Sleepless in Midland

Is 14 day quarantine realistic after Covid-19 exposure?

A big part of the Coronavirus panic is likely caused by the fear of being subjected to 14 days of quarantine while symptom free. But it's entirely possible that 14 days is too long.

According to a study recently released about the average incubation time, the mean was 5–7 days while the median was 5.1 days. The report can be found at New Study on COVID-19 Estimates 5.1 Days for Incubation Period. Quote:

The analysis suggests that about 97.5 percent of people who develop symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection will do so within 11.5 days of exposure. The researchers estimated that for every 10,000 individuals quarantined for 14 days, only about 101 would develop symptoms after being released from quarantine. ...

The new estimate of 5.1 days for the median incubation period of SARS-CoV-2 is similar to estimates from the earliest studies of this new virus, which were based on fewer cases. This incubation period for SARS-CoV-2 is in the same range as SARS-CoV, a different human-infecting coronavirus that caused a major outbreak centered in southern China and Hong Kong from 2002–04. For MERS-CoV, a coronavirus that has caused hundreds of cases in the Middle East, with a relatively high fatality rate, the estimated mean incubation period is 5–7 days.

Via Study Finds.

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1:55 PM 3/11/2020

Researchers announce new blood test for cancer

It's likely that most of us on the user side of the medical industry relationship wish those blood draws for the annual physical could reveal more useful information. Well, good news. Researchers are trying.

A new test was recently researched, and the results were positive. See New blood test capable of detecting multiple types of cancer. Here's the gist of it:

The test, developed by GRAIL, Inc., uses next-generation sequencing technology to probe DNA for tiny chemical tags (methylation) that influence whether genes are active or inactive. ...

The new test looks for DNA, which cancer cells shed into the bloodstream when they die. In contrast to “liquid biopsies,” which detect genetic mutations or other cancer-related alterations in DNA, the technology focuses on modifications to DNA known as methyl groups. Methyl groups are chemical units that can be attached to DNA, in a process called methylation, to control which genes are “on” and which are “off.” Abnormal patterns of methylation turn out to be, in many cases, more indicative of cancer – and cancer type – than mutations are. The new test zeroes in on portions of the genome where abnormal methylation patterns are found in cancer cells.

Good luck. And please hurry, my next blood draw is scheduled a few days from now. But that's an unpleasant reminder of my phobia -- dying one day before a cure is found for whatever kills me.

Via Study Finds.

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1:51 PM 11/3/2019

Quote of the week 11-3-19 -- People fall for ideas that make too much sense

This is a quote from Rich Cohen's book, "The Last Pirate of New York" about Albert W. Hicks and the horrific crimes for which he was tried, convicted, and hanged on Friday the 13th of July, 1860.

This particular passage was about phrenology -- the pseudo science popular around that time about psychology and the shape of the skull.

Fowler fell for phrenology for the reason confused people tend to fall for ideas that make too much sense. It explained everything. No more mystery or confusion. No more sin or redemption. No more free will or guilt. Who could be condemned for committing even the worst crime if it was preordained in the frontal lobe?

It would do us all well to be aware that scientists can be wrong, even if there seems to be a consensus.

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2:46 PM 11/2/2019

We really do look alike to people of other races

Most of us could probably provide an anecdote or two which demonstrate the truth of the old saw that people of other races all look alike. I assumed it was predominately white people who thought all black people looked alike until I heard a black man say that all white people look alike. So if the situation exists, it must be universal.

So here comes a study that proves it, at least as to whites. They used an MRI to measure the high-level visual cortex in the subjects to test the changes when exposed to images of people of different races. Anyway, here's a report about the study at You All Look Alike to Me’ is hard-wired in us:

Their findings affirmed previous studies, determining that participants showed a greater tendency to individuate— recognize differences in—own-race faces, and less for other races.

It was a small study, so if this is a serious area of analysis, then more work is needed. Also, all the test subjects were all white, and the woke scientist declined to extrapolate:

Previous studies have found the “other-race effect” is found in populations other than whites. But Hughes isn’t comfortable extending his findings to assume that black people also “de-individuate” white faces in the high-level visual cortex. The reason: Majority vs. minority perceptions.

Meanwhile, jury members should try to keep this in mind if testimony of an eye witness is crucial evidence.

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10:54 AM 10/16/2019

Scientists are keeping dead pig brains alive -- insert your own political joke

The fact that brains from decapitated pigs were able to produce some activity could be a remarkable discovery.

The researchers put the brains in a BrainEx container with a computer controlled pump which circulated a secret sauce through the brain. Here's an excerpt from Pig experiment challenges assumptions around brain damage in people:

This computerized network of pumps, heaters and filters controlled the flow, temperature and constituents of a proprietary perfusate solution for six hours.

