This Week in Science

[connor_in]

Sooooo, Mike, general invitation to Kzoo for your alien parties? I'd love to get my X-files on (I'm more Scully than Mulder, for the record).

 

[connor_in]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Space aliens would surely think it odd that one way humans express affection is the simultaneous exchange of saliva.</p>— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) <a href="https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/684409730186477570">January 5, 2016</a></blockquote>
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I think Neil's been smoking weed in the middle of the day again

 

[MNIrishman]

OMM gets a visit from the MIB:

 

[Old Man Mike]

Yep. You are a great illustration of why the government's policies have worked to make the subject a laughing stock.

As the old commercial said: "Thank you for your support."

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Ever doubted the reliability of research about human nutrition? If not, this 538 article explains why you should. Here's the conclusion:

Nearly every nutrient you can think of has been linked to some health outcome in the peer-reviewed scientific literature using tools like the FFQ, said John Ioannidis, an expert on the reliability of research findings at the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford. In a 2013 analysis published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Ioannidis and a colleague selected 50 common ingredients at random from a cookbook and looked for studies evaluating each food’s association to cancer risk. It turned out that studies had found a link between 80 percent of the ingredients — including salt, eggs, butter, lemon, bread and carrots — and cancer. Some of those studies pointed to an increased risk of cancer, others suggested a decreased risk, but the size of the reported effects were “implausibly large,” Ioannidis said, while the evidence was weak.

But the problems weren’t just statistical. Many of the reported findings were also biologically improbable, Ioannidis said. For instance, a 2013 study found that people who ate three servings of nuts per week had a nearly 40 percent reduction in mortality risk. If nibbling nuts really cut the risk of dying by 40 percent, it would be revolutionary, but the figure is almost certainly an overstatement, Ioannidis told me. It’s also meaningless without context. Can a 90-year-old get the same benefits as a 60-year-old? How many days or years must you spend eating nuts for the benefits to kick in, and how long does the effect last? These are the questions that people really want answers to. But as our experiment demonstrated, it’s easy to use nutrition surveys to link foods to outcomes, yet it’s difficult to know what these connections mean.

FFQs “aren’t perfect,” said Harvard’s Chavarro, but at the moment there are few other options. “It may be that we have reached a limit of current methodology for nutritional assessments and it’s going to require a major shift to do something better,” he said.

Current studies suffer another fundamental problem: We expect far too much from them. We want to answer questions like, what’s healthier, butter or margarine? Can eating blueberries keep my mind sharp? Will bacon give me colon cancer? But observational studies using memory-based measures of dietary intake are tools too crude to provide answers with this level of granularity.

One reason is that single nutrients like saturated fat or an antioxidant seem to produce only trivial differences in the absolute risk of disease, Ioannidis said. (His conclusion comes from more rigorous randomized trials.) This is why headlines so often report relative risks — how many people got cancer in the group who ate the most bacon compared with those who ate none. Relative risks are almost always much more extreme than absolute risk, but absolute risk (your risk of getting cancer if you consume bacon, for instance) is what we really care about. If, say, 1 out of 10,000 people who ate the most bacon got cancer, compared with 3 out of 10,000 who ate none, that’s a threefold difference. But the difference in absolute risk — a 0.01 percent chance of cancer versus 0.03 percent — is tiny and probably not enough to change anyone’s eating habits.

The tendency to report results as more precise and important than they are also explains why we get so many back-and-forth headlines about things like coffee. “Big data sets just confer spurious precision status to noise,” Ioannidis wrote in his 2013 analysis.

So we’re left with our original question: What is a healthy diet? We know the basics — we need sufficient calories and protein to keep our bodies alive. We need nutrients like vitamin C and iron. Beyond that, we may be overthinking it, said Archer, the Nutrition Obesity Research Center physiologist. “We have cultures that eschew fruits and vegetables that were perfectly healthy for thousands of years,” he said. Some populations today thrive on very few vegetables, while others subsist almost entirely on plant foods. The takeaway, Archer said, is that our bodies are adaptable and pretty good at telling us what we need, if we can learn to listen.

