Why don’t you trust the science?
Tag: science
Fauci Oversaw Dangerous, Torturous Experiments On Dogs
In addition to overseeing funding of gain of function coronavirus experiments in Wuhan, and then lying about it, it has now emerged that Dr Fauci was in charge of funding horrid experimental research on dogs, including purposefully infecting the animals with parasites known to be contagious to humans.
The report from the White Coat Waste Project draws on information gleaned from a FOIA request which revealed that $400,000 was pumped into National Institutes of Allergy & Infectious Disease experiments to infect beagles with parasites from biting flies.
The report outlines how the dogs “endured months of pain, and once researchers were done with them, they were killed.”
The NIAID task order states that “28 beagles were to be allowed to develop infections for three months before being euthanized for blood collection.”
The records obtained under the FOIA request show the dogs “vocalized pain” during the experiments.
‘It’s happening’: Ice worms emerge in Pacific Northwest glaciers
“It’s happening,” scientist Scott Hotaling told a reporter for OPB as he gestured across Paradise Glacier high up on Mount Rainier in Washington.
He was referencing hundreds of thousands of tiny, black worms emerging from a vast expanse of white snow.
Ice worms were first discovered in 1887 on Alaska’s Muir Glacier. They have since been spotted on most of the coastal glaciers in Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. It was an exciting discovery because, for the longest time, biologists considered high-altitude glaciers sterile places where life was essentially impossible.
“I think they’re like the mascot of mountain glaciers in the West,” Hotaling told AccuWeather about ice worms. They’re incredibly cool, they’re incredibly abundant and they’re the largest organism on Earth that spends its whole life cycle in ice. ” When they’re around, there are hundreds per square meter. You cannot walk without stepping on them…so, it’s a very dramatic thing when they are present.”
Scientific Authoritarianism Erodes Private Property And Human Liberty
“A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.”
~Hannah Arendt ~ (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1966)
As a recipient of an E.C. Harwood Visiting Research Fellowship at the American Institute for Economic Research, I am inspired by tales of the principled battles that Colonel Harwood fought in support of the ideals behind the US Constitution. Taking his oath to support that great document as a lodestar, his support for the cause of human liberty and personal dignity led him to be a vocal opponent of the policies of FDR’s New Deal. As such, he continued doing so despite orders from his military commanders to cease his criticisms, eventually choosing to take early retirement from a promising military career as a graduate of West Point.
My lesson from his brave acts against the most powerful institutions in the US is that being a true patriot requires supporting an ideology of individual freedom rather than accepting partisan interests that violate foundational precepts. As such, Americans wishing for a united and prosperous country should follow Edward Harwood’s example to challenge the authority of government officials and question assertions of “experts” they use for support.
This contrarian behavior is even more urgent given the drift of public policy in recent years that would expand political powers beyond FDR’s wildest dreams, at the expense of private property rights and human liberty. As it is, public policies have become increasingly pointed towards responses to claims that irresponsible actions by humans are causing environmental degradation and climate change.
While the emergence of a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and the disease that it might cause, Covid-19, are now at center stage, they share equal billing with the former only slightly in the background. In all events, this pair of menaces offers a convenient pretense for government officials to seek expansions in their powers that give them greater control over human actions and private resources. Initially, the specter of climate change was not enough to induce most citizens to accept enhanced political power that would diminish their liberty and curtail their personal rights.
However, fear ginned up during the recent pandemic based on pronouncements reflecting “expert” authority caused individuals to stop thinking of health as a personal issue and to embrace “public health.” The notion that “public health” reflects an objective reality must be challenged, especially since so much focus is on only one among many viruses and on only one disease among many ailments that afflict mankind. It is troubling that these political feats of legerdemain have induced many citizens to accept an artificial collective construct, with solidarity dominating individual autonomy and security elevated over human liberty.
While human health and protecting or rehabilitating the natural environment are indisputably worthy goals, a holistic approach to these matters requires considering their impact on the individual lives of humans.
Curbs on individual behavior and resource use to serve “public health” or the natural environment involve an unhealthy confusion of politics and “science.” In the end, the nonpharmaceutical interventions related to the Covid-19 pandemic might turn out to have been a dress rehearsal that serves as a roadmap for “climate action” to offset global warming.
Even if there is agreement on problems arising from human activity, the debate should be about the efficacy of the range of remedial actions that are available. As such, the quest for solutions should begin with an understanding that government interventions can often cause problems rather than be an appropriate remedy.
Physicists Have Developed a New Way to Levitate Objects Using Sound Only
A newly developed method of levitating and manipulating tiny objects using sound waves could represent a major step forward for the technology.
Engineers in Japan have figured out how to pick up objects from reflective surfaces using acoustic levitation. Although they can’t yet do so reliably, the advance could help unlock the full potential of the manipulation of physical objects using nothing but sound.