There was no evidence of the kind of neural activity that is thought to signal consciousness, or the ability to perceive the environment and experience sensations such as pain or distress. But, incredibly, BrainEx did restore and sustain circulation to major arteries, small blood vessels and capillaries, cellular responsiveness to drugs and cerebral metabolism. A drug that increases blood flow in people’s brains, for instance, dilated pig blood vessels and increased the rate of flow of the perfusate.

Some large-scale anatomical and small-scale morphological features were restored and preserved, thanks to a reduction in swelling and other changes that would otherwise have led to cell damage and cell death. Electrodes inserted into slices of brain tissue (cultured in standard medium) detected electrical activity in individual neurons; neurons fired action potentials in response to an electrical stimulus and even displayed spontaneous synaptic activity. All of this was detected at normal body temperature.

All the articles are quick to assert that the results did not display any form of consciousness. That was surely an attempt to divert any ethical scrutiny. But the reason for the lack of consciousness may be because the chemicals contained enough channel blockers to prevent it. Here's an excerpt from Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body:

However, it could also be due to chemicals the Yale team added to the blood replacement to prevent swelling, which also severely dampen the activity of neurons. “You have to understand that we have so many channel blockers in our solution,” Sestan told the NIH. “This is probably the explanation why we don’t get [any] signal.”

Anyway, the potential, if this works on humans, is big. And the comedy potential -- how long will it take for the joke writers for those lame late night political comedy shows to come up with a Donald Trump joke with a dead pig brain theme?

Related reading:
Pig experiment challenges assumptions around brain damage in people
Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
Neuroscientists just brought pig brain cells back to life, changing our view of death
Scientists restore some brain cell functions in pigs four hours after death
Pig brains partially revived four hours after death
Scientists Restore Some Function In The Brains Of Dead Pigs
Pig brains partially revived hours after death—what it means for people
Dead pig brains bathed in artificial fluid showed signs of cellular life
A dead pig's brain was brought back to life, sort of.

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2:26 PM 4/18/2019

Battle of the news outlets -- global warming is shrinking glaciers but solar minimum might foretell cooling

Hardly anyone believes that old canard that there's a scientific consensus on man made global warming, except those who have a financial investment in that consensus.

Anyway, AP in the morning paper rings an alarm bell about melting glaciers. Titled Global warming is shrinking glaciers faster than thought, it contains such alarmisms as this one: “'In these regions, at the current glacier loss rate, the glaciers will not survive the century,' Zemp said.”

It's difficult to square that with this: Sunspot update March 2019: An upcoming Grand Minimum?

Reduced solar activity has a pretty big effect on Earth's climate. And an extended period with a lack to solar activity would result in a cooled down Earth.

Any attempt to fight the hypothetical global warming by spending millions, billions, or trillions of dollars should certainly wait for more proof of the theory that has excited movie maker Al Gore and so many of his progressive followers.

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2:16 PM 4/10/2019

Eggs -- once good for you, then bad, then good again, now bad

Here's Ryan W. Miller at USA Today, Eggs linked to higher risk of heart disease and early death, study says:

Are eggs good for you? The long-standing dairy discussion may have more answers, and it looks like bad news for egg lovers.

A new study suggests people with a higher consumption of eggs or cholesterol may be at a higher risk for cardiovascular disease and early death.

And here's Marla Paul at Eating Eggs and Cholesterol Linked to Heart Disease and Death Risk:

The new study looked at pooled data on 29,615 U.S. racially and ethnically diverse adults from six prospective cohort studies for up to 31 years of follow up and found:

-Eating 300 mg of dietary cholesterol per day was associated with 17 percent higher risk of incident cardiovascular disease and 18 percent higher risk of all-cause deaths. The cholesterol was the driving factor independent of saturated fat consumption and other dietary fat.
-Eating three to four eggs per week was associated with 6 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease and 8 percent higher risk of any cause of death.

It's the yolks that contain the cholesterol. So it may still be safe to eat milk carton egg whites. Oh, and hold the bacon.

P.S. Here a link to the abstract of the JAMA article they're relying on.

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3:10 PM 3/17/2019

A woman made a business out of DNA research and family tree building

If like me, you are impressed with entrepreneurs who put together a new business using old and new techniques to serve their customers, you may like this article. It came out a couple of weeks ago. The Making of a DNA Detective, (Alternate link), is about CeCe Moore and her business of helping people find relatives and helping police solve cold case files.

Millions of people have taken DNA tests from the online companies, and Ms. Moore uses the data to help her clients.

