Bloomberg- Dubai Grinds to Standstill as Cloud Seeding Worsens Flooding
Unlocking Self Sufficiency
National Post- Ontario resident who wants both a vagina and penis wins public funding for unique surgery
Ontario has been ordered to pay for unique surgery for a resident who is seeking to have a vagina constructed while leaving their penis intact.
Denying the procedure would infringe on the person’s Charter-protected right to security of the person, an Ontario court said in its ruling.
Article contentThe unanimous decision by a three-member panel of judges of Ontario’s Divisional Court could expand access to “bottom surgery” for people who identify as non-binary, meaning neither fully male nor fully female.
Assume The Position
Daily Sceptic- Prostate Cancer Screening Doing “More Harm Than Good”, Study Finds
The largest study to date investigating the PSA (Prostate-specific antigen) blood test, which is used as a screening tool in some European countries, found it had a small impact on reducing deaths, but also led to a worrying level of over-diagnosis.
The results of the trial show that an estimated one in six cancers found by the single PSA screening were over-diagnosed leading to unnecessary treatment of tumours that would not have caused any harm in someone’s lifetime.
“However, this research highlights that a PSA test for early detection can do more harm than good – it’s simply not accurate enough and can lead to some men having tests and treatment that they don’t need.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Surely, no one meant this literally: Can a Butterfly in Brazil Really Cause a Tornado in Texas?
Almost everyone has heard the claim that a butterfly can flap its wings in one part of the world and cause a chain reaction of events that ultimately results in a major event on the other side of the world. For example, a butterfly wing flap in Brazil could cause a tornado in Texas. Indeed, this concept has permeated popular society. . .
In academia, the concept of the butterfly effect apparently first appeared in an article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by J. Smagorinsky in 1969, but the specific question “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” was introduced by Ed Lorenz at the 1972 Meeting of AAAS Section on Environmental Sciences.
Good Lord, it seems some do.
. . . existing numerical models cannot accommodate a disturbance as small as the flap of a butterfly’s wing, meaning we cannot accurately predict the resulting weather phenomena using numerical models.
But despite the lack of scientific evidence supporting the idea that a butterfly wing flap could create a tornado in Brazil, the prevailing opinion, even among many in the atmospheric science community, continues to be that it is, indeed, possible.
Y2Kyoto: Rope
The nation’s first outdoor test to limit global warming by increasing cloud cover launched Tuesday from the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay.
The experiment, which organizers didn’t widely announce to avoid public backlash, marks the acceleration of a contentious field of research known as solar radiation modification. The concept involves shooting substances such as aerosols into the sky to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.
The move led by researchers at the University of Washington has renewed questions about how to effectively and ethically study promising climate technologies that could also harm communities and ecosystems in unexpected ways. The experiment is spraying microscopic salt particles into the air, and the secrecy surrounding its timing caught even some experts off guard.
“Since this experiment was kept under wraps until the test started, we are eager to see how public engagement is being planned and who will be involved,” said Shuchi Talati, the executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, a nonprofit that seeks to include developing countries in decisions about solar modification, also known as geoengineering.
The Sound Of Settled Science
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days: Another surprising discovery made inside the Lovelock cave was a handprint embedded in the rock face that measured twice the size of an average human palm.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Surprisingly, they found that in human-modified habitats, animal activity actually increased with human activity, by around 25 percent.
Y2Kyoto: The “Younger Cry-Ass Boundary”
After 15 years of deliberation, a team of scientists made the case that humankind has so fundamentally altered the natural world that a new phase of Earth’s existence—a new epoch—has already begun.
Soaring greenhouse gases, the spread of microplastics, decimation of other species, and fallout from nuclear tests—all were submitted as evidence that the world entered the Anthropocene, or era of humans, in the mid-20th century.
But the proposal was rejected in a contentious vote that has been upheld by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the field’s governing body said in a statement published on its website on Thursday.
The decision “to reject the proposal for an Anthropocene Epoch as a formal unit of the Geologic Time Scale is approved”, it said.
The only thing funnier than losing the vote is the notion that it could be determined by vote.