Even so, I doubt we’ll give up looking for secret health elixirs in our pantries and refrigerators. There’s a reason the media and the public gobble up these studies, and it’s the same reason that researchers spend billions of dollars doing them. We live in a world where scary diseases constantly strike people around us, sometimes out of the blue. The natural reaction when someone has a heart attack or is diagnosed with cancer is to look for a way to protect yourself from a similar fate. So we turn to food to regain a modicum of control. We can’t direct what’s going on inside our cells, but we can control what we put into our bodies. Science has yet to find a magic vitamin or nutrient that will allow us to stay healthy forever, but we seem determined to keep trying.

<blockquote class="twitter-video" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">How many cups of ribs did you eat last night?
<a href="https://t.co/bY6a7eKTcN">https://t.co/bY6a7eKTcN</a>
<a href="https://t.co/X2aKrt0NxD">https://t.co/X2aKrt0NxD</a></p>— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) <a href="https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/685214735936151553">January 7, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[MNIrishman]

Yep. You are a great illustration of why the government's policies have worked to make the subject a laughing stock.

As the old commercial said: "Thank you for your support."

I'm not quite sure how to interpret this. I hope you didn't take my poking fun as a lack of respect or serious interest. I find the topic of astrobiology to be academically fascinating and would love to participate in a serious treatment of ufology.

 

[Old Man Mike]

To Whiskey's post: the ability of our system, viewed in whole system terms, to produce unbiased and easily-communicated testings of health-related issues [of any sort] is very close to zero. This is because of many almost unsurmountable problems, a few of which are:

1). commercial companies [pharmaceutical et al] are so compromised by the core values of making money and preserving reputations that they are almost untrustworthy on any topic connected to their business, including deliberately managing research test results;

2). academic hospitals and academic university departments have so rewarded "cited" publications and punished lack of publications, that PhD/MD researchers rush into print with the poorest patience and undisciplined claims as to what their latest research actually means; a prime example involves our extremely poor methods of rapidly assessing the mutagenic power of substances and relating those numbers to human carcinogenesis;

3). the media doesn't really understand any of the subtleties in this, or doesn't want to bother because it would make stories less attractive to readership/viewership, and therefore goes with the over-the-top overstatements, producing hysteria or cultism in segments of the American public;

4). the American public is incredibly uneducated in any real understanding of science and technology, even though these things utterly dominate their lives. This is particularly critical regarding biology/biochemistry/chemistry, where the state of the typical citizen's status could be viewed as profoundly ignorant at best, and dangerously wrong at worst;

5). government shies away from making strong corrective moves against these dangerous ignorances and biases due to another complexity of forces, usually traceable to monied interests, unhelpful political philosophies, unwillingness to really step up on matters of science in the k-12 school system {including more teachers and better salaries --- this would involve supporting teacher-producing college departments as well}, and the growing money-and-politics-inspired distrust of government generally.

These factors make this a nearly unsolvable situation. The bottom-line is: more and more Americans are going to be sold more and more "snake oil" by companies, resulting in more and more "supplements", artificialities, denials of simple natural goodness of many foods and activities resulting in diminution of quality of day-to-day life and almost certainly compromised immune systems --- leading to, hmmmm, more health products sold.



