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.
The Sound Of Settled Science
The Revolution Will Be Televised
Grab a beverage.
Tom Luongo- The Great Reset is Dead, Long Live the Great Reset
Spoken like the true authoritarian that he is, Harari can only see violence and chaos. He’s not wrong. The violence and chaos coming, however, have their roots in his attempts (or complicity) in trying to force, through violence, a global order on humanity which humanity doesn’t want.
This push towards violence, however, can stop tomorrow. All that has to happen is for cretins like Harari, Soros, Schwab, Gates, and all the people behind them, to truly accept the fact that they have failed and cut a deal with us.
Opinions Verboten
National Post- Jury awards climate scientist Michael Mann $1 million in defamation lawsuit
During the trial, Steyn represented himself, but said through his manager Melissa Howes that he would be appealing the $1 million award in punitive damages, saying it would have to face “due process scrutiny.”
“We always said that Mann never suffered any actual injury from the statement at issue,” Steyn said on Thursday through his manager. “And today, after twelve years, the jury awarded him one dollar in compensatory damages.”
Pick Up The Cookie?
The Sound Of Settled Science
“We believe that it is crucial to thoroughly revise our preconceptions of the Amazonian world.”
Man Bites Mann
Mark is in Washington resting up in preparation for the resumption of his trial at the DC Superior Court on Monday morning.
In the meantime, here are Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer with their dramatised reconstruction of the last day’s events, including what Powerline’s John Hinderaker described as Steyn’s “bravura performance” of his opening statement.
I’m Going To Miss The Arctic Sea Ice
Daily Sceptic- Arctic Sea Ice Soars to Highest Level for 21 Years
The dramatic, if largely unpublicised, recovery in Arctic sea ice is continuing into the New Year. Despite the contestable claims of the ‘hottest year ever’ (and even hotter in 2024), Arctic sea ice on January 8th stood at its highest level in 21 years. Last December, the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) revealed that sea ice recorded its third highest monthly gain in the modern 45-year record.
Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Maldives
If sea level rise is ongoing and inexorable, then all else equal, the areal extent of global land areas should be shrinking, especially in low-lying continental areas and among tropical islands. Indeed that is the message that NASA is telling children, warning of the disappearance of large parts of the coastline, as shown below, with large parts of Florida and Louisiana succumbing to the seas.
Sea levels around the world of course are rising and expected to continue to rise throughout the 21st century and beyond. However, from 1985 to 2015 — a period when global sea levels increased by about 60 millimeters (about 2.4 inches) — the areal extent of global coastal land increased by almost 34,000 square kilometers (about 13k square miles), or about the size of Belgium home to more than 11 million people.
If the notion of landification seems paradoxical or contrary to what you’ve read in the media, don’t worry, you won’t be not alone.
Starving Cancer
Cedars Sinai- Researchers Look to Fasting as a Next Step in Cancer Treatment
…fasting selectively targets cancer cells based on their vulnerabilities—just like chemotherapy. While healthy cells lie dormant during a fast (and shore up their defenses), cancer cells are already damaged, so they struggle to survive without nourishment.
“I liken it to bears and hummingbirds,” Freedland explained. “In the absence of food, bears hibernate. But hummingbirds, like tumor cells, can’t hibernate—and they’ll die without food.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Over the past few weeks I have read Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, by Mike Davis. During my time as a scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I spent a lot of time researching impacts of and responses to El Niño and La Niña under the guidance of the one and only Mickey Glantz. I was aware of the 1877-78 El Niño event and its profound impacts, but I never connected its significance to the contemporary climate discourse until recently.
Davis compiles estimates suggesting that more than 50 million people died in the mid-1870s related to extreme weather and climate — That equates to about 4% of global population. Today, that same proportion of the world’s population would be over 320 million deaths, or almost the entire population of the entire United States. We cannot even imagine this magnitude of human suffering.
The proximate cause of the 1870s massive climate impacts was a very strong El Niño even in 1877 and 1878, but that event was also perhaps comparable to strong El Niño events in 1997/98 and 2015/16. What accounts for the massive loss of life in the 1870s? Davis explores this in depth, and the simple answer is colonial rule informed by Malthusian impulses.
The Sound Of Settled Science
10 minute on the heretics of today.
Published This Month In The Journal Of The Blindingly Obvious
Your morning science: Study shows sex could be a better predictor of sports performance than gender identity
Dr John Armstrong, King’s, Dr Alice Sullivan, University College London and George M Perry, an independent researcher from the USA, conducted a study analysing data on the performance of people who competed in the non-binary category of 21 races in the New York Road Runners database.
Outside of purely biological outcomes and criminology, little empirical work has been done to test the theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes. The data set of 166 race times achieved by non-binary athletes within a data set of 85,173 race times was selected as it was the largest available consistently formatted data on non-binary athletes.