Her method:

First, she uses an ancestry test to identify a distant relative—say, a third cousin. She then constructs a family tree, filling out branches with information from public records such as wedding announcements, obituaries and even social media.

“You just keep building and building and building to find that intersection where these different families come together,” she says. “Most second great-grandparents—back then there were big farm and Catholic families. I run into it often where there’s between 15 and 20 children, and it takes a lot of time to build all of those people’s descendants forward.”

We applaud the detective work that goes into the capture of bad guys and gals. As for law abiding people who might just like to be left alone? Read on:

Ms. Moore is fiercely protective of individual privacy and doesn’t want DNA used without people’s consent. Yet making your own DNA public may impinge on your relatives’ privacy. Ms. Moore worries that such fears could deter people from taking ancestry tests and make it harder to put criminals behind bars.

As for the complaint that genealogy can draw innocent relatives of criminals into investigations, she notes that it can also exonerate innocent people who might needlessly be pulled into investigations. “There are hundreds or thousands of people that are investigated in crimes that are innocent,” she notes. “In all of the crimes I’ve worked except one, the [identified perpetrator] didn’t appear on their person-of-interest list.”

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3:53 PM 2/25/2019

Magnetic North is on the move -- faster than previously

Here's National Geographic: Magnetic north just changed. Here's what that means. Maya Wei-Haas tells this:

Magnetic north has never sat still. In the last hundred years or so, the direction in which our compasses steadfastly point has lumbered ever northward, driven by Earth's churning liquid outer core some 1,800 miles beneath the surface. Yet in recent years, scientists noticed something unusual: Magnetic north's routine plod has shifted into high gear, sending it galloping across the Northern Hemisphere—and no one can entirely explain why.

National Centers for Environmental Information puts it this way: World Magnetic Model Out-of-Cycle Release which is to say that the World Magnetic Model is being released a year early due to the speed of change. As to who needs it, there's this:

The military uses the WMM for undersea and aircraft navigation, parachute deployment, and more. Other governmental organizations, such as NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, U.S. Forest Service, and many more use this technology for surveying and mapping, satellite/antenna tracking, and air traffic management.

For anyone using an old fashioned pocket compass this natural change in *magnetic declination is probably unnoticeable compared with the distortions caused by modern electronics. I tried to use a compass in a rented car roughly a year ago and was lost most of the time due to something under the hood that caused the needle to point toward the front of the car whichever direction it was headed.

Click hyperlink to find the magnetic declination at your location.

*Magnetic declination or variation is the angle on the horizontal plane between magnetic north and true north. This angle varies depending on position on the Earth's surface, and changes over time.

P.S. How soon will be until someone blames this rapid change on humans?

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2:12 PM 2/10/2019

Immuno-oncology -- releasing the patient's own immune system to fight cancer

For years there have been three tools to fight cancer: burn it out with radiation, inject poisons that are hoped to kill the cancer without killing the patient, and/or cut it out. There's increasing interest in a fourth way, one that doesn't hurt the patient, but instead causes the patient's immune system to get in the fight.

Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells. And somehow the cancer cells turn of the patients immune response to this attack. While it might seem like common sense, it took over a century for the theory of turning off cancer's immune system kill switch to really catch on.

And now the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is being awarded jointly to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo who have have advanced research on the topic remarkably. Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018 tells us what each of them did:

About Allison:

During the 1990s, in his laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, James P. Allison studied the T-cell protein CTLA-4. He was one of several scientists who had made the observation that CTLA-4 functions as a brake on T cells. Other research teams exploited the mechanism as a target in the treatment of autoimmune disease. Allison, however, had an entirely different idea. He had already developed an antibody that could bind to CTLA-4 and block its function (see Figure). He now set out to investigate if CTLA-4 blockade could disengage the T-cell brake and unleash the immune system to attack cancer cells. Allison and co-workers performed a first experiment at the end of 1994, and in their excitement it was immediately repeated over the Christmas break. The results were spectacular. Mice with cancer had been cured by treatment with the antibodies that inhibit the brake and unlock antitumor T-cell activity. Despite little interest from the pharmaceutical industry, Allison continued his intense efforts to develop the strategy into a therapy for humans. Promising results soon emerged from several groups, and in 2010 an important clinical study showed striking effects in patients with advanced melanoma, a type of skin cancer. In several patients signs of remaining cancer disappeared. Such remarkable results had never been seen before in this patient group.

