To most people, food production, home ownership, and energy don't have much in common, but in the hands of 'science is a corporate conspiracy' theorist Dave Goulson, humans are ruining the planet. The common cultural cancer underpinning of our problem, he believes, is capitalism.

Rachel Carson believed misuse of DDT was harming birds, Goulson claims our very existence is. And his solemn false dichotomy choice to prevent it is Draconian. Start culling the human herd or create a level of social authoritarianism that even John Holdren, Paul Ehrlich, and Anne Ehrlich didn't advocate in their book "Ecoscience." And they embraced eugenics.(1)

I used some spare research funds to open a six-months internship to help my research group in Padova, and the call is open for applications at this site (the second in the list right now, the number is #23584). So here I wish to answer a few questions from potential applicants, namely:
1) Can I apply? 
2) When is the call deadline?
3) What is the salary?
4) What is the purpose of the position? What can I expect to gain from it?

5) What will I be doing if I get selected? 


Answers:

President Biden is using his Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) agency to mandate vaccines for companies - by saying they need it to protect workers' safety.

There is no question that COVID-19 is the worst pandemic of my lifetime. It has led to greater absolute US deaths than the Asian Flu of 1957 and the Spanish Flu of 1918, though obviously we are 2X and 3X the population, respectively, of those pandemics so in relative terms they remain way ahead.

Where we also lead over the two other large US pandemics of the last 100 years is fear and misinformation. That is due to corporate media. Thanks to corporate media, an anti-vaccination movement that was overwhelmingly Democrats two years ago has now lurched to being Republicans. Thanks to media, the risks of COVID-19 are so blown out of proportion that neither group has a real handle on facts. They are just yelling at each other.

In 2019, three free-ranging cheetahs in the Namib Desert died within 24 hours of each other. Scholars set out to determine why.

On October 5th 2019, the carcass of a GPS-collared cheetah in the Namib desert was found dead from the air. After they went in on foot to investigate, two other cheetahs were also found dead. The GPS data showed they had all died within a short period of each other so the team then identified a cluster of GPS locations approximately two kilometers away from the location where they were found dead.

For a pilot study, a team examined blood samples from 50 patients and 16 healthy subjects. Using atomic force microscopy technology, they analyzed the surface of around 1000 red blood cells per person without knowing anything about their state of health. 

They were able to detect the presence of suspicious proteins, beta-amyloid peptides and tau proteins associated with the neurodegenerative disease commonly called dementia. but also to determine their variable shape and form as well as their amounts.

The US military has quietly led to a lot of technological advancements that few know about. One recent example; before we had a serious COVID-19 infectious disease problem to worry about, the US National Institutes of Health tried to use Ebola in parts of Africa to ask Congress for $100 million in emergency funding to combat it. In the US. Where it did not exist.

Exercise is healthy. That is common knowledge. But just how rigorous should that exercise be in order to really impact a person’s fitness level? And, if you sit all day at a desk, but still manage to get out and exercise, does that negate your six, seven, or eight hours of sedentary behavior? 

These were the sort of questions Matthew Nayor and his team at Boston University School of Medicine set out to answer in the largest study to date aimed at understanding the relationship between regular physical activity and a person’s physical fitness. 

If a group of astrologers all write papers endorsing astrology and then another astrologer comes along and does a meta-analysis of those, they can conclude authoritatively that astrology works. As a smart reader, you know it's nonsense, but if you are selling astrology services, you either set out to deceive people or you want to believe so badly you lose your ability to reason. 

A new analysis finds that if there ever was a "Beepocalypse", it hasn't been during this century.

Using data since 1961, they found that the number of managed honey bee colonies has risen by 85%. Managed colonies are the only way to create reasonable estimates, that is how surveys of losses are done annually, but in the past activists trying to create a new fundraising target leveraged blips in averages to claim that a Colony Collapse Disorder was being caused by...farmers.