Each man kills the thing he loves, sang Jeanne Moreau in a beautiful song some thirty years ago. But the sentence is actually a quote from Oscar Wilde - aren't all smart quotes from that amazing writer?
Anyway, in some way this rather startling concept applies to every man except researchers in fundamental physics - both male and female, in fact. There, all of us love our Standard Model - it is a theory so wonderful and deep, and so beautifully confirmed by countless experiments, that it wins you over forever once you reach enough understanding of its intricacies. And physicists have tried, unsuccessfully, to kill the Standard Model for over fifty years now.
Anomaly! Anomaly!
During last evening's Republican National Convention, speakers repeatedly invoked the fentanyl crisis and blamed lax border control and unchecked illegal immigration. Democrats, on the other hand, blame Big Pharma, and argue corporate exploitation of supply chain monitoring loopholes fueled the US opioid epidemic.
They are both right. Every high-profile death related to fentanyl had it purchased illegally, that is due to crime syndicates, while the other side argues that it doctors and pharmaceutical companies caused the addiction which forced them to go the illegal route.
Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories have always been with us. The belief that Republican Vice-President Dan Quayle couldn't spell 'potato' or that Democratic President Barack Obama was not a citizen are common modern ones that still get repeated as facts.
A recent
paper did something interesting with data from 100 hypertension trials around the world - it compared blood pressure reductions by the type of healthcare professionals who led the interventions.
The results were that pharmacists achieved the greatest improvements, followed by community health workers. The authors believe that, unlike in the government-controlled medical environment, especially if patients are subsidized or free under the Affordable Care Act, doctors and nurses don't spend much time, while pharmacists and community health care workers have calmer, more empathetic demeanors.
Alzhiemer’s, the most common form of dementia, is increasingly prevalent.
In 2009, one of the first orders of business for self-proclaimed Scientist-In-Chief President Obama was to cancel NASA's Constellation project.
He said he wanted to 'go bigger' but given the hostility of his campaign, politically agnostic people knew what it meant - he was no Nixon, he was never going to allow a program with his predecessor's name on it to get off the ground, so the Constellation had to die to spite Bush. NASA has never really recovered from such overt politicization of science but the problems were evident before that.
If epidemiologists were held accountable for the high costs, drug shortages, and food and chemical misinformation they cause, nonsense like claiming a type 2 diabetes drug that is popular off-label for weight loss in rich people also prevent dementia would stop.
Yet the reason so many "studies" by epidemiologists are being pushed onto the public now is because it is a fad. Fads, creating them or capitalizing on them, is big business for lawyers on one side and corporations on the other, and epidemiologists capitalize on that.
Ask a farmer what their most important asset is and they will tell you it's their land. Without it, nothing happens.
Yet the Biden EPA has shown breathtaking hostility to American farmers, insinuating by regulation that not only do American farmers not care about their most important asset, they are systematically destroying it.
It makes no sense but neither does the method EPA is using to undermine American science; namely that they are doing no science at all. Instead, they have stuffed panels with epidemiologists who don't need evidence, they have correlation. Then they use correlation to invoke other regulations and claim it is the Constitution at war on American agriculture, not generational bureaucrats who only even touch grass in photo-ops.
A new
analysis has found that cirrhosis, a liver disease that occurs when scar tissue prevents the liver from functioning normally, occurs twice as often in trans adults as those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.
In the previous post I have described some of the main functionalities of the RadiaCode 103 radiation spectrometer, which the company graciously made available for my tests. Here I want to discuss some additional tests I have done, using radioactive samples from my minerals collection as well as a couple of test sources we have in our Physics department in Padova.