To MN: my "over-sensitivity" to "kidding" about the serious UFO research effort is simple: you don't help much by "kidding" something which is weak. Kidding should be done [if ever] about something which is actually strong. UFO research is facing, and has faced for many decades, an impossible uphill battle against a formidable double-barreled authority consisting of an understandable policy by the military [you cannot know this without reading something serious like UFOs and Government] and academic establishments [another long story as to how this became a forbidden research area, and an "understandable" but irrational one.] This has resulted in making the unknowing media and public treat the whole thing as a Har-Har joke {some of it deserves that; some not at all}. The Har-Har, which is stated clearly as a goal in the 1953 CIA panel minutes documents, results in people like myself not wanting to talk about the subject anywhere [notice that even here on a minor IE thread I'm treated to the resultants of this], and not being able to publish research and scholarship in any widely read journals. It also results in VERY few new researchers wanting to spend any time on the subject at all. So: no outlets for research; no "rewards" or acknowledgements in one's academic settings/jobs; no new researchers; and general unwanted remarks and grief everywhere --- which is why the few of us gather in Kalamazoo to just get away from the crap, which we all have been subjected to for decades.

Every new Har-Har published remark adds to that wonderful sociology. That's why I say: thank you for your support --- knowing that you personally did not intend anything negative, but noting that it IS a negative anyway. But ... Peace. And now you know why I don't remark about this stuff much here or anywhere --- I, personally, have stopped agreeing to Television companies' requests for interviews since the big Peter Jennings documentary years ago, which his team handled respectfully but that was very unusual.

 

[MNIrishman]

To Whiskey's post: the ability of our system, viewed in whole system terms, to produce unbiased and easily-communicated testings of health-related issues [of any sort] is very close to zero. This is because of many almost unsurmountable problems, a few of which are:

1). commercial companies [pharmaceutical et al] are so compromised by the core values of making money and preserving reputations that they are almost untrustworthy on any topic connected to their business, including deliberately managing research test results;

2). academic hospitals and academic university departments have so rewarded "cited" publications and punished lack of publications, that PhD/MD researchers rush into print with the poorest patience and undisciplined claims as to what their latest research actually means; a prime example involves our extremely poor methods of rapidly assessing the mutagenic power of substances and relating those numbers to human carcinogenesis;

3). the media doesn't really understand any of the subtleties in this, or doesn't want to bother because it would make stories less attractive to readership/viewership, and therefore goes with the over-the-top overstatements, producing hysteria or cultism in segments of the American public;

4). the American public is incredibly uneducated in any real understanding of science and technology, even though these things utterly dominate their lives. This is particularly critical regarding biology/biochemistry/chemistry, where the state of the typical citizen's status could be viewed as profoundly ignorant at best, and dangerously wrong at worst;

5). government shies away from making strong corrective moves against these dangerous ignorances and biases due to another complexity of forces, usually traceable to monied interests, unhelpful political philosophies, unwillingness to really step up on matters of science in the k-12 school system {including more teachers and better salaries --- this would involve supporting teacher-producing college departments as well}, and the growing money-and-politics-inspired distrust of government generally.

These factors make this a nearly unsolvable situation. The bottom-line is: more and more Americans are going to be sold more and more "snake oil" by companies, resulting in more and more "supplements", artificialities, denials of simple natural goodness of many foods and activities resulting in diminution of quality of day-to-day life and almost certainly compromised immune systems --- leading to, hmmmm, more health products sold.



To MN: my "over-sensitivity" to "kidding" about the serious UFO research effort is simple: you don't help much by "kidding" something which is weak. Kidding should be done [if ever] about something which is actually strong. UFO research is facing, and has faced for many decades, an impossible uphill battle against a formidable double-barreled authority consisting of an understandable policy by the military [you cannot know this without reading something serious like UFOs and Government] and academic establishments [another long story as to how this became a forbidden research area, and an "understandable" but irrational one.] This has resulted in making the unknowing media and public treat the whole thing as a Har-Har joke {some of it deserves that; some not at all}. The Har-Har, which is stated clearly as a goal in the 1953 CIA panel minutes documents, results in people like myself not wanting to talk about the subject anywhere [notice that even here on a minor IE thread I'm treated to the resultants of this], and not being able to publish research and scholarship in any widely read journals. It also results in VERY few new researchers wanting to spend any time on the subject at all. So: no outlets for research; no "rewards" or acknowledgements in one's academic settings/jobs; no new researchers; and general unwanted remarks and grief everywhere --- which is why the few of us gather in Kalamazoo to just get away from the crap, which we all have been subjected to for decades.

