News Articles

Honeybees are important pollinators for agriculture like the sweetener and almond industries but are also invoked by environmentalists targeting pesticides.It's hard to separate marketing hype from reality but scholars believe simulations and a monitoring system could see if activists who target seed treatments like neonicotinoid pesticides have science or just-so stories.

For farmers, land is their most valuable asset so they protect it in ways environmentalists do not understand. By using science whenever possible, to reduce water, energy, and environmental strain.Even organic farmers use toxic pesticides but because they are older and less effective they must use a lot more. A new literature review posits that organic farmers, and conventional as well, can reduce effects on soil using cover plants. Most farmers grow cover plants, animal feed or just plants to lay there and decompose, between main crops to supply the soil with nutrients before the next planting. They also protect against erosion and may increase biodiversity above and below ground. 

A new study of light anomalies combined with results from a Korea Microlensing Telescope Network microlensing survey show that super-Earths exist as far from their host star as our gas giants are from the sun. Which means that Earth-like exoplanets are a lot more common NASA press releases over every new statistical wobble suggest.

Trial lawyers hate when scientists note that animals are not tiny people, so their claims PFAS which harms animals in high doses does not mean it impacts humans at all. That animals are not little people are why drugs and medical devices must survive human clinical trials. There would be 10,000 cures for cancer being sold if effectiveness in a mouse was enough.Animal activists also hate animal trials. They will be happy about bioprinting organic tissue models that function like living organs. 

An algorithm that maps individual brain activity can reveal a “neural fingerprint” of  transient brain states during social interactions. The authors of the new paper believe their work demonstrates that individuals whose neural fingerprints are more aligned tend to more readily enter a shared state of deep focus—commonly known as team flow—which has profound implications for enhancing teamwork and performance across various high-stakes environments.

The cochlear implant has helped many regain hearing functionality and a new study shows a potential roadmap for those whose cochlear nerve is too damaged; the auditory brainstem implant.The current auditory brainstem implant and its rigid structure does not allow for good tissue contact, which means a majority of the electrodes must be switched off due to unwanted side effects such as dizziness or facial twitching. A soft, thin-film version with electrodes embedded in silicone leads to a pliable array less than a millimeter thick.Superior conformity means patients will no longer get vague sounds and little speech intelligibility - and fewer side effects.

Duckweed split into different species 59 million years ago, when the climate was more extreme than even the most aggressive climate simulation produced now.A new study, genome sequences for five duckweed species, reveals how duckweed can essentially farm itself, and because it can double in mass after two days what that might mean for the future of food science.

It's easy for Greenpeace employees in cities to talk about farming but in the real world, without pesticides we'd lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetables, and 32 percent of cereal crops. Most farmers want to optimize razor-thin margins and protect their biggest asset, land, so they are cautious about spraying too much, but the organic process leads to startling amounts of nitrogen runoff into rivers and ground water. A study claims 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution while the old ways of German farmers recently showed they were exposing everything to wasted chemicals. Seed treatments like neonicotinoids have gone a long way to reducing runoff but some products can only be sprayed. 

The world is producing more food using fewer pesticides than ever, thanks to modern science. The gap between modern pesticide usage and organic food pesticides needed per calorie of food got so large, up to 600% more organic pesticides used, that California stopped itemizing organic pesticides separately to improve the optics of the organic industry.

Today, the best way to prevent malaria remains DDT. Though banned in the US by a politician over the objections of scientists, it is still recommended by the United Nations for use where malaria has not been wiped out. Our FDA even wrote the book on how to spray it in homes.Despite 70 years of effort, viable affordable replacements remain elusive but a new program hopes LLMs could help find one. The  National Institutes of Health
funded a proposal to use machine learning techniques combined with cheminformatics to help generate new mosquito repellents.

The  Kilometre Cubic Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) collaboration has reported detection of  a neutrino with an estimated energy of about 220 PeV (220 million billion electron volts) by its ARCA detector. The event, KM3-230213A, is the first evidence that neutrinos of such high energies are produced in the Universe and the most energetic neutrino ever observed. 

A new Artificial Intelligence analysis of data of ovarian cancer patients links birth control pills to a 26% reduced risk for those had ever used it, and 43% for those who had used the it after the age of 45.That does not mean you should take it as a way to prevent cancer, it is an endocrine disruptor that binds to estrogen with 20,000X the effect of compounds like BPA that environmentalists tried to claim are too risky in food containers, and this study is EXPLORATORY. With enough data, Australians could link voting for the Liberal Party to lower risk of diseases. Epidemiology can link anything to anything.