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Mouse Study Correlates Diabetes To Alzheimer’s

Mouse Study Correlates Diabetes To Alzheimer’s

Mar 24 2024 | comment(s)

A recent study in mice suggests the the liver is key in a molecular link that may also cause humans with diabetes to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

Unlike type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes is overwhelmingly in obese people so if the findings in mice ever apply to humans the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease in such people could be avoiding it in the first place.
Women Could Cut Cervical Cancer Cases Doing This One Thing

Women Could Cut Cervical Cancer Cases Doing This One Thing

Mar 19 2024 | comment(s)

Given that most adult women did not have access to the HPV vaccine in youth, the clinical burden of cervical cancer in the United States has not yet declined.  

Women still get tested and a few thousand still die each year. The authors believe that the increase in saved life-years has not occurred because taxpayers haven't yet spent enough.
American Individualism May Be A Negative In Old Age

American Individualism May Be A Negative In Old Age

Mar 18 2024 | comment(s)

America was founded by people escaping European norms, like government control of religion and economies. Such culturally inherited individualism has served us well but government is now claiming that loneliness may be a problem. 

Not a problem like California manufactures with its claims about 'toxic stress' but because people are a lot more mobile. Fewer work in trades so they may not stay close to home, they go where lifestyles and jobs are, at least until they decide they want to buy a house.
Plank It: Meta-Analysis Shows Isometric Exercises Help Lower Blood Pressure The Most, By A Lot

Plank It: Meta-Analysis Shows Isometric Exercises Help Lower Blood Pressure The Most, By A Lot

Mar 15 2024 | comment(s)

Risk factors like salt and sugar intake and high blood pressure for heart attacks and disease need constant rethink if they are going to be more than folk wisdom.

Low-salt and sugar-free have too many vested interests to get critical thinking on how valid population-level statistics are for individuals, and 'high' blood pressure rarely gets questions about how reliable the correlation was that picked 130/85 mmHg (millimeters of mercury) as high blood pressure for everyone. Thosa blood pressure numbers are the clunkily-named systolic on top over the diastolic below. The top is the pressure in arteries as the heart beats while the bottom is the pressure at rest.(1)
What Will It Take For Real Farming In Space?

What Will It Take For Real Farming In Space?

Mar 14 2024 | comment(s)

If humans in space are happening any time soon, it will be despite government involvement rather than because of it. NASA couldn't even build a telescope without going 25 years and 1,000 percent over budget. By the time all cultural parties pick away at a manned space program, it will be so expensive and time-costly it won't be worthwhile, and the private sector will throw all that baggage out and just do it.

The James Webb Space Telescope program showed NASA is incapable of doing Big Engineering now, but they can put cute robots on other planets, and fund smaller projects, like how we might grow plants. Early results for how monitors that plants can wear and will stretch as plants grow are due to a NASA grant, and that is a very good thing.
England Has Banned Puberty Blockers

England Has Banned Puberty Blockers

Mar 13 2024 | comment(s)

If my son watches Lord of the Rings, and decides to take up a pipe, he can't do it until he is 21, even though a pipe is, by any scientific measure, absolutely harmless. Government says he is too immature until then to decide for himself.

What about taking Supprelin LA, with some real positives - it blocks puberty for young people who do not feel like their sex at birth - and unknown negatives? England is taking the precautionary principle about it and National Health Service has banned puberty blockers for cases of gender dysphoria or gender incongruence in minors. They're instead going to somehow conduct trials. 
Why Some Female Whales Live So Long: Menopause

Why Some Female Whales Live So Long: Menopause

Mar 13 2024 | comment(s)

Humans and five whale species are the only mammals known to go through menopause. Why is unclear but a new study sought answers.

