Category: Science

The Sound Of Settled Science

Science Unsettled Science 1 Comment

Intelligent Design: Michael Levin on Consciousness, Cognition, Biology, Emergence

…what she had discovered was that if you look at the nascent ectoderm that later will regionalize to become face and mouth, you know, eyes and mouth and all of that, that, um, uh, that, uh, early, early on before all the genes turn on that, um, uh, determine where all those things will go.

The bioelectric pattern within that ectoderm looks like the face. It, it shows you where all this stuff is going to go.

Fascinating stuff.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 56 Comments

A recent discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe challenge established ideas about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.

Led by researchers from Penn State and utilizing the NIRSpec instrument on JWST as part of the RUBIES survey, the international team identified three enigmatic objects dating back to 600-800 million years after the Big Bang, a time when the universe was just 5% of its current age. They announced the discovery on June 27 in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The scientists analyzed spectral measurements, or intensity of different wavelengths of light emitted from the objects. Their analysis found signatures of “old” stars, hundreds of millions of years old, far older than expected in a young universe.

The Sound Of Settled Science

AI Tech Unsettled Science 4 Comments

When I was about 12, I read a book on “forensic science”, and for a time considered it as one of my career options. Little did I know, the field is more credentialist guesswork than it is solid science.

New research highlights the importance of careful application of high-tech forensic science to avoid wrongful convictions. The study was published on June 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the study, which has implications for a wide range of forensic examinations that rely on “vast databases and efficient algorithms,” researchers discovered that the odds of a false match significantly increase when examiners make millions of comparisons in a quest to match wires found at a crime scene with the tools allegedly used to cut them.

The rate of mistaken identifications could be as high as one in 10 or more, concluded the researchers, who are affiliated with the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE), based in Ames, Iowa.

Flashback: Bite marks, blood-splatter patterns, ballistics, and hair, fiber and handwriting analysis sound compelling in the courtroom, but much of the “science” behind forensic science rests on surprisingly shaky foundations.

Safe and Effective®

Safe and Effective Science 4 Comments

Ahh, the speed of socialized science. It is a wonder to behold.

Daily Mail- Huge surge in demand for hepatitis C test after it emerged 1,700 who caught it in blood transfusion scandal have not been diagnosed

According to the Hepatitis C Trust, those people are in addition to the other 27,000 who caught it when they were given contaminated blood from the 1970s until 1991 – in what is widely regarded as the biggest treatment disaster in NHS history.

The BBC has reported that 12,800 people in England have requested NHS home-testing kits in just over a week, compared with 2,300 in the entire month of April.

Too Much Freedom

Canada’s Bolsheviks Climate Cult Unsettled Science 22 Comments

As Terence Corcoran notes, it’s no longer debatable that the productivity of the Canadian economy has taken a beating recently. The problem is that most analysts seem to believe that the problems arose from too little government oversight over the economy, not too much.

Faced with the medical pandemic, Ottawa ordered unprecedented social and economic closures to “flatten the curve” of contagion. To offset the inevitable economic decline, government spending soared and the Bank of Canada unleashed a major monetary expansion, claiming at the time that it could do so with minimal inflationary disruption. The Bank was wrong.

In Road to Freedom, Stiglitz argues that post-pandemic shortages, inflation and unemployment were the product of free-market failure rather than state interventions and bungled monetary policy. When COVID struck, everyone turned to the government to save the economy “and it worked remarkably well.” Therefore, he says, we need more government. “It wasn’t a one-time thing,” he claims. “As the world faces the existential crisis of climate change, there is no alternative but government action.”

Natural Immunity For The Win

Safe and Effective Science Wuhan Flu 22 Comments

SDA been sayin’.

Nature- Scientists tried to give people COVID — and failed

The first participants got the same tiny dose of the ‘ancestral’ SARS-CoV-2 strain as did those in the first trial. When nobody developed a sustained infection, the researchers increased the dose by more and more in subsequent groups of participants, until they reached a level 10,000 times the initial dose. A few volunteers developed short-lived infections, but these quickly vanished.

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