Biomedical engineering, nanotechnology and the development of pharmaceuticals are some of the fields in which manipulating objects without touching them is potentially really useful. We can already do this with a technology called optical tweezers, which use lasers to generate sufficient radiation pressure to levitate and move extremely small particles.
Acoustic tweezers – where pressure generated with sound waves can be used to move particles – have the potential to be an even more powerful tool. They could be used to manipulate a wider range of materials, and at larger sizes – up to the millimeter scale.
A matter of trust…
Religious adherents…
Wormhole Tunnels in Spacetime May Be Possible, New Research Suggests
In the early days of research on black holes, before they even had that name, physicists did not yet know if these bizarre objects existed in the real world. They might have been a quirk of the complicated math used in the then still young general theory of relativity, which describes gravity. Over the years, though, evidence has accumulated that black holes are very real and even exist right here in our galaxy.
Today another strange prediction from general relativity—wormholes, those fantastical sounding tunnels to the other side of the universe—hang in the same sort of balance. Are they real? And if they are out there in our cosmos, could humans hope to use them for getting around? After their prediction in 1935, research seemed to point toward no—wormholes appeared unlikely to be an element of reality. But new work offers hints of how they could arise, and the process may be easier than physicists have long thought.
The original idea of a wormhole came from physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. They studied the strange equations that we now know describe that unescapable pocket of space we call a black hole and asked what they really represented. Einstein and Rosen discovered that, theoretically at least, a black hole’s surface might work as a bridge that connected to a second patch of space. The journey might be as if you went down the drain of your bathtub, and instead of getting stuck in the pipes, you came out into another tub just like the first.
Mysterious New ‘Borg’ DNA Seems to Assimilate Genes From Different Organisms
Mysterious strands of DNA that seemingly assimilate genes from many different organisms in their surrounding environment have been discovered in a Californian backyard.
Scientists have named these elements “Borgs”, and their discovery could help us not just understand the evolution of microorganisms, but their interactions within their ecosystems, and their role in the broader environment.
According to geomicrobiologist Jill Banfield from the University of California, Berkeley, Borgs could make for a tremendously significant discovery.
“I haven’t been this excited about a discovery since CRISPR,” she said on Twitter. “We found something enigmatic that, like CRISPR, is associated with microbial genomes.”
A paper describing the structures has been uploaded to preprint server bioRxiv, and currently awaits peer review.
The first of the Borgs was discovered in mud dredged up from Banfield’s backyard. She was working with geneticist Basem Al-Shayeb of UC Berkeley to identify viruses that infect anoxic microbes known as archaea that live in wetland environments, Science Magazine reports.
Environmental DNA is an excellent way to identify the range of organisms that inhabit an ecosystem. But in their scoop of mud, Banfield and Al-Shayeb found something funny: a structure of DNA consisting of nearly a million base pairs. That’s huge.
A closer look at the sequence revealed even more peculiarities: more than half of the genes were new; it had mirrored sequences at the end of each strand; and it showed structures consistent with the ability to self-replicate.
Puzzled, the researchers turned to DNA databases to see if they could find anything else that looked like their discovery. They identified 19 sequences that seemed to fit the profile.
What these DNA structures are is unclear, but they’re certainly fascinating. They belong to a class of structures called extrachromosomal elements, or ECEs, which can be found outside of the chromosomes that contain most of an organism’s genetic material.
ECEs are huge and self-replicating, and they can be found inside or outside of the cell nuclei; examples include plasmids and viral DNA.
“We can neither prove that they are archaeal viruses or plasmids or mini-chromosomes, nor can we prove that they are not,” the researchers write in their paper.
The Borgs are much larger than other ECEs, however, according to Banfield: one-third of the size of their host microbes.
World-first CRISPR-edited sugarcane helps reduce environmental impact
Sugarcane is an important food crop, but it’s large environmental impact means there’s plenty of room for improvement. Unfortunately it’s tricky and time-consuming to breed new varieties, but now researchers have used CRISPR gene-editing to do so quickly and more easily.
Sugarcane is a key source of sugar, obviously, but that’s not its only product – the oil in the leaves and stems is often used to make bioethanol for greener fuels and plastics. But these don’t come cheap – sugarcane takes up a large percentage of farmland in many countries, which fuels deforestation. It also takes a huge amount of water to grow, and creates plenty of waste and pollution during processing.
Some of these problems can be addressed with new varieties of the plant, but sugarcane is frustratingly difficult to crossbreed due to its complex genome. It requires a lot of back-and-forth to filter out desirable traits from unwanted ones, so new versions can take years to develop.
That’s where CRISPR comes in. This powerful gene-editing tool allows scientists to switch off genes or cut them out and replace them with more useful ones. It could be useful in treating a range of diseases, but also for improving crops – and now researchers have used CRISPR to develop a couple of new varieties of sugarcane.
Hellbound and Down 
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