Tag: science

High-Profile Scientists Keep Winding Up Dead or Missing — GOP Rep Suggests There May Be a Conspiracy at Play

Several prominent scientists and researchers in the U.S. have reportedly died or gone missing over the past year, fueling speculation about whether some of the disappearances may have occurred under suspicious circumstances.

William Neil McCasland, a 68-year-old retired Air Force major general who had knowledge of UFOs, went missing in New Mexico on Feb. 27, NewsNation reported. Republican Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett told the Daily Mail on Sunday that he believes there may be a pattern emerging of other researchers throughout the nation similarly disappearing “under suspicious circumstances.”

“There have been several others throughout the country that have disappeared under suspicious circumstances,” Burchett told the outlet. “I think we ought to be paying attention to it.”

The congressman also indicated that “the numbers seem very high in these certain areas of research,” adding “I think we’d better be paying attention, and I don’t think we should trust our government.” He went on to claim that researchers with knowledge about UFOs are usually “very secretive about what they know.”

“Everybody’s talking about the UFO stuff,” the Tennessee Republican told the Daily Mail. “Those folks are very secretive about what they know. So I suspect very much that [McCasland] was involved in some of that.”

Burchett’s office did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

McCasland’s wife, Susan, asserted that no “foul play” was suspected in her husband’s disappearance, but added that he had left their house with just a pair of boots and his .38-caliber revolver on the day he disappeared, according to the Daily Mail.

Still, investigative journalist Ross Coulthart suggested during a Sunday appearance on “NewsNation Prime” that “foul play” may be a possibility in relation to McCasland’s disappearance.

“We have to ask, now, [about] the possibility of foul play — is there somebody who has interceded to take the general out of the picture?” Coulthart told NewsNation. “He was a man with some of the most sensitive U.S. military intelligence secrets in his head, especially particle beam technology.”

Additionally, Monica Reza went missing on June 22, 2025 while on a hike in the Angeles National Forest, per a Facebook page which describes its mission as aiming to “raising awareness and organizing volunteer efforts” to help find her. Reza previously served as a material scientist at Aerojet Rocketdyne, which notably was funded by NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory for several years, The New York Post (NY Post) reported.

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“Renewable” energy policies can’t work – because of physics

Chapter 1: The Physics That Demolishes Energy Policy, Or Why You Can’t Boil An Egg In A Swimming Pool

By Richard Lyon, 3 March 2026

On Saturday, I told you I’d written a book and promised to walk through its core arguments chapter by chapter. Some long-standing readers will recognise what follows from a post I wrote in 2024. This is the sharper, tighter version that became the book’s opening chapter – the foundation everything else rests on. If you’re new here, start here.

There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water. You can boil an egg in the pan. You can’t boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available – and still have a cold, raw egg.

This is not a riddle. It is the single most important concept in the energy debate, and almost nobody making energy policy understands it.

Gradient

To do useful work, energy must flow from a region of high concentration to a region of low concentration. This difference is called the energy gradient. The steeper the gradient, the more work you can extract. A shallow gradient means the energy is real but useless.

Think of a ski slope. A run that falls 1,000 feet over 1,000 feet of distance is steep enough to let gravity do the work. A ski queue that falls 10 feet over 100 feet is too shallow – you have to shuffle. Now join 100 ski queues end to end. The total height difference is 1,000 feet – the same as the ski run. But do you glide down it? No. Because the gradient hasn’t changed. It’s still a long, flat shuffle.

This is exactly what happens when you build more wind turbines. A gas flame at 1,500°C in a 15°C room is a ski run – a vast temperature difference that a power generation system can exploit. A wind turbine extracts energy from air moving at perhaps 25 miles an hour. That’s real energy, but it’s a tiny gradient – the difference between a breeze and no breeze. Build a thousand turbines and the total energy grows, but the gradient of each one hasn’t changed. You haven’t built a ski run. You’ve built a thousand ski queues.

Density

Energy gradient tells you whether a source can do work, and therefore why the sheer quantity of energy available tells you almost nothing about how much useful work you can extract from it. Energy density tells you whether you can build a civilisation on it.

Diesel contains roughly 44 megajoules per kilogram. The best lithium-ion battery manages about 1. That is a ratio of 44 to 1 – and the gap is not an engineering problem. It is a chemistry problem. Carbon-hydrogen bonds release enormous energy when broken. Shuttling lithium ions between electrodes releases much less. The periodic table is not subject to software updates.

