>=A major new study from Stanford Medicine, published in Science Translational Medicine, offers a fundamentally new explanation for rare cases of mRNA vaccine–associated myocarditis. Rather than simply showing that cardiac injury occurs, the researchers identify a specific immune signaling mechanism that can trigger heart cells to damage themselves from within.
Crucially, the authors describe this mechanism as a potential class effect of mRNA technology, raising important design considerations not only for current COVID vaccines, but also for future mRNA vaccines and cancer therapies.
A.I. vs A.I.
What could possibly go wrong?
Nature- ‘A serious problem’: peer reviews created using AI can avoid detection
It’s almost impossible to know whether a peer-review report has been generated by artificial intelligence, according to a study that put AI-detecting tools to the test.
Everything Keeps Getting Older
A groundbreaking new discovery has just pushed back the origins of making fire by over 350,000 years
Everything Keeps Getting Older
Beyond the regional implications, the structures add to a growing body of underwater evidence demonstrating that complex stone-building traditions existed among coastal hunter-gatherer groups long before agriculture spread across Europe.
The Sound Of Settled Science
The CDC has updated its “Autism and vaccines” page.
Pursuant to the Data Quality Act (DQA), which requires federal agencies to ensure the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information they disseminate to the public, this webpage has been updated because the statement “Vaccines do not cause autism” is not an evidence-based claim. Scientific studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines contribute to the development of autism. However, this statement has historically been disseminated by the CDC and other federal health agencies within HHS to prevent vaccine hesitancy.
HHS has launched a comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism, including investigations on plausible biologic mechanisms and potential causal links. This webpage will be updated with gold-standard science that results from the HHS comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism as required by the DQA.
I expect we’ll be hearing lots about this.
What Would We Do Without Research?
Stat Modeling; (sorry about the code glitch)
The point is that I shouldn’t be so shocked to hear that Columbia medical school has prominent faculty who’ve been involved in research fraud. If you’re a medical researcher and a cheater, then research fraud is a natural step. Just as if you’re a storekeeper and a cheater, then ripping off your customers and employees is a natural step; or if you’re a statistician and a cheater, then it makes sense to hire yourself out as a data manipulator; or if you’re a CEO and a cheater, then it makes sense to fake your corporate reports; or if you sell used cars and you’re a cheater, then you’ll hide the flaws in your cars; or if you’re a university administrator and a cheater, then it makes sense to fake your U.S. News statistics . . . ulp! In all these examples, there’s a clear incentive to cheat: if you play honest, it’s easy to fall behind your competitors who could be cheating too. Indeed, you could argue that, if you play by the rules, you’d be letting the side down . . . it’s arguably unethical not to cheat. You’re developing treatments what will save lives, after all!
Via Steve McIntyre: Gelman didn’t mention the following famous statement by climate scientist Stephen Schneider
Let Them Eat Bullets
Viral immunologist Dr. Bridle;
The data suggest the ostriches experienced an outbreak of avian influenza, which was most likely introduced to the farm by wild birds, in which the virus is endemic. In the ostriches, the virus functionally behaved like a low pathogenic strain, based on the percentage of deaths. Ostriches that had been on the farm for more than several years did not get sick, suggesting that they had naturally acquired immunity, likely from a previous exposure to the virus. Newer members of the flock got sick and some died. Most of the sick ostriches recovered and returned to full health. This suggests that all of the remaining healthy flock had naturally acquired immunity. So, to execute healthy birds with gold-standard immunity in no way increases the safety of people or animals in the region. In fact, it does the opposite.
A flock with naturally acquired immunity creates a geographical location where the virus will either be stopped dead in its tracks, or will have great difficulty getting transmitted. Instead, the farmers will be allowed, if they so wish, to repopulate the farm with immunologically naive birds that will be highly susceptible to influenza viruses that can get re-introduced by the birds that forever migrate through the property. Absolutely nothing has been done or can be done about the carrier population of wild birds that spread the virus between continents. So, by failing to acknowledge the reality of naturally acquired immunity, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has done the opposite of enhancing public safety. Their policy of ignoring this basic science has raised public risk through the removal of a flock that achieved the ultimate public health goal of herd immunity and allowing them to be replaced with highly susceptible birds.