Since the race results do not provide the sex of non-binary athletes, the sex of non-binary athletes was either derived from previous races they had run, or where this wasn’t available, the researchers used a novel technique to model the sex of athletes probabilistically based on their given names, using US Social Security Administration data. Race times were used as the outcome variable in linear models with explanatory variables derived from biological sex, gender identity, age and the event being raced.
I don’t ever want to hear another word about the flat-earth people. Not. One. Word.
Y2Kyoto: Follow The Science
Into the void;
A new study by a team of mostly San Francisco Bay Area scientists that found human-caused climate warming has increased the frequency of extremely fast-spreading California wildfires has come into question from the unlikeliest of critics—its own lead author.
Patrick T. Brown, climate team co-director at the nonprofit Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley and a visiting research professor at San Jose State University, said his Aug. 30 paper in the prestigious British journal Nature is scientifically sound and “advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior.”
But Brown this week dropped a bomb on the journal—as well as his study’s co-authors who are staunchly defending the team’s work. In an online article, blog post and social media posts, Brown said he “left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published,” causing almost as much of a stir as the alarming findings themselves.
Brown wrote that the study didn’t look at poor forest management and other factors that are just as, if not more, important to fire behavior because “I knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.” He added such bias in climate science “misinforms the public” and “makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
Thousands of years before ancient people in Central Eurasia learned to farm, hunter-gatherer groups in the subarctic were building some of the first permanent, fortified settlements, challenging the notion that agriculture was a prerequisite for societies to ‘settle down’.
Researchers now think they have dated the earliest known fortifications in the icy north, if not the world, near a curve of the Amnya River in Western Siberia. […]
Traditionally, archaeologists have assumed that foraging communities were not yet societally or politically ‘complex’ enough to build monumental, permanent structures that needed to be maintained or defended.
Yet ongoing research at the Amnya promontory and other archaeological sites around the world suggest that cultivating crops and rearing animals aren’t the only incentives for such activity.
Paper here.
Safe and Effective
Oreos Are Better Than Statins for Lowering Cholestrol?
Okay, this is preliminary, highly context dependent, and the initial experiment isn’t even over yet. But it’s still darn interesting.
British Exceptionalism
Unlike Canada, there are still some nations in the world, such as the UK and America, where doctors are not automatically driven from their careers for disagreeing with Covid policy. Dr. John Campbell brings us this engaging interview with Dr. Clare Craig about the myths and reality of virus spread, masking and scientific modeling in the Covid era. Her book is available on Amazon UK.
“There is a problem that we have that modelers… first of all, their entire career is about this sort of event, so they want to spin it and out and exaggerate it….the worse they can make it, the better it is for them so they become the heros…So they’ve got all the wrong motivations and on top of that, if they say 85% are going to be susceptible and they’ve got it wrong, there doesn’t seem to be any consequence for them….They have this massive incentive to always be over-calling it.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
BVA Journals: Neutering is no longer the hallmark of responsible ownership
She is especially keen for vets to understand the breadth of ways in which research has shown the reproductive system contributes to an animals physiology. Take for instance the role of luteinising hormone (LH), which is responsible for triggering ovulation in females and production of testosterone in males — and is a key research focus for Kutzler and colleagues at her lab.
“When we first started looking at it, we found luteinising hormone had receptors on lymphocytes, so these immune cells that are floating around and involved in everything from fighting off viruses, fighting off bacteria, to making antibodies. When we started to review the literature, ‘we found that other people before us had demonstrated there were these receptors in humans, laboratory animals and even in dogs.’
In itself, that didn’t necessarily mean a great deal. Just because a cell has a receptor for a certain hormone doesn’t mean that it actually does anything. If you think of a receptor asa lock and the hormone as the key, you could unlock the door and theres nothing behind it,” she explains.
Indeed, Kutzler suspects the general assumption had been that there was nothing behind the LH receptor lock on the lymphocyte door. ‘Not that there was any science behind it, but it was just: “Why would there be reproductive hormone receptors on lymphocytes? They must not be functional.”
To test the assumption, Kutzler and colleagues collected lymphocytes from both neutered and intact dogs. ‘We grew those lymphocytes in cultures and added increasing levels of LH to see what happened. Did it unlock the door and there was something behind there? Sure enough, what happens is LH induces neoplastic changes in lymphocytes. Among them are cell proliferation, cell adhesion and cell ‘migration into tissue.”
For Kutzler, this provides an explanation for a finding seen in research studies – that lymphoma, along with certain other cancers, occurs in much higher rates in neutered dogs.
“We know that there are a number of serious neoplastic diseases such as lymphoma, haemangiosarcoma, osteosarcoma that can develop after gonadectomy,” says Stefano Romagnoli, professor of small animal reproduction at the University of Padova; president of the Italian Society for Animal Reproduction; and chair of the World Small Animal Veterinary Association reproduction control committee.
“And we also know that some castrated dogs develop prostatic carcinoma. It’s strange; counterintuitive.
I’ve been recommending (with rare exceptions) against routine neutering of my male puppies for at least 25 years, because we knew it was bullshit.