This is why you can drive from London to Edinburgh on 50 litres of diesel, but need a battery weighing half a tonne to do it in an electric car. It’s why aviation runs on kerosene and always will. It is not a matter of waiting for better technology. It is a hard physical constraint.

Every successful energy transition in history has moved up the density ladder: wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to nuclear. Each step concentrated more energy into less mass, enabling capabilities that were physically impossible before. Railways. Aviation. The globalised supply chain. The direction has always been the same: concentration.

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Chinese scientists have turned mosquitoes into flying vaccines — that can still bite humans

Researchers from the nation that likely unleashed COVID-19 unto the world have transformed mosquitoes into flying syringes.

Some researchers, including a group at the Bill Gates Foundation-backed Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, have already attempted in recent years to fashion mosquitoes into flying vaccine delivery systems with human targets in mind.

Now, scientists at the state-controlled Chinese Academy of Sciences — an institution that has a strategic partnership with the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences — have targeted bats, purportedly designing mosquitoes to instead deliver recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus-based rabies and Nipah vaccines to the flying mammals.

Like rabies, Nipah virus is a potentially deadly virus found in animals. Whereas rabies has nearly a 100% fatality rate in humans once symptoms manifest, the estimated case fatality rate for Nipah virus ranges from 40% to 75%.

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Is ‘vibe physics’ the future?

At the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Denver, a session on “Navigating the AI revolution: future-proofing your science career” drew in a crowd of early-stage physicists searching for practical career advice. What they received was much more philosophical in nature.

Malachi Schram of the Pacific Northwest National Lab and Hilary Egan of the National Laboratory of the Rockies delivered back-to-back talks full of similar rhetoric, emphasizing the fast-paced development of AI used for specialized tasks in science, such as detecting equipment failure or identifying ways of retrofitting older buildings.

But the third speaker, Matthew Schwartz, a theoretical physicist from Harvard University, took his optimism about AI far further. In a punchy presentation, he predicted that large language models (LLMs) will surpass human intelligence in five years.

“There’s definitely exponential growth of the intellectual capacity of these [large language] models as a function of time,” Schwartz told the audience, using the number of model parameters as a proxy for intelligence. “The machines are still growing by roughly 10 times each year, and we” – he paused for dramatic effect – “are not growing much smarter.” This drew a wave of laughter from the crowd.

Unlike humans, machines can visualize higher dimensional spaces, hold far more information in memory and process more complex equations. “We are not the endpoint of intelligence. We are only the smartest things to evolve on Earth so far,” Schwartz argued. He went on to suggest that humans may simply be incapable of understanding long-standing physics problems such as a theory of everything. He compared it to cats, which he suggested will never understand chess.

If the talent of physicists exists on a bell curve, Schwartz claims we can push the bell curve higher on the talent axis: “If we use AI augmentation, we can get 10 000 Einsteins a century instead of one Einstein.”

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Scientists Just Taught Lab-Grown Brain Cells to Play Video Games — and People Are Freaked Out

Researchers say they have successfully trained living human brain cells to play the classic video game Doom, marking the latest experiment in so-called “biological computing.”

Australian biotech company Cortical Labs announced the development in a recent demonstration showing neurons grown in a laboratory interacting with the 1993 first-person shooter.

The experiment builds on earlier work from 2022, when the company revealed that clusters of human brain cells grown in a petri dish had learned to play the much simpler video game Pong.

Those early experiments involved “mini-brains” made up of roughly 800,000 to one million living human neurons.

According to the company, the cells demonstrated the ability to adapt and learn basic tasks in real time.

Now researchers say they have taken the technology further by teaching the neurons to interact with the far more complex environment of Doom, a three-dimensional game that requires movement, targeting, and exploration.

To make the system work, engineers translated the digital signals from the game into patterns of electrical stimulation that the neurons could interpret.

“So we showed that biological neurons could play the game Pong,” Cortical Labs chief scientific officer Brett Kagan explained in a video announcement.

“This was a massive milestone because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time, goal-directed learning.”

“Doom was much more complex,” he added. “It’s 3D. It has enemies. It needs to explore, its an environment, and it’s hard.”

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Aliens may have been trying to contact us for DECADES, scientists claim – as they warn we’ve been ‘looking for the wrong thing’

For decades, we’ve been looking to the skies for any sign of aliens – but it turns out we may have been missing attempts at contact.