About Honjo:

In 1992, a few years before Allison’s discovery, Tasuku Honjo discovered PD-1, another protein expressed on the surface of T-cells. Determined to unravel its role, he meticulously explored its function in a series of elegant experiments performed over many years in his laboratory at Kyoto University. The results showed that PD-1, similar to CTLA-4, functions as a T-cell brake, but operates by a different mechanism (see Figure). In animal experiments, PD-1 blockade was also shown to be a promising strategy in the fight against cancer, as demonstrated by Honjo and other groups. This paved the way for utilizing PD-1 as a target in the treatment of patients. Clinical development ensued, and in 2012 a key study demonstrated clear efficacy in the treatment of patients with different types of cancer. Results were dramatic, leading to long-term remission and possible cure in several patients with metastatic cancer, a condition that had previously been considered essentially untreatable.

Wow. Simply beefing up a person's own immune system can beat back cancer. There have been many false positives in the search for the magic bullet. But this one is plausible enough that it might actually work.

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2:27 PM 12/10/2018

We might be able to stop aging -- if we live long enough

Humans have probably been searching for a fountain of youth for as long as they've been cognizant of their own vulnerability. It hasn't stopped. See A stealthy Harvard startup wants to reverse aging in dogs, and humans could be next.

It would take too long to get FDA approval to test humans, so dogs will have to do for starters.

Basically, the process involves gene therapy to stop some known ailment, like heart failure, that's common in certain breeds. And selling a workable treatment to dog owners could be a good way to fund other tests. Here's an excerpt:

The company, which has carried out preliminary tests on beagles, claims it will make animals “younger" by adding new DNA instructions to their bodies.

Its age-reversal plans build on tantalizing clues seen in simple organisms like worms and flies. Tweaking their genes can increase their life spans by double or better. ...

Gene therapies work by inserting DNA instructions into a virus, which conveys them into an animal’s cells. In the Harvard lab, the technology has been used to modulate gene activity in old mice—either increasing or lowering it—in an effort to return certain molecules to levels seen in younger, healthy animals.

The lab started working through a pipeline of more than 60 different gene therapies, which it is testing on old mice, alone and in combinations. The Harvard group now plans to publish a scientific report on a technique that extends rodents’ lives by modifying two genes to act on four major diseases of aging: heart and kidney failure, obesity, and diabetes. According to Church, the results are “pretty eye-popping.”

The fear of most of us is that any discovery that could keep us alive longer may come along the day after we die.

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3:14 PM 5/26/2018

Hiit just got harder

We talked about high intensity interval training a couple of months ago. At that time the high end calculation for the maximum heart rate (HRmax) was the Tanaka formula, 208 – (0.7 x age).

But wouldn't you know? A team of researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have come out with a formula that gives us an even higher maximum rate. So the hiit workouts just got harder.

Click the hyperlink to get to their Maximum Heart Rate Calculator. Their formula is 211 – (0.64 x age). For me result is about 7.3 bpm higher.

Here's their recommended routine:

1. Start with a ten minute warm-up at approximately 60 % of HRmax to get you sweating.
2. Do four intervals, each four minutes long. The last two minutes of each interval, your heart rate should be at 90–95 % of HRmax, so you become short of breath. Use the first two minutes of each interval to reach this heart rate level.
3. Between each interval, your should perform active resting at a heart rate of approximately 70 % of HRmax. This is the zone where the body clears lactic acid most efficiently.
4. End with a ten minute cool-down with lighter activity after the last interval.

Previously: Hiit, mother nature and father time.

Good luck.

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1:30 PM 3/31/2018

Hiit, mother nature and father time

Just about everyone who works out is familiar with high intensity interval training.

There are as many variations of it as there are exercise gurus. First you calculate your maximum heart rate. I use the Tanaka formula, 208 – (0.7 x age). Then you work out near the maximum for half a minute, relax half a minute, then repeat that cycle for a total of four or five times. Supposed to be good for us.

So what should we think about this recent disclosure? Vigorous Exercise Tied to Macular Degeneration in Men.

Dang. It's as if Mother Nature says, "Exercise hard and live long." Then Father Time comes along and says, "I'm gonna get you one way or another."

Well maybe. My Optometrist says macular degeneration is more likely to occur in those who over do it -- think marathons -- rather than 30 minute work-outs.

Check back in about 20 years.

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1:45 PM 1/17/2018

Talking sexbots -- but will they shut up?

With the fear of being accused of sexual assault hanging over the heads of every male in a relationship, is it any wonder why some see sexbots as the next best thing to a real girlfriend?

Now we are learning that sexbots are being programmed to talk. One might be tempted to ask, "Will I be able to shut her up?"

If they really want to gin up sales, they should build in a feature that will prepare meals and clean up the house.

Instead, we'll probably end up with robots with the ability to learn all we know and decide to take over. Just ask Stephen Hawking.  Hmm. Maybe they'll want to keep us around as pets.

