Science 2.0

In December, people begin to think about the new year, and that means resolutions to lose weight. Exercising is a lot of work and feeling hungry much of the time is not desirable so many will instead opt for diet plans. One popular diet is the Atkin's Diet, where natural sugars are replaced with protein, while another is the Ketogenic Diet, where sugars are replaced with fatty foods. Both seek to put your body into a metabolic state called ketosis, where elevated level of ketone bodies replace glucose.

"Epstein didn't kill himself" is a conspiracy meme that has been everywhere lately. If you are not familiar with the name Jeffrey Epstein, he was a billionaire and convicted sex offender - but as a billionaire he was connected to almost everyone in politics and culture, so when he was found dead in his jail cell, denied bail on a new charge, there began concerns someone had him killed to keep him silent.

I got an email from a young person at a university stating they were working on a research paper, and while many in the science and scicomm community are jaded about such requests - we are doing someone's homework for them, it is said - I always answer. It's a nonprofit, answering is the job.The questions were rather specific to GMOs so I stuck to that, but of course I write about a lot more than agriculture while the rest of Science 2.0 writes about virtually every area of science.The 5 questions I answered below and I added some more thoughts for this article:1. Why did you create Science 2.0?2. Why did you choose to write about GMOs? 3. What impact do you think the anti-GMO activist have on the scientific community?

Patients with Werner Syndrome show early signs of aging, including grey hair and wrinkled skin. They live on average about 45 years. It affects around 1 in 200,000 people in the U.S. but in Japan it is 1 in 40,000. Why the difference?  That is a mystery, like much of the disease. Since the underlying mechanisms are unknown there is no real treatment or cure, but a new study found that in banana flies and C. elegans worms with the equivalent of the syndrome that the dietary supplement nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) prolonged life and reduced age-related diseases like cancer.

We are setting up a live streaming/video channel to do things like reviews of books, interviews, and then eventually we will do staff meetings as well.(1)But while it was once limited to something like Facebook live, with Restream we can go out to YouTube Live, Mixer, and Twitch, all at once.(2) 

Let's say your Generation Z child is concerned about chemicals in your Thanksgiving meal and you want to avoid that awkward moment when they don't look up from their phones while saying "OK Boomer" as you try to explain to them that all food has chemicals.Maybe they just don't want scientific chemicals. Maybe they want the organic kind that are healthier, according to, well, organic industry trade groups and journalists at the Mother Jones company.So you trudge off to Whole Foods or a store you read about on a Facebook page and buy the stuff on your menu, all certified expensive. I hate to alarm you but it all has chemicals that are known carcinogens. That's right, they cause cancer.

With endorsements from five previous FDA Commissioners and a Republican Senate deciding his fate, Stephen Hahn, M.D., is certain to become the next Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.He's qualified, but most FDA heads have been(1). He also understands politics, and that is always part of FDA because a Commissioner has to let career scientists do their jobs while navigating demands from both the White House and Congress, which can often be politically motivated. And he s a lung cancer doctor, so he understands better than most what really causes lung cancer (smoking) and what is hype promoted by pharmaceutical companies and other groups who have tremendous influence inside organizations like the American Medical Association.

The 1950s were the first sign that with a booming economy, progressive busy-bodies were going to once again turn their sights on controlling behavior. Though Prohibition had ended the Puritan Piety attack on alcohol, and Hitler had put a halt to progressive dreams of eugenics, the war on inferiors continued by well-meaning elites unabated after the soldiers came home.

You know you are in a wealthy country when there are articles about how people are depressed if they can't get a $2,000 Macbook, young people can talk about how bored they are, and poor families live in more square footage than the middle class in France.Oh, and a majority are fat, even among poor people. It was never before possible for poor people to be obese, abundance of food used to be a sign of wealth.

In a story that feels like it could have come from Babylon Bee or The Onion, psychologists used surveys of teens to declare with somber seriousness that teens are more bored than ever - and adolescent girls are most bored. And that could lead to drug abuse.They looked at responses from the Monitoring the Future in-school survey to statements like "I am often bored." Youth self-chose how bored they were on a five-point scale starting in 2008.

Dr. Norm Borlaug, the "father of the Green Revolution", is credited with saving a billion lives using agricultural science, and for the last 50 years he and his successors debunked the Malthusian claims of cynics like Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and their modern-day acolytes like Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, and Naomi Oreskes.When Holdren and Ehrlich (and the other Ehrlich) were trying to drum up support for mandatory birth control and a world government to enforce it(1), Borlaug and the science community quietly made farming more efficient than ever. Today, even the poorest people in most of the world can afford to be fat, something never possible before, and that is thanks to the legacy of Dr. Borlaug.

An exploratory study in cell cultures and mice finds that in their rodents high-fat diets throughout pregnancy (rich in polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acids) impacted fetal brain development. Don’t be alarmed, mice are not little people so a mouse study can only ever disqualify an effect, it can never show one in humans. Mice studies (and epidemiology) are termed "exploratory" because they can only suggest a link and will need relevant study before they can relate to humans, regardless what Huffington Post or Guardian may forget to note in their articles.