The More You Know
The Speed of Science
Joseph Varon- (facebook link) Finally, after 4 years, The Lancet just published a paper that confirmed what we were doing 4 years ago, and many of our colleagues thought we were crazy! Our treatment modality saved many lives. Patients come first, politics last!
What Would We Do Without Studies?
“Psychological researchers in Finland have created an assessment to help measure an individual’s commitment to principles of social justice and made some surprising findings across the Finnish population — including a negative correlation between progressive ideals and levels of happiness.”
“Their findings, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, suggest other Western nations may see similar patterns among their socially conscious citizens.”
One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest
What a COVID-19 Food Fight Says About Scientific Discourse
I first wrote a version of this post almost three years ago when I learned that I was blocked on Twitter by some prominent virologists soon after I called for an independent investigation of COVID-19 origins. Since then, I have observed public discussions of COVID-19 origins among virologists continue to devolve into ever-greater depths of name calling, juvenile insults, and more troublingly, efforts to damage careers and reputations.
Of course, I’ve seen this all before up close and personal in public discussions of climate, and as you might guess, I have some thoughts.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Every now and then there’s a new piece of evidence that shakes up what we thought we knew about the origin of our species.
Follow the Xience
At Frontiers in Psychology, it seems that users on X are now part of the peer review process.
On January 4th, the paper “Meta-analysis: On average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average,” was accepted to the journal. That same day, the abstract was published with the notice that the “final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.”
Soon thereafter, the paper went viral, quickly accruing over 54,000 views, wide discussion on X and Reddit, and coverage in popular media (including RCS). It garnered this attention for its intriguing yet simultaneously obvious finding: over the past 80 years, as a far greater proportion of North Americans attended college, the average IQ of college undergraduates dropped from around 120 to 102, just slightly above the average of 100.
As the authors, Bob Uttl, a psychologist and faculty member at Mount Royal University, and his students Victoria Violo and Lacey Gibson, noted, “The decline in students’ IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years. Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s.” College students no longer come solely from the ranks of the highly intelligent and privileged, they come from all corners of society. Uttl and his colleagues noted that this has implications. For example, academic standards and curricula might have to be adjusted. Moreover, employers can’t assume that applicants with university degrees are more capable or smarter than those without degrees.
A little over a month after Uttl, Violo, and Gibson’s paper was accepted and the abstract published, they were abruptly notified by email that it was rejected. They were apprised that Specialty Chief Editor Eddy Davelaar, a Professor of Psychology and Applied Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London, overrode the three peer reviewers who approved the paper and even his own handling editor. His reasons were subsequently forwarded to Uttl and his colleagues.
Down The Memory Hole
Irreversible climate change catastrophe along with mass death will be upon us within twenty years, apparently.
Oh, wait,… that prediction was made twenty years ago.
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.
The Racist Weather
From Theory to Fact
Safe and Effective™
The Sound Of Deplorable Science
It was known for decades that the Appalachian culture was inbreeding because of all the birth defects that were in the culture that turned out to be… bad nutrition. (Which was why, BTW, the DOD introduced the School Lunch Program back in the late 1940s. To cut down the rate of 4F from childhood nutrition deficiencies.)
Now, with DNA, we can peer into the past of the Appalachian culture and show that those toothless (from poor nutrition) rednecks were…
Not actually sleeping with their daughters. The DNA shows no higher rate of actual incest in traditional Appalachian culture than in the general background of the US.
Fathers Milk
Telegraph- Trans-women’s milk as good as breast milk, says NHS trust
For a person born male to breastfeed, they must develop milk-producing glands by taking the hormone progestin.
A drug is required to lactate, such as domperidone, which is often prescribed to women struggling to breastfeed, and helps to stimulate the production of prolactin – a separate hormone that tells the body to produce milk.
Domperidone, also known by the brand name Motilum, was not intended for this, but is prescribed off-label by doctors, despite the manufacturer, Janssen, itself recommending against it because of possible side effects to a baby’s heart.
Francisco- As long as they’re not using ivermectin…