Scientists found that females of short-finned pilot whales, false killer whales, killer whales, narwhals and beluga whales and experience menopause live around 40 years longer than other female whale species of a similar size and speculation is that by living longer without extending their reproductive lifespan they have more time to help their children and grandchildren, without increasing the “overlap” period when they compete with their daughters by breeding and raising calves at the same time.
On The Utility Function Of Future Experiments

On The Utility Function Of Future Experiments

Mar 13 2024 | comment(s)

At a recent meeting of the board of editors of a journal I am an editor of, it was decided to produce a special issue (to commemorate an important anniversary). As I liked the idea I got carried away a bit, and proposed to write an article for it. 
Social Media Brings Out Our Baser Natures - Anger Is Rising In Democracies

Social Media Brings Out Our Baser Natures - Anger Is Rising In Democracies

Mar 12 2024 | comment(s)

Like old media such as newspapers and televisions, content on social media is tailored toward audience engagement. Television and newspapers have long known that 'dead bodies sell' but in social media it can be sold in real-time. It has sped up information - and cynicism. Fifteen years ago Reuters was caught augmenting photos of an Israeli attack on terrorists so it looked like more smoke and destruction than actually occurred and few in media were bothered, more recently outlets pulled a photo of British Princess Kate of Wales because it had been retouched. Only after the audience flagged it, though.
Emergency Room Bro Culture Needs To Change Before Millennial Doctors Will Take The Speciality

Emergency Room Bro Culture Needs To Change Before Millennial Doctors Will Take The Speciality

Mar 11 2024 | comment(s)

If a small survey in California is indicative of young physicians nationwide, emergency room culture will need to change for younger residents to have interest.

The news comes at a worrisome time. Increased government control of health care has meant plummeting interest in emergency medicine among graduating medical students. Women are even less likely to enter the field and instead opt for a culture that requires less assertiveness and self-advocacy, according to the survey.  
Correlation: Sitting Is Bad For Your Health And Exercise Won't Help

Correlation: Sitting Is Bad For Your Health And Exercise Won't Help

Mar 11 2024 | comment(s)

Advances in technology in recent decades have obviated the need and desire for humans to move. Many of the world’s population sit for long periods throughout the day, whether in front of a computer at work or in front of a TV at home. Given that the human body is made to move, all this sitting is clearly bad for our health. A new study from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), confirmed this – and then some.

A total of 5,856 female participants aged 63 to 99 years were asked to wear an activity monitor on their hip for seven days at the start of the study. The researchers then followed them for a decade, during which 1,733 participants died.

Avi Loeb And Aliens: The Right And Wrong of Science Funding. (Also Bing Image Search Brings up Porno When you Search for him)

Avi Loeb And Aliens: The Right And Wrong of Science Funding. (Also Bing Image Search Brings up Porno When you Search for him)

Mar 11 2024 | comment(s)

Avi Loeb he prolific Harvard astrophysicist, dances on the edge of cosmic controversy. His research spans black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the early universe, but it’s his extraterrestrial musings that have set tongues wagging. What he is right about is if alien intelligences exist one of the most interesting things, they could find would be another technological alien species.  If they exist it makes sense that they would observe us from time to time.  Space is full of a whole lot of nothing alive, then a whole lot of single cell life, and technological complex multi cellular life seems rare.   That would make us interesting.
Benzene Is Not 'Cancer Causing' When IARC Epidemiology Only Claims Correlation

Benzene Is Not 'Cancer Causing' When IARC Epidemiology Only Claims Correlation

Mar 07 2024 | comment(s)

If you have acne, and are worried about benzene because corporate media is touting that an "independent" lab - which happened to be paid by a group representing lawyers who want to sue - found elevated levels of it, you can relax.

In 2018, an International Agency for Research on Cancer did discuss benzene, but the levels were 10,000X safe levels. And they do not ever show what causes cancer, all they do is target chemicals and look at rows and columns of data from surveys and other papers, and try to claim correlation.


IRS Correctly Says You Can't Use Health Savings For Acupuncture, Massages or Other Wellness Nonsense

IRS Correctly Says You Can't Use Health Savings For Acupuncture, Massages or Other Wellness Nonsense

Mar 07 2024 | comment(s)

Folk medicine, traditional medicine, alternative medicine, complementary medicine, wellness - it is all the same thing rebranded to be sold anew but one thing remains consistent; none of it is actual medicine.