Every new Har-Har published remark adds to that wonderful sociology. That's why I say: thank you for your support --- knowing that you personally did not intend anything negative, but noting that it IS a negative anyway. But ... Peace. And now you know why I don't remark about this stuff much here or anywhere --- I, personally, have stopped agreeing to Television companies' requests for interviews since the big Peter Jennings documentary years ago, which his team handled respectfully but that was very unusual.

To your point, can you explain to me how, outside of the SETI initiative and evolutionary theory-based laboratory work, ufology proceeds as a serious academic discipline? You're absolutely right, there's a lot of cloudiness (lenticular cloudiness?) surrounding the subject. My experience with such things is entirely based in the popular culture of it, which you for obvious reasons dislike. What research do you do? Is it sociological or could it be experimental (if only in principle)?

 

[Old Man Mike]

This is a big subject, not very subject to internet post answers.

For what it's worth, a list:
1). every time there is a CE2"trace" case, materials from that trace can be taken into the chem/geo laboratory and tested for chemical and crystalline and magnetic and heat-effects changes. This takes money, personnel, and facilities. France's governmental program did that, even looking at sophisticated biochemical changes in plants in one "lucky" case --- opportunities to do some of this are not happening "regularly";

2). physical testing to see the level of force [and what types of force] are necessary to create certain effects noted in UFO physical effects cases could be done --- this takes even more sophisticated labs, and has only been done pitifully few and inadequate times [ex. how to stop a car engine, how to shift magnetic directions in metals, how to alter crystalline materials or even just fuse certain substances];

3). taking seriously the possibility that near-Earth or Lunar-distance "anomalies" might be artificial structures not launched by us --- there are lots of "uncorrelated targets" in the files of NORAD --- or seriously look at the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points for "objects" or technical debris --- one guy was almost dismissed from the SETI community for trying to look at that --- too close to UFOs;

4). researching the physics of so-called "solid light" cases where the beams seem to be truncated in mid-air --- what does it take to do that, and did the alleged beams leave any after-effects?;

--- he!l, there are LOTS of things like this, including statistical studies and document retrieval and scholarship.

My, doubtless unacceptable, "softness" of scholarship involves researching large numbers of military and civilian case files to attempt to discover data patterns and levels of credibility in the sightings. This would be describable, I suppose, as "history of science and technology" which is my PhD. The tenor of your inquiry seems to hint that things other than lab-bench type science might not be "real" academic work, but even that, as indicated 1-->4 is possible ,and in an ideal academic world pursuing truth, is feasible/theoretically respectable.

 

[Bishop2b5]

Your Inner Fish: The Series | HHMI BioInteractive

This three-part series looks at the evidence in our anatomy and dna that connects us to our ancient ancestors from fish, to reptiles, and monkeys. Each of the three episodes is about 55 minutes long, very well done, and takes you on a journey to dozens of sites around the world. Very informative and enjoyable to watch.

 

[NDJimmy]

I have never seen a UFO, but believe very strongly that space-alien-operated UFO's are real. I would be curious to know if anyone on this board has had a UFO experience and is willing to describe it.

 

[AdmiralBackhand]

Cool story, fish.

 

[no.1IrishFan]

LIGO reporting gravitational waves from two merging black holes have been detected. Huge news!!!
Einstein was right.

 

[pkt77242]

http://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/A-Roadmap-to-Interstellar-Flight-15-h.pdf

 

[no.1IrishFan]

http://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/A-Roadmap-to-Interstellar-Flight-15-h.pdf

Pretty basic stuff.

 

[dshans]

Pretty basic stuff.

"We are stardust ..."

