Tag: science

This New, Non-Cuttable Material Is Virtually Indestructible

A new material called Proteus is billed as just 15 percent the density of steel, but completely resistant to being cut through. That means cyclists around the world may be blessed with truly inviolable locks for the first time ever.

People who want to steal the outdoor furniture from restaurant patios will have to cut the furniture now instead of the cable lock. Most importantly, TV writers will have to work even harder to make it seem easy to get into a locked electrical storage or nuclear facility.

Researchers in Germany and the U.K. have teamed up to make a material they say uses harmony and vibration to thwart any attempts to cut it. “Our architecture derives its extreme hardness from the local resonance between the embedded ceramics in a flexible cellular matrix and the attacking tool, which produces high-frequency vibrations at the interface,” they explain in their paper.

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Dr. Anthony Fauci Opposes Controlled Study on Effectiveness of Masks

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday he opposes conducting a controlled study on the effectiveness of masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Fauci discussed the idea during a conversation with students of Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.

One student asked if it is possible to do a study in the midst of a pandemic about the effectiveness of wearing masks.

“What kind of studies can we do right now in the middle of the pandemic about masks and transmission of the disease?” the student asked. “Or are we just relying on anecdotal evidence because we are not able to do those kind of studies right now?”

Fauci said there are enough “meta-analyses” of existing data showing the efficacy of masks.

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The COVID-19 Panic Shows Us Why Science Needs Skeptics

The dumpster fire of COVID predictions has shown exactly why it’s important to sustain and nurture skeptics, lest we blunder into scientific monoculture and groupthink. And yet the explosion of “cancel culture” intolerance of any opinion that doesn’t fit a shrinking “3 x 5 card” of right-think risks destroying the very tolerance and science that sustains our civilization.

Since World War II, America has suffered two respiratory pandemics comparable to COVID-19: the 1958 “Asian flu,” then the 1969 “Hong Kong flu.” In neither case did we shut down the economy—people were simply more careful. Not all that careful, of course—Jimi Hendrix was playing at Woodstock in the middle of the 1969 pandemic, and social distancing wasn’t really a thing in the “Summer of Love.”

And yet COVID-19 was very different thanks to a single “buggy mess” of a computer prediction from one Neil Ferguson, a British epidemiologist given to hysterical overestimates of deaths, from mad cow to bird flu to H1N1.

For COVID-19, Ferguson predicted 3 million deaths in America unless we basically shut down the economy. Panicked policymakers took his prediction as gospel, dressed as it was in the cloak of science.

Now, long after governments plunged half the world into a Great Depression, those panicked revisions are being quietly revised down by an order of magnitude, now suggesting a final tally comparable to 1958 and 1969.

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