Science! (#2)

 

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 Some more "sciency" articles that have caught my attention recently:

• "Elites are genetically different"--Aporia Magazine.  After discussing the exploits of Yonatan Netanyahu and his brothers Benjamin (PM of Israel) and Iddo (a successful radiologist and playwright) the author continues:

    Even if Netanyahu’s claimed lineage is inaccurate, it’s difficult to dispute his family’s accomplishments. His grandfather Nathan Mileikowsky was a successful activist, writer, and rebbe during the Emancipation. His father Benzion was a respected historian and an Ivy League professor who also found the time to be a successful activist. His cousin Elisha Netanyahu was a mathematician who served as the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the Israeli Institute of Technology, and he married Israeli Supreme Court justice Shoshana Netanyahu (née Shenburg), whose son was the successful computer scientist Nathan Netanyahu.

    The reason this is interesting is that the family clearly has an extremely high level of talent, and its members have applied their skills in numerous different ways. They are, in short, elites. They’re elite at everything they do, from apprehending terrorists to leading nation-states to administering the law to commanding congregations to developing optimal algorithms for nearest-neighbor search and more. It’s unlikely any of them would have failed in life.

    The Netanyahu family is interesting, but their level of talent is far from unique. They can be readily compared to the numerous cousins involved in the development of the atomic bomb, or with other esteemed families like the Darwin-Wedgwood-Galtons: ... 

 

And although the article spends a lot of time discussing Jews, it shows up in other groups from Japan, to India, to Europe and Australia. The article notes:

 In these studies, individuals who had better genes than their parents tended to be upwardly mobile. This finding has also been replicated in another cohort based in Minnesota. Matt McGue and colleagues showed that when a child has greater cognitive and noncognitive skills, and higher polygenic scores for those traits, they tend to move up. The result even holds when comparing siblings: the one with better skills tends to move up, whereas the one with worse skills tends to move down: ...

But through selective mating, the author argues, these genetic traits become concentrated in certain groups and passed down to succeeding generations.

• Related: "Why wealthy people are more likely to have very tall children: New study claims to have the answers after Gary Barlow's son took the internet by storm"--Daily Mail.  The article notes that genetics is 70 to 80% responsible for how tall we become, and "research suggests family income is the second strongest indicator in determining how tall we become."
  
• "Sources of low-frequency variability in observed Antarctic sea ice" by David B. Bonan, et al, The Cryosphere (h/t Slay News). An excerpt:

Antarctic sea ice has experienced notable changes over the satellite record. Since the late 1970s, Antarctic sea ice area (SIA) has slowly increased, despite significant global warming (Fig. 1a; Parkinson and Cavalieri, 2012; Turner et al., 2015; Gagné et al., 2015; Parkinson, 2019). The increase in Antarctic SIA occurred largely between 2000 and 2014 (Fig. 1a; Gagné et al., 2015; Meehl et al., 2016; Simmonds and Li, 2021) and was driven by an increase in sea ice concentration in all sectors of the Antarctic, except for the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas (Fig. 1b). ...

• "Egyptian mummy discovered with bubonic plague rewrites history of the notorious Black Death"--New York Post. The mummy that was tested dates back 3,290 years to the late Bronze Age. 

    Analysis of the mummy’s bone tissue revealed traces of Y. Pestis — bubonic plague bacteria — DNA, meaning that the disease had reached an advanced stage when the victim perished, IFL Science reported. However, it’s unclear if this was an isolated case or part of a widespread epidemic in the region.

Interestingly, a 2015 paper indicated that, at that time, "direct molecular evidence for Y. pestis has not been obtained from skeletal material older than 1,500 years," but the authors were able to sequence the genes of Y. pestis as far back as 5,000 years from the teeth of remains scattered across Europe and Central Asia. But that paper also indicated that it did become the highly virulent until approximately 3,000 years ago. It is interesting to speculate whether a plague outbreak might have contributed to the collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilizations.

• A Fortean headline: "Mystery black objects that fell from the sky during a storm have left locals baffled"--New York Post. A couple in Phatthalung, a province of Thailand near the Malaysian border, "found some shiny, black rocks — ranging in size and totaling over 44 pounds — in their palm plantation after a storm." Apparently the rocks were located in a pit left over from a lightening caused fire. The wife claims to be feeling more energetic and mentally clear since the discovery.
• "A Case Report of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL)/Lymphoblastic Lymphoma (LBL) Following the Second Dose of Comirnaty®: An Analysis of the Potential Pathogenic Mechanism Based on of the Existing Literature"--Europe PMC. This a pre-print. Nevertheless, the authors write: "In this report we describe the case of a healthy, young, athletic woman who developed acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL)/lymphoblastic lymphoma (LBL) after receiving the second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech modified mRNA (modRNA) COVID-19 genetic vaccine (marketed as Comirnaty®)."
• "Impact of administration routes and dose frequency on the toxicology of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines in mice model"--Immunotoxicology. From the abstract:

... Our findings revealed that all vaccine candidates significantly induced SARS-CoV-2 spike protein-specific IgG and T cell responses. However, at 2 dpsi [days post-secondary injection], there was a notable temporary decrease in lymphocyte and reticulocyte counts, anemia-related parameters, and significant increases in cardiac damage markers, troponin-I and NT-proBNP. Histopathological analysis revealed severe inflammation and necrosis at the injection site, decreased erythroid cells in bone marrow, cortical atrophy of the thymus, and increased spleen cellularity. While most toxicological changes observed at 2 dpsi had resolved by 14 dpsi, spleen enlargement and injection site damage persisted. Furthermore, repeated doses led to the accumulation of toxicity, and different administration routes resulted in distinct toxicological phenotypes. These findings highlight the potential toxicological risks associated with mRNA vaccines, emphasizing the necessity to carefully consider administration routes and dosage regimens in vaccine safety evaluations, particularly given the presence of bone marrow and immune organ toxicity, which, though eventually reversible, remains a serious concern.