 

[connor_in]

Scientist grow a dinosaur leg on a CHICKEN in bizarre 'reverse evolution' experiment  | Daily Mail Online

 

[Cackalacky]

Scientist grow a dinosaur leg on a CHICKEN in bizarre 'reverse evolution' experimentÂ* | Daily Mail Online

Some scientists at Wisconsin have done something dilation this with chickens and teeth and a couple other dinsaurian traits. Its becoming more apparent that the code shared by related organisms is still in there and may just need to be reactivated .

 

[pkt77242]

2 astronomers: Use lasers to hide Earth from aliens - CNN.com

 

[phork]

2 astronomers: Use lasers to hide Earth from aliens - CNN.com

Right, because aliens who happen to travel the distance to get to earth won't have better technology than us ....

 

[ND NYC]

apparently we are planning to land on Mars by "the 2030's".
consortium of nasa, other countries space agencies, private companies etc.

had no idea this was actually in the works.

 

[pkt77242]

Right, because aliens who happen to travel the distance to get to earth won't have better technology than us ....

Huh? I am pretty sure that the point of the lasers is to try and disguise that we are here, not to stop them if they ever come here.

 

[phork]

Huh? I am pretty sure that the point of the lasers is to try and disguise that we are here, not to stop them if they ever come here.

Exactly. Perhaps their technology picks up laser stealth tech?

 

[connor_in]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/scientists-seek-to-resurrect-the-auroch-the-extinct-beast-that-inspired-cave-paintings/2016/04/04/e1e3c38a-c5e9-11e5-a4aa-f25866ba0dc6_story.html

 

[BGIF]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/scientists-seek-to-resurrect-the-auroch-the-extinct-beast-that-inspired-cave-paintings/2016/04/04/e1e3c38a-c5e9-11e5-a4aa-f25866ba0dc6_story.html

And no mention of Goering and Nazi funding, Lutz Heck as "a committed Nazi" and member of Third Reich’s Forest Authority, or more recently, Derek Gow and his Devon Heck Herd.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...nazi-bred-cows-caused-havoc-on-a-modern-farm/

Gow, for his part, was able to breed the Heck cattle he owned. But after more than five years, many of the animals were just too aggressive to keep. He said they had little commercial value, although they were still important for conservation purposes.

"The ones we had to get rid of would just attack you any chance they could," Gow told the Guardian this week. "They would try to kill anyone. Dealing with that was not a lot of fun at all."

Even loading them onto a trailer to get rid of them was a challenge; a "very athletic young man" had to allow the beasts to charge at him as he stood on a ramp. Gow says that with the culling of the more violent animals, peace has returned to his farm.

 

[Irish#1]

Exactly. Perhaps their technology picks up laser stealth tech?

I kind of agree with you, but why do we always assume aliens will be smarter than us?

 

[Irish#1]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/scientists-seek-to-resurrect-the-auroch-the-extinct-beast-that-inspired-cave-paintings/2016/04/04/e1e3c38a-c5e9-11e5-a4aa-f25866ba0dc6_story.html

So these really weren't Aurochs, but in reality an attempt to create a new breed that looked like the Aurochs. It appears they were really trying designer breeding, like mixed breeds of dogs such as the Labrador/Poodle mix.

If they could find real Auroch DNA and given cloning technology one would think they could actually recreate the "real thing" instead of a fake copy.

 

[GowerND11]

I kind of agree with you, but why do we always assume aliens will be smarter than us?

Because of the unknown. On top of that, it makes sense that if they can traverse space as well as they could in order to get here, they must be incredibly smart and sophisticated.

 

[RDU Irish]

Isn't this like assuming a great football team will be great at water polo? Advancements in different technologies are mutually inclusive.

 

[connor_in]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">From science fiction to reality. <a href="https://t.co/rW6l33knoG">pic.twitter.com/rW6l33knoG</a></p>— History In Pictures (@historyepics) <a href="https://twitter.com/historyepics/status/719580465066283008">April 11, 2016</a></blockquote>
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