A new study has cast doubt on our radio signal detection methods, arguing that ‘space weather’ could be distorting incoming transmissions.

Until now, most experiments have focused on identifying spikes in radio frequency – signals unlikely to be produced by any other natural processes in space.

But experts have highlighted an overlooked complication.

Even if an extraterrestrial transmitter produces a perfectly narrow radio signal, it may not remain narrow by the time it leaves its home star’s atmosphere.

This distortion, which happens near the point of origin, can ‘smear’ the signal’s frequency, meaning it can be missed by our detectors that are primed to search for more focused radio waves.

‘Searches are often optimized for extremely narrow signals,’ Dr Vishal Gajjar, astronomer at the SETI Institute and lead author of the paper, said.

‘If a signal gets broadened by its own star’s environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it’s there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we’ve seen in technosignature searches.’

For their study, the team analysed radio transmissions from our own spacecraft in the solar system.

Using measurements from probes, they worked out how turbulent plasma released from stars – such as the Sun – affects radio signals.

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They Are Experimenting on Your Dog

You read the labels. You check the ingredients. You avoid seed oils, limit sugar, and side-eye anything with a barcode longer than a haiku. You subscribe to Substacks that dissect institutional capture. You understand, probably better than most, that “the science” can be quietly purchased by the people it is supposed to regulate.

So let me ask you a question that might sting.

What did you feed your dog this morning?

If the answer is a brown pellet from a bag, you are running the same ultraprocessed food experiment on your dog that you have spent the last few years learning to reject for yourself and your family. And you are doing it for entirely understandable reasons, because the same machinery of institutional capture, industry-funded research, and reassuring pseudo-scientific language that once told you margarine was healthier than butter has been quietly operating in veterinary medicine for decades.

I am a practising veterinary surgeon in the UK. I have spent over 30 years in clinical practice, and I am the founding president of the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society. I also lecture on canine nutrition at the University of Glasgow and around the world. I was in Florida last year and San Diego the year before. I am writing a book on ultraprocessed food for dogs, because someone needs to say plainly what the pet food industry would rather you never thought about: your dog has been subjected to the most sustained ultraprocessed feeding experiment in mammalian history, and almost nobody noticed.

The Cleverest Marketing You Never Saw

Here is how it works, and it will feel familiar to anyone who has followed the corruption of nutritional science in human medicine.

The major pet food corporations do not merely sell food. They fund the university departments in the UK and the US where veterinary nutritional science is researched. They endow professorships. They provide free student packs and educational materials to veterinary schools. They sponsor the conferences where vets gather for continuing professional development. They supply the textbooks. They fund the bursaries. They stock the waiting room shelves and put posters on the surgery walls.

They do this so quietly and so comprehensively that most vets do not even realise they have been swimming in industry-sponsored water since the first day of vet school.

The result is predictable. Almost all large-scale nutrition studies published over the past 50 years have been conducted on extruded, grain-based diets produced by the very companies that funded the research. That research became what vets are taught. 

Raw and fresh diets, by contrast, have received almost no industry funding, which means almost no large-scale trials. Vets are then honestly told there is “no evidence” for raw, because nobody with money has paid for that evidence to exist.

It is rather like sponsoring every study on buses and then declaring there is “no evidence” that bicycles work.

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association’s Global Nutrition Committee now explicitly warns that most pet nutrition studies are industry-funded and says conflicts of interest should always be declared. RCVS Knowledge, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in the UK, which runs the Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine Network, notes that funding source is one of the strongest predictors of outcome in nutrition trials. JAVMA News has run pieces on corporate influence in veterinary education.

This is in the official documents. It is no longer fringe grumbling.

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Renowned scientist who discovered water on distant planet shot dead on front porch of California home

A renowned scientist who contributed to the discovery of water on a distant planet was mysteriously shot and killed on the front porch of his desert California home. 

Carl Grillmair, 67, was identified as the victim of a fatal shooting in Llano, a rural area of northern Los Angeles, on Monday morning. 

Colleagues called Grillmair’s research ‘ingenious’ and said that discovering water ‘is a telltale sign the conditions of the planet are auspicious for life.’

The astrophysicist was found with a gunshot wound on his front porch after detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Homicide responded to reports of an assault with a deadly weapon just after 6am. 

