows.

But researchers at Stanford University discovered that if you transfuse cerebrospinal fluid from a young mouse into an old one, it will recover its former powers of recall and freeze in anticipation. They also identified a protein in that cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, that penetrates into the hippocampus, where it drives improvements in memory.

The tantalizing breakthrough, published Wednesday in Nature, suggests that youthful factors circulating in the CSF, or drugs that target the same pathways, might be tapped to slow the cognitive declines of old age. Perhaps even more importantly, it shows for the first time the potential of CSF as a vehicle to get therapeutics for neurological diseases into the hard-to-reach fissures of the human brain.

“This is the first study that demonstrates real improvement in cognitive function with CSF infusion, and so that’s what makes it a real milestone,” said Maria Lehtinen, a neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the new research. “The super-exciting direction here is that it lends support to the idea that we can harness the CSF as a therapeutic avenue for a broad range of conditions.”

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Forget extinction: U.S. company plans to bring back wooly mammoths

Wooly mammoths might be making a comeback thanks to Colossal Biosciences of the great state of Texas.

The Dallas-based company says it plans to take on the environmental issues that led to critical endangerment and perform the once seemingly impossible task of reviving long-extinct species.

Colossal announced it will pioneer the use of CRISPR technology along with other genome engineering technologies toward a practical working model of de-extinction initially focused on its long-term goals of successful restoration and rewilding of functional woolly mammoths, large proboscideans from the Ice Age, to the tundra, according to a press release.

It said genetic engineering applications expand beyond animals and have the potential to advance human health, enhance food production, reduce environmental impact, and optimize animal health and welfare.

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EPA Ignores Own Science, Plans to Reapprove Deadly Neonicotinoid Pesticides

Recent coverage by The Guardian of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) plan — to extend the registration of several demonstrably harmful neonicotinoid insecticides — compels Beyond Pesticides to identify, once again, the agency’s failures to enact its core mission.

That mission is “to protect human health and the environment,” and to ensure that “national efforts to reduce environmental risks are based on the best available scientific information.”

EPA has undertaken a review of the registration of several members of the neonicotinoid (neonic) family of pesticides and, despite the agency’s own findings of evidence of serious threats to pollinators, aquatic invertebrates, and other wildlife, it issued interim decisions on these neonics in January 2020 that disregard the science on the pesticides’ impacts.

EPA appears to be prepared to finalize these registrations late in 2022; this would, barring further action, extend the use of these harmful compounds for 15 years.

Neonics are used widely in the U.S., both on crops to kill sucking insects, and as seed treatments with the same goal for the developing plant.

These insecticides are systemic compounds, meaning that once applied, they travel to all parts of a plant through the vascular system, and are then present in pollen, nectar, and guttation droplets.

Non-target organisms — such as bees, butterflies, birds, bats, and other insects — feed and drink from those sources and are thus readily and indiscriminately poisoned.

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Mosquitoes With Synthetic DNA Scheduled For California Release

In the mosquito breeding rooms of British biotech company Oxitec, scientists line up fresh eggs, each the size of a grain of salt. Using microscopic needles, the white-coated researchers inject each egg with a dab of a proprietary synthetic DNA.

For four days, Oxitec technicians care for the eggs, watching for those that hatch into wriggling brown larvae. Those “injection survivors,” as the company calls them, face a battery of tests to ensure their genetic modification is successful.

Soon, millions of these engineered mosquitoes could be set loose in California in an experiment recently approved by the federal government.

Oxitec, a private company, says its genetically modified bugs could help save half the world’s population from the invasive Aedes aegypti mosquito, which can spread diseases such as yellow fever, chikungunya and dengue to humans. Female offspring produced by these modified insects will die, according to Oxitec’s plan, causing the population to collapse.

“Precise. Environmentally sustainable. Non-toxic,” the company says on its website of its product trademarked as the “Friendly” mosquito.

Scientists independent from the company and critical of the proposal say not so fast. They say unleashing the experimental creatures into nature has risks that haven’t yet been fully studied, including possible harm to other species or unexpectedly making the local mosquito population harder to control.

Even scientists who see the potential of genetic engineering are uneasy about releasing the transgenic insects into neighborhoods because of how hard such trials are to control.

“There needs to be more transparency about why these experiments are being done,” said Natalie Kofler, a bioethicist at Harvard Medical Schoolwho has followed the company’s work. “How are we weighing the risks and benefits?”

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Eisenhower warned the World of the “danger that Public Policy could become the captive of a Scientific-Technological Elite” in 1961; but we didn’t listen

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the American people, delivered on the 17th of January 1961, has gone down in history as a truly thought-provoking speech culminating in a warning about the internal threats and dangers facing the country.

Written in eloquent language that would be hard to imagine coming forth from the lips of the current American president or his predecessor, it was apparently prepared by Eisenhower and his brother months in advance, rather than at the last moment, which is what many people had assumed.

And while pretty much everyone in the world has focused on his clear warning about the dangers of an excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the “military-industrial complex”, few have paid attention to—much less been guided by—the second warning he gave, one which is far more relevant today, given the current unmitigated disaster being unleashed upon humanity globally.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.[i]

These are the words that have been quoted time and again to explain the JFK assassination, the inexorable rise of the arms lobby in Congress, the ever-increasing war-mongering that has characterised US foreign policy over the last half century, the trillions that have been spent on the military—both in the US and in client states abroad—and even the lost trillions that have disappeared into black budgets and the secret space programme. These explanations and conclusions are not altogether incorrect or misplaced.

In fact, they do help shed light on how American democracy became subverted, how and why the American people lost the ability to influence their future through elections, and how the American economy became bogged down and is now drowning in its own debt, since the US military-industrial complex has indeed been one of the main protagonists in all of these developments.

However, what we have seen over the last two and a half years—which is nothing less than a global coup d’état—suggests that Eisenhower’s warning, though completely correct and prescient, goes some way to explaining only the events of the decades following the assassination of John F. Kennedy and not the events of the last few years, such as the Covid-19 plandemic/scamdemic, the jabbing of billions of people across the world by a gene-editing bioweapon, the destruction of the West’s middle class, the relentless roll-out of digital tools and platforms to upend multiple aspects of daily living/human interaction, and the dramatic escalation in censorship and information manipulation to confuse and fool the populations of countries everywhere.

In all of these developments, the US military-industrial complex has not been the protagonist. Indeed, it too has been a victim — a victim of another group of conspirators which has surpassed it in terms of reach, effectiveness and evil intent. To understand the nature of this group, it is necessary to explore President Eisenhower’s speech further and spot the second dire warning he issued. Here it is:

… we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.[ii]

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Science papers now subject to extreme censorship if they question the “official” narrative on anything: COVID, AIDS, vaccines, climate, virology and more

The “moderators” at Cornell University‘s arXiv server, an open-access archive and free distribution service for scientific material, have been censoring scientific studies that they claim contain “inflammatory content and unprofessional language.”

A “preprint server” for preliminary versions of scientific studies that are moderated but not yet peer-reviewed or published, arXiv is supposed to be neutral when it comes to what gets published. The reality, however, is that arXiv is selectively censoring studies and even banning scientists for publishing work with “controversial” viewpoints.

In one instance, researchers tried to publish a study presenting an opposing viewpoint to another study about room temperature superconductivity. Those researchers aligned with the opposing point of view study are reportedly now “in hot water” on arXiv for daring to buck the “consensus.”

The server also proceeded to ban University of California San Diego (UCSD) theoretical physicist Jorge Hirsch from posting anything on the platform for six months as punishment for his conflicting viewpoints.

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