Acupuncture is a placebo, massages are not evidence-based treatments, your Blue Apron "organic" food subscription is not preventing any illness, and so the Biden administration has rightly decreed that you can't use a Health Savings Account - untaxed funds meant to be used for medical care - and buy alternatives to medicine. Not even if you you get a doctor to give you a note saying it is real. The irony is that because his constituents overwhelmingly distrust science, his administration launched an unscientific  “Food is Medicine” initiative last year.
Weedkillers Don't Cause Cancer And Juries Have Learned People Are Not Plants

Weedkillers Don't Cause Cancer And Juries Have Learned People Are Not Plants

Mar 07 2024 | comment(s)

A lawyer who claims his client, a government union employee, got cancer from using the common weedkiller Roundup, is whining that his side didn't get to include "key evidence" from "the World Health Organisation" that it caused cancer.
Losing Weight Can't Cause Cancer But Welcome To Modern Epidemiology

Losing Weight Can't Cause Cancer But Welcome To Modern Epidemiology

Mar 06 2024 | comment(s)

As the century turned, the science community began to become critical of a once-honored field; epidemiology.  If you are not familiar with it, it is people who correlate causes to outcomes. They don't show it, they usually are not scientists, but they look for links and then if those look interesting scientists will follow up on it.

This was an occupation once so conservative and evidence-driven that they were the last to accept that heart disease and cancer might have a hereditary factor. When epidemiologists showed that smoking causes lung cancer the data were so overwhelming and comprehensive that Big Tobacco began to stockpile money for the inevitable lawsuits because they had denied it.
Where's Tommaso?

Where's Tommaso?

Mar 02 2024 | comment(s)

March is here, and with it begins a season of intense travel for me - something which for some combination of reasons has become sort of a habit. First, workshops and conferences are rarely scheduled in the December-February period. Second, the Christmas vacations put a sort of break to all activities and disrupt the flow. Third, I teach a course in the first semester, which is now over. And fourth, INFN funding mechanisms imply that it is harder to travel in those months (yearly budgets close toward the end of November, and funds become again available only a bit after the new year starts).
'Food Is Medicine' Gurus Link Processed Food To Basically Every Disease

'Food Is Medicine' Gurus Link Processed Food To Basically Every Disease

Mar 01 2024 | comment(s)

Food fads in the 'food is medicine' space try to use science jargon - nutriceuticals (literal food as medicine), polyphenols, prebiotics, all so they can  promote fad diets around something new - like fermented foods recently.
Boiling Water To Remove 'Microplastics' Is So Dumb Even Washingon Post Won't Endorse It. Oh Wait...

Boiling Water To Remove 'Microplastics' Is So Dumb Even Washingon Post Won't Endorse It. Oh Wait...

Feb 29 2024 | comment(s)

A new paper in Environmental Science&Technology Letters (created a decade ago to ride the 'everything causes cancer' craze) claims that not only are 'microplastics' harmful - because in modern times we can detect anything in anything and if you can detect it, it is killing you - you can and should remove them by both boiling and filtering the water in your home.

It is so bizarre - we'd have been extinct 150,000 years ago if our bodies did not have the ability to harmlessly excrete lots and lots and lots of trace chemicals - that no mainstream media outlet would promote it.
Reduce School Violence By Eliminating Grades, Say Academic Psychologists

Reduce School Violence By Eliminating Grades, Say Academic Psychologists

Feb 27 2024 | comment(s)

One of the few things that can get a government union employee in a mandatory industry like education fired is hitting a student. Yet the link between increased tolerance and less accountability for students has correlated to increased violence by teachers. If there are no repercussions for behavior, behavior gets worse.

Everyone seems to know this except academic psychologists, who instead argue that grades are the problem. Don't want to be assaulted? Don't have accountability for any student who will suffer no lasting repercussions if they assault you while if you defend yourself you will be fired, go to jail, be sued, and vilified by the internet for eternity.