Emergency responders attempted life-saving measures, but he was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. 

While investigating the shooting call, the Palmdale Sheriff’s Station responded to a carjacking in the same area and arrested a man named Freddy Snyder, 29, who was named as a person of interest in Grillmair’s homicide case. 

Snyder was arrested for murder, carjacking, and burglary on Wednesday. He is in custody with a $2 million bail. 

Law enforcement has not released a motive in the alleged homicide. It’s unclear if the two men knew one another or whether the shooting was targeted. 

The LACSD hasn’t released Snyder’s booking photo or any further information on the case. 

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EXPOSED: Taxpayer-Funded Horror at University of Chicago – NSF Pours Millions into Inducing Severe Strokes in Dogs Before Killing Them

In a shocking new exposé highlighting the grotesque waste and cruelty involved in federal science funding, watchdog White Coat Waste (WCW) has uncovered documents revealing how the University of Chicago is using millions in taxpayer dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to deliberately inflict the “most severe” strokes on dozens of dogs, only to kill them shortly after.

This barbaric practice, which involves blocking the animals’ brain arteries and subjecting them to immense suffering, comes as the NSF is already under fire for a litany of wasteful and inhumane animal experiments.

According to WCW’s investigation, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, the lab at the University of Chicago has conducted these experiments on at least 64 dogs, inducing what researchers themselves describe as the “most severe stroke” possible.

The process is cold and methodical, spanning three days:

  • Day 1: The dogs undergo imaging scans and blood draws to establish baselines.
  • Day 2: Experimenters block the animals’ middle cerebral arteries using coils, triggering massive strokes. The dogs are then assessed using a “stroke scale” to measure the damage.
  • Day 3: The suffering ends – not with treatment or mercy, but with euthanasia. Lab documents admit that if the dogs were allowed to survive, they would endure “significant suffering” due to the lack of round-the-clock care equivalent to what human stroke patients receive.

These experiments are purportedly testing a stroke treatment that has already been proven safe and effective in human clinical trials, raising serious questions about why innocent dogs are being tortured and killed for redundant research.

WCW notes that this continues despite NIH’s pledges to phase out dog testing, led by figures such as Fauci-fan girl Nicole Kleinstreuer, who heads the agency’s efforts to promote non-animal alternatives.

While the NIH has wasted $4.9 million on these dog experiments, including a new $596,000 grant awarded in June with three more years of funding secured, the NSF’s involvement is even more egregious.

Portions of two massive NSF grants, totaling a staggering $40.5 million, are supporting the University of Chicago lab. The current active grant alone is worth $24.7 million and runs through August.

Those are your hard-earned tax dollars, part of the NSF’s bloated $9 billion annual budget, going straight to needlessly torturing man’s best friend.

This isn’t an isolated incident.

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Jeffrey Epstein Recruited NSA Codebreakers for Genome “Manhattan Project”

In the decade before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. and Russia were engaged in high-stakes exchanges of advanced technology involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Skolkovo Innovation Center—a Russian government-backed technology hub that aimed to jump-start a “venture” innovation ecosystem in Moscow.

Jeffrey Epstein sat at the crossroads of academia, philanthropy, and venture finance as these global capital flows were threatened by the brewing confrontation in Ukraine.

In 2013, during the early cryptocurrency boom, Epstein sought an audience with Vladimir Putin to encourage the Russian president to shift course from the MIT–Skolkovo model. Instead of playing “catch up” with the United States through venture-backed startups, Epstein proposed, Russia could help lead a new financial system based on a novel global currency.

Epstein funded the early development of cryptocurrency through the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, founded in 2015. MIT’s Bitcoin Core Development Fund helped pay bitcoin’s early developers to maintain the open-source software authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s anonymous inventor. Epstein was an early investor in Coinbase, and he was friends with Brock Pierce, the co-founder of U.S. dollar stablecoin company Tether, which operates, in effect, the world’s largest crypto bank.

Epstein was also recruiting cryptographers to a more ambitious project: hacking the human genome. In an email to a redacted recipient in August 2012, Epstein wrote, “My biology gurus at harvard all agree that the signal intelligence used by the various agencies , could be put to work on breaking the dna code or protein signal problems. breaking foreign codes is the expertise of the us and nsa.” Epstein prompted the recipient to help him recruit “code breakers” from the various intelligence agencies: “it would be great to know which agency button to push.”

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