Oh, by the way, best watch this public service announcement from Futurama: Don't date robots!

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2:50 PM 12/12/2017

Quote of the week ending 11-18-17

This is from David Shenk's review in the Wall Street Journal of Joseph Jebelli's book titled, "In Pursuit of Memory" about Alzheimer's disease. Here's the quote about medical research:

"Every finding has scores of older, closely related findings trailing behind, each having been disproved, amending the scientific narrative," Mr. Jebelli srites. "Science orbits the truth; it doesn't live there."

The book and the quote are about Alzheimer's disease research. But it applies to any scientific endeavor. Proponents of the "consensus" on global warming should take note.

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3:20 PM 11/17/2017

Use muons to detect clandestine smuggling tunnels

Authorities discover tunnels under the Southern U.S. border quite frequently. And they are usually described as a random discoveries even though there are underground detection techniques available.

The Israelis are just as secretive about their techniques. In Netanyahu hails ‘breakthrough technology’ in discovery of Gaza attack tunnel, they found a tunnel terrorists dug in an apparent attempt to use to attack Israelis. The tunnel finding techniques aren't disclosed. So we are left to wonder.

About a year ago I heard a Stardate podcast on NPR about how muons were used to map the interior of an earthquake and tsunami damaged nuclear reactor in Japan. Listen to that MP3 at this Stardate link. It's only a couple of minutes long.

Here's an article about that particular endeavor at Muons suggest location of fuel in unit 3. Excerpt:

Muons are high-energy subatomic particles that are created when cosmic rays enter Earth's upper atmosphere. These particles naturally and harmlessly strike the Earth's surface at a rate of some 10,000 muons per square meter per minute. Muon tracking devices detect and track these particles as they pass through objects. Subtle changes in the trajectory of the muons as they penetrate materials and change in direction correlate with material density. Nuclear materials such as uranium and plutonium are very dense and are therefore relatively easy to identify. The muon detection system uses the so-called permeation method to measure the muon data.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) installed a muon detection system on the first floor of unit 3's turbine building. Measurements were taken between May and September this year.

Tepco said analysis of muon examinations of the fuel debris shows that most of the fuel has melted and dropped from its original position within the core.

Anyway, a light bulb went off. Could these tiny cosmic things be harnessed to locate illicit smuggling tunnels into the U.S. from Mexico? Well, maybe.

At least one writer hypothesized about that nearly a decade ago. See High-Tech Border Patrol: 5 New Tricks to Find Smuggler Tunnels. Here's a thumbnail description of how that would work:

Cosmic Rays
How It's Done: Muons are subatomic particles created by cosmic rays hitting the Earth's atmosphere. The number of them detected underground varies with the mass above: If there's a tunnel, more muons are found.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is supposed to be a big fan of Uri Geller -- see details in Annie Jacobsen's book, "Phenomena" -- so for all we know, Uri Geller is using his divining rod to find those tunnels into Israel.

Did the winner nudge the Nobel committee to award prize to him?

University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in economics for "for his work on behavioral economics, which tries to understand how humans make decisions, especially bad ones." Source: American professor wins Nobel Prize in economics for trying to understand bad human behavior. More:

Thaler, an American, is one of the leading experts in the relatively new field that combines psychology and economics. He has made a career of studying people's poor choices — everything from why people save so little for retirement to why National Football League teams that go early in the annual draft typically do a poor job of selecting new players. He's even looked at how to make bathroom floors cleaner.

The hook for getting those of us with short attention spans to read about it was the part about the "nudge." To wit:

The committee praised Thaler for trying to “nudge” people and companies to make better decisions. ... “My mantra is if you want to get people to do something, make it easy," Thaler said Monday in an interview from his home posted by the University of Chicago.

So did I get "nudged" into reading about this? You bet your sweet bippy I did. Here's the nudge right here: What’s a urinal fly, and what does it have to with winning a Nobel Prize?

Spoiler alert! Turns out that the tactic was used at an airport in Amsterdam to encourage men to take better aim when using urinals with the addition of flies painted in them to provide a target.

If your building has a cooling tower, there's a good chance it's contaminated with Legionnaires' bacteria.

Here's the whats-up from a recent Wall Street Journal article:

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed water from 196 cooling towers across the U.S. for Legionella, the bacteria that cause the severe and sometimes-fatal form of pneumonia. They found live Legionella bacteria in 79 of them, in most regions of the country. Overall, they detected Legionella DNA -- indicating the bacteria were either Present or had been there at some point -- in 164 or 84% of the cooling towers.