Indeed, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has documented multiple farms across the country in which their stamping out policy for avian influenza facilitated the repeated return of the disease when naive birds were introduced. Over just a few-year span, several farms were documented to have up to four repeat outbreaks. Let’s explicitly spell out what that looks like…
Follow The Science
In March 2025, the Australian government quietly buried its last collection of Pleistocene human fossils in an unmarked grave. These remains were of Homo sapiens who had shared the Earth with Neanderthals. But they went into the ground with little media coverage or protest from the global scientific community, who knew better than anyone that these delicate, carefully reconstructed fossils would not last long in hostile conditions.
The significance of this loss is hard to overstate. Australia is a unique piece in the puzzle of human origins. It was colonized by modern humans before Europe, but it remained almost entirely isolated, preserving many aspects of human culture and genetics that vanished elsewhere. As Charles Darwin observed, “the Australian aborigines rank amongst the most distinct of all the races of man.”
Following the British settlement of Australia, museums and universities accumulated collections of both historical and ancient remains. Most material came from southeast Australia and Tasmania, where the once-numerous tribes had suffered enormous losses and even extinction. Today, these thousands of bones, mummies, and fossils have almost all been buried or cremated; genetic “biographies” that were burned before they were ever read.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Strange glassy blobs strewn across the Australian desert are evidence of an ancient meteorite impact that scientists hadn’t noticed until now. […]
“They formed when an asteroid slammed into Earth, melting surface rock and scattering debris for thousands of kilometres. These tiny pieces of glass are like little time capsules from deep in our planet’s history.
“What makes the discovery even more intriguing is that, although the impact must have been immense, scientists are yet to locate the crater.”
Younger Dryas, call your office.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
What Is Actually Happening With 3I Atlas
The Sound Of Settled Science
Peanut allergies are down 43% since we stopped avoiding peanuts in childhood.
The Sound Of Settled Science
“This isn’t science fiction. This is the work of Michael Levin at Tufts University and is completely rewriting the rules of biology.”
Science!
The Times- Nature journal accused of abandoning science for social justice
Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist, backed Krylov and said that too many journals were “favouring authors because of their identity group rather than the excellence and importance of their science”.
What Would We Do Without Peer Review?
I am writing in response to your invitation to review the manuscript titled “Large circular dichroism in the total photoemission yield of free chiral nanoparticles created by a pure electric dipole effect” submitted for publication in Nature Communications.
Although the topic is within my field of expertise and I would normally welcome the opportunity to contribute to peer review, I must decline. Furthermore, I have decided not to engage with journals belonging to the Nature group in any professional capacity in the future because the group has adopted policies and practices that are incompatible with the mission of a scientific publisher.
Scientific publishers play a key role in the production of knowledge — they are a pillar of what Jonathan Rauch has termed the “the Constitution of Knowledge” (Rauch, 2025). The role of the publisher is to be an epistemic funnel: it accepts claims to truth at one end, but permits only those that withstand organized scrutiny to emerge from the other, a function traditionally performed by a rigorous peer-review and editorial process. This process should be guided by scientific rigor and a commitment to finding objective truth.
Unfortunately, the Nature group has abandoned its mission in favor of advancing a social justice agenda. The group has institutionalized censorship, implemented policies that have sacrificed merit in favor of identity-based criteria, and injected social engineering into its author guidelines and publishing process. The result is that papers published in Nature journals can no longer be regarded as rigorous science.
Pants on Fire
Spare Parts
A Midwestern Doctor- The Hidden Crisis in Organ Transplantation
Science!
Where would we be without peer review?
Pub med- Prostate Cancer in Transgender Women: Incidence, Etiopathogenesis, and Management Challenges
Harvard Health- Prostate cancer in transgender women
Nature- Incidence of prostate cancer in transgender women in the US: a large database analysis
Canadian Urological Association Journal- Rethinking prostate cancer screening in transgender women
Mothers Little Helper
Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan- Antidepressants in mild depression
In mild depression, the effect of antidepressants is clinically irrelevant – improvements are mainly attributable to placebo response, natural recovery, or nonspecific effects.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Humans in America 130k years ago?