Yikes. Almost 84% had it when tested or at some point in the past. Someone needs to dump some bleach in those tanks.

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3:29 PM 5/5/2017

There should be march for scientific accuracy instead of advocacy

The other day people demonstrated in various spots around the nation in what they called the March for Science. Now at what appears to be an official march-for-science website, we see the words: "On April 22, 2017 We marched. Now, we act." So basically it was a community organizing movement for political action. These days global warming is the popular theory that community organizers want to promote, and it's hard to imagine any other scientific theory that has been so polarizing. The smartest source of information on global warming can be found at Watts Up With That? The photo of the sign on the right came from there.

But this post isn't about global warming. It's about bad science. A while back some friends bragged on a book about Henrietta Lacks, the black lady whose unique cervical cancer cells got their own name - HeLa - and which have been involved in countless research projects. (The prevailing narrative is that Ms. Lacks was taken advantage of because she had not given knowledgeable consent for cloning of her cells and publication of her DNA sequencing.)

Unfortunately, it turns out that the cells had been contaminated early on, and much of the subsequent research was flawed. An article in the Wall Street Journal says an independent group studying misidentified cells reports that 113 of the 450 cases they've found involved the HeLa cells as the contaminate. That's from The Breakdown in Biomedical Research (paywalled).

Scientist who have spent countless hours and dollars on research are slow to fess up to mistakes. And when others try to reproduce the same results, they can't. We even have NPR explaining How Flawed Science Is Undermining Good Medicine.

So let's make the next march about scientific accuracy instead of advocacy.

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4:10 PM 4/24/2017

Government employees should quit trying to politicize climate science

"Science, not silence," is the battle cry for the March for science scheduled for April 22, 2017. The problem is that their silence is what is distorting an understanding of important science issues.

That issue would be global warming, or climate change, as it's now called. Seems that a whistle blower blew the whistle on an influential NOAA paper last year. See Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data. Excerpt:

The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.

But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.

Meanwhile, March for science founders say this:

Mischaracterization of science as a partisan issue, which has given policymakers permission to reject overwhelming evidence, is a critical and urgent matter. It is time for people who support scientific research and evidence-based policies to take a public stand and be counted.

Good advice. At least they didn't call skeptics names. But it would have been better if they called for honest reporting of their research.

Cultural cognition shapes scientific opinion more than we would like -- Surprisingly!

Cultural cognition is the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters to values that define their cultural identities. That doesn't seem to be an earth shattering observation as we see how divided the political classes are about certain issues about which there really shouldn't be much doubt.

Conservatives, for the most part, can't understand why progressives are so intent on disarming citizens when it seems obvious that only the most law abiding citizens would obey any law requiring them to relinquish their privately owned firearms. Likewise, progressives are dumbfounded by the idea that anyone could be suspicious of the claims that climate science is settled.

Science has an answer to how to reach those with opposing views. See “Science curious” more likely to explore data contradicting their world view. Researchers attempted to measure science curiosity among survey takers and found this:

While low-science-curiosity folks were more likely to select the article that agreed with their opinion, regardless of whether it sounded novel, high-science-curiosity people preferred whichever headline was “surprising.” If anything, they were even more likely to select that headline if it ran counter to their beliefs.

The undercurrent there seems to be carrying water for the climate-change-science-is-settled school of thought. So global warming agnostics shouldn't be surprised to see more "surprising" headlines about climate change. But why should they have all the fun? Gun owners should get in on this too.

Early predictions about marijuana use and impaired driving turned out to be true

In July of 2014 Angela Hawken appeared on C-SPAN, and I wrote about it on these pages. See Angela Hawken on C-Span re marijuana legalization.

She talked about the results of her research, and one noteworthy observation was of the complicated relationship between alcohol and marijuana. She said driving while stoned on marijuana is probably not as bad as driving drunk. However, driving after using alcohol and marijuana is worse than driving under the influence of either one alone.

Two and a half years later we see some real world results of the state experiments with marijuana legalization. See States that enact medical marijuana laws see dips in fatal car crashes. Excerpt.

When examining 19 states that had medical marijuana laws on the books by 2014, researchers found that their average rate of traffic deaths fell 11 percent after the laws were enacted. The happy side-effect wasn’t uniform, however; only seven states saw significant reductions, while two states saw increases. Nevertheless, the authors of the new report in the American Journal of Public Health argue that the data bucks the common criticism that more pot access should increase car crashes and injuries.

Drops in traffic deaths may, in part, be explained by people swapping alcohol for pot, leading to reduced drunk driving, the study’s authors speculated. To back that up, the authors note that the lives spared tended to belong to younger people, particularly 25- to 44-year-olds—an age group frequently involved in alcohol-related traffic deaths.

More research is needed. But this study seems to support Ms. Hawken's predictions.

In any event, this is a big win for the federalist theory of allowing states to make their own laws so that those that work can be copied by the other states.

Our first explorers on Mars may live in Igloos

It's amazing what smart people come up with when they're trying to solve a problem. The NASA folks have been bouncing ideas around about how to house astronauts who go to Mars. And they came up with an intriguing idea -- igloos.

Actually, they aren't the igloos we might imagine, although they are in the shape of a dome. The structures have thick layers of ice in the walls that would shield the inhabitants from radiation. Brilliant, huh? See A New Home on Mars: NASA Langley’s Icy Concept for Living on the Red Planet which describes the “Mars Ice Dome” concept.

Last week I shared my excitement about the National Geographic channel mini-series, "Mars." The characters spent a whole episode trying to find water, so this ice house raised a significant question -- where did they get the water?  Turns out it's not such a hurdle after all if the reports about huge underground frozen lakes are accurate.

Obsessive adherence to the leftist agenda is a symptom of a psychological condition

Charles Battig says it more succinctly in Progressivism as a mental illness where he quotes these four statements from Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., to wit:

1. The laws and moral codes--the rules--that properly govern human conduct arise from, and must be compatible with, the biological, psychological and social nature of man.

2. The liberal agenda's Modern Parental State violates all of the rules that make ordered liberty possible.

3. The modern liberal agenda is a transference neurosis of the modern liberal mind, acted out in the world's economic, social and political theaters.

4. The liberal agenda's Modern Permissive Culture corrupts the foundations of civilized freedom and is destroying America's magnificent political achievements.

Numbers 2 and 4 seem almost contradictory. But it does fit when we consider that the cradle to grave regulatory environment where gay marriage is encouraged, but declining to bake the cake is grounds for public ridicule, boycotts, and legal action.

Number 3 left me confused, especially the phrase "transference neurosis." It's defined here as "a phenomenon occurring in most psychoanalyses, in which the patient undergoes, with the analyst as the object, an intense repetition of childhood conflicts, reexperiencing impulses, feelings, and fantasies that originally developed in relation to the parent."

Fitting that into the context must mean that politics is the tool with which the leftist acts out his/her childhood conflicts. Now it all makes sense.

It's probably insulting to progressives to psychoanalyze them like that. But they do it to conservatives all the time with what seems motivated more by a desire to insult than to understand. Therefore, just as they seek condescending explanations for why someone could possibly oppose them, we conservatives seek explanations for why they can't be more accepting of people with whom they disagree.

Finally, my take is that people are motivated by their own self interest, even if it's only the self satisfaction of casting a protest vote. But anyone obsessed with politics above and beyond that is a little bit crazy.

Coffee more than a hangover helper -- may reduce chance of cirrhosis

This seems like a combination made in heaven -- coffee and booze. According to nypost.com, Drinking more coffee may reverse liver damage from booze. Excerpt:

Cirrhosis involves a hardening and destruction of liver tissue and kills more than 1 million people every year worldwide. It can be caused by hepatitis infections, excessive alcohol consumption, immune disorders and fatty liver disease, which is tied to obesity and diabetes.

Kennedy and colleagues did a pooled analysis of average coffee consumption across earlier studies to see how much adding two additional cups each day might influence the odds of liver disease.

Combined, the studies included 1,990 patients with cirrhosis.

In eight of the nine studies analyzed, increasing coffee consumption by two cups a day was associated with a significant reduction in the risk of cirrhosis.

In all but one study, the risk of cirrhosis continued to decline as daily cups of coffee climbed.

Compared to no coffee consumption, researchers estimated one cup a day was tied to a 22 percent lower risk of cirrhosis. With two cups, the risk dropped by 43 percent, while it declined 57 percent for three cups and 65 percent with four cups.

A mixture of alcohol and coffee might seem like the perfect drink, and there are plenty of recipes available. They all seem a little bit too heavy on cream, sugar, or both, but your tastes may vary.

Cheers.

A glue that conducts electricity could replace solder

For the occasional solderer who's a little bit on the sloppy side -- cough, like me, cough -- this could be a real godsend.

It's a glue that conducts electricity. It was developed by Hanchen Huang, a professor at Northeastern University, and two students, according to the article informing us about this product. See Researchers’ Metallic Glue may Stick it to Soldering and Welding. Here's a how-it-works excerpt:

“It’s like welding or sol­dering but without the heat,” says Huang, who is pro­fessor and chair in the Depart­ment of Mechan­ical and Indus­trial Engineering.

“Both ‘metal’ and ‘glue’ are familiar terms to most people, but their com­bi­na­tion is new and made pos­sible by unique prop­er­ties of metallic nanorods–infinitesimally small rods with metal cores that we have coated with the ele­ment indium on one side and galium on the other. These coated rods are arranged along a sub­strate like angled teeth on a comb: There is a bottom ‘comb’ and a top ‘comb.’ We then inter­lace the ‘teeth.’ When indium and galium touch each other, they form a liquid. The metal core of the rods acts to turn that liquid into a solid. The resulting glue pro­vides the strength and thermal/electrical con­duc­tance of a metal bond. We recently received a new pro­vi­sional patent for this devel­op­ment through North­eastern University.”

It's not clear how they get the nanorods lined up just right so that they interlace, but hopefully they do it without requiring much user involvement in the process.

Meanwhile, here's a link to their company: mesoglue.com. And here's a link to their introductory video.

If it works the way they say it will this would indeed be a Super Glue.

Enhanced Human Operations -- put it to use on football players

Even non-football fans couldn't avoid hearing about the slug fest that took place between the Bengals and the Steelers last week end. No one wants to see players get hurt, whether intentionally or not, and the helmets in use these days are probably as good as current technology will allow.

But there may be more work to be done with body protection. DARPA is working on what they call Enhanced Human Operations for military use. So why not apply some of that technology to pro-football?

Put them in Iron Man suits and let them go at it.

NFL -- when MMA is not enough.

Quicksand in California or liquefaction on the freeway

Liquefaction is a very interesting, and earthy, problem. The word is usually connected to earthquakes, with a dirt and water mixture shaken to produce a slime. But it happened the other day in California. They called it a mud slide, but the result was the same -- vehicles encased in solid dirt.

See some amazing photos at Dailymail.co.uk in 'A raging river of mud': Hundreds of cars and trucks completely CONSUMED by 6ft-deep California mudslide. My favorite is the one showing two guys standing on solid soil looking down at a tractor trailer half consumed by the earth.

Government goes the wrong way on e-cigarettes

Last week we talked about how the British Royal Society for Public Health is calling for greater use of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation. But the U.S. government seems to be taking a different tact. The goal they seek is to extinguish tobacco use for good. And e-cigarettes do not play a role.

Dailycaller.com calls our attention to the way the U.S. National Institutes of Health uses grants to influence the outcome of the research they fund, and in particular, research into tobacco use. See Government Grant Funding Corrupts Tobacco Research, Holds Back Scientific Inquiry. The point of the article is that the government wants a particular outcome of the research projects it funds, and with so much money at stake, the universities seeking the grants are too willing to comply.

The author, Jesse Hathaway, says this:

Every year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) doles out $623 million to more than 1,000 university researchers interested in advancing its stated goal of “a world free of tobacco use.” In one such solicitation for researchers willing to fit facts to dogma, NIH set aside $10 million for eight to 10 studies, provided those studies proved useful in helping the government “develop effective ways to limit the spread and promote cessation of smokeless tobacco use.”

Studies show smokeless tobacco is much less harmful than smoking, and hence it should be part of any harm-reduction strategy governments would pursue. That is the very opposite of what the NIH is doing.

Emphasis added.

It's a shame that the U.S. government has to be such a corrupting influence on science. The Brits got this one right.

Conservatives and progressives respond differently to disgusting images

This article from last year sprang to mind while thinking about progressives' indifference to the videos about Planned Parenthood's atrocities, Liberal or conservative? Brain responses to disgusting images help reveal political leanings. From the article:

In a brain scanner, participants were shown disgusting images, such as dirty toilets or mutilated carcasses, mixed with neutral and pleasant images, such as landscapes and babies.

Afterward, the subjects took a standard political ideology inventory, answering questions about how often they discuss politics and whether they agreed or disagreed with hot-button topics such as school prayer and gay marriage.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, scientists from the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute — in collaboration with researchers from University College London, Rice University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Yale University — recorded brain activity of the subjects responding to the images.

Responses to disgusting images could predict, with 95 percent to 98 percent accuracy, how a person would answer questions on the political survey. ...

Conservatives tend to have more magnified responses to disgusting images, but scientists don’t know exactly why, Montague said.

Read the rest of the article for some theories about why that is.

This helps to understand why progressives seemed so unconcerned about the atrocities committed by Kermit Gosnell and how disinterested they are now in the revelations exposed by the videos of the Planned Parenthood personnel. They conjure up a mental image, then yawn.

In any event, it's nice to see a psychology study that doesn't simply try to reinforce the left's desire to brand those who disagree with them as having a mental disorder.