• "Young mammoth remains found nearly intact in Siberian permafrost"--Reuters. The mammoth was believed to have been approximately 1 year old when it died around 50,000 years ago.
• "The Famous Bering Land Bridge Was More Like a Swamp, Geologists Say"--Gizmodo. Low-lying land next to bodies of water often are.
  
• Watching a paradigm shift as it happens: "Scientists Claim Dark Energy does not Exist, and Accelerated Expansion of Universe is an Illusion Caused by Gravity slowing down time"--LBV Magazine (h/t Instapundit).
  

    For decades, dark energy has been one of the most enigmatic concepts in physics, introduced to explain the accelerated expansion of the Universe. This mysterious force, often described as an “antigravity” effect, was thought to make up approximately 70% of the Universe’s total energy density. However, new research challenges this assumption, proposing a groundbreaking explanation rooted in the behavior of gravity and the nature of time.

    The concept of dark energy emerged to reconcile observations of distant supernovae. These celestial explosions appeared farther away than expected if the Universe’s expansion were consistent with a purely gravitational model. Physicists theorized that a repulsive force, dubbed dark energy, was driving the acceleration. This idea became a cornerstone of the ΛCDM (Lambda Cold Dark Matter) model, the standard framework for cosmology.

    However, recent observations have raised questions about the accuracy of this model. The “Hubble tension”, for instance, reveals discrepancies between the current expansion rate of the Universe and its inferred early expansion from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Additionally, data from advanced instruments like the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) suggest that the ΛCDM model struggles to account for evolving patterns in cosmic structures.

    Researchers at the University of Canterbury, led by Professor David Wiltshire, offer an alternative explanation that removes the need for dark energy altogether. Their timescape model proposes that the appearance of an accelerating Universe is an illusion caused by the uneven effects of gravity on time.

    The theory hinges on a key principle of Einstein’s general relativity: gravity can distort the flow of time. In regions of space with strong gravitational fields, such as galaxies, time runs more slowly compared to vast, empty voids in the cosmos. These differences in time dilation mean that clocks in galactic regions would measure billions of years less than clocks in cosmic voids.

    This uneven flow of time affects how we perceive the Universe’s expansion. Light traveling through these “grumpled” structures appears stretched in a way that mimics accelerated expansion, even though the Universe may simply be expanding at different rates in different regions.

• "Surprise Hair Loss Breakthrough: A Sugar Gel Triggers Robust Regrowth"--Science Alert. Scientists testing a deoxyribose sugar gel on mice to see if it aided in healing serendipitously  discovered it energized hair growth. In fact, "[t]he deoxyribose gel was so effective, the team found it worked just as well as minoxidil, a topical treatment for hair loss commonly known by the brand name Rogaine." 
• "The Vindication of Cheese, Butter, and Full-Fat Milk"--The Pocket (reprinted from The Atlantic).

    A study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition is relevant to an ongoing vindication process for saturated fats, which turned many people away from dairy products such as whole milk, cheese, and butter in the 1980s and ’90s. An analysis of 2,907 adults found that people with higher and lower levels of dairy fats in their blood had the same rate of death during a 22-year period.

    The implication is that it didn’t matter if people drank whole or skim or 2-percent milk, ate butter versus margarine, etc. The researchers concluded that dairy-fat consumption later in life “does not significantly influence total mortality.”

    “I think the big news here is that even though there is this conventional wisdom that whole-fat dairy is bad for heart disease, we didn’t find that,” says Marcia de Oliveira Otto, the lead researcher of the study and an assistant professor of epidemiology, human genetics, and environmental science at the University of Texas School of Public Health. “And it’s not only us. A number of recent studies have found the same thing.”

• "Predicting The A-Bomb: The Cartmill Affair"--Hackaday. In 1944, Astounding Magazine (a periodical that published science-fiction stories) published a story called "Deadline" by Cleve Cartmill with technical assistance from John W. Campbell, which featured an atomic bomb, including details and concerns very similar to those facing the scientists in the Manhattan Project. The consequence was that Cartmill and Campbell were investigated by the FBI, although no connection was every discovered between them and any of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. As the author of the Hackaday article notes, "It is a great story about how science is — well, science — and no amount of secrecy or legislation can hide it."
  
• "Real-life ‘invisibility cloak’ one step closer — scientists unveil cutting-edge camouflage material"--New York Post. From the article:

    Chinese scientists have devised a camouflage material that adjusts its molecular composition to blend into the background, potentially rendering the wearer imperceptible to the naked eye. They detailed this cutting-edge cloaking technology in a study published last month in the journal Science Advances.

    “Applying this technology to clothing could make an individual effectively ‘invisible’,” head researcher Wang Dongsheng of China’s University of Electronic Science and Technology told China Science Daily in an interview last week, the South China Morning Post reported.

    The material’s disappearing act is facilitated by a process called self-adaptive photochromism, or SAP, in which the molecules rearrange when exposed to certain wavelengths of light. This causes the substance to change color and effectively become unseeable, the Independent reported.

• "Psychiatric adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination: a population-based cohort study in Seoul, South Korea" by Hong Jin Kim, et al, Molecular Psychiatry.  The researchers noted that there was a well documented connection between Covid-19 infections and poorer mental health, but not much on the effect of the vaccine. So they conducted research into the latter. They found:
  

The cumulative incidence of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, sleep disorders, and sexual disorders at three months following COVID-19 vaccination were higher in the vaccination group than no vaccination group. However, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders showed lower cumulative incidence in the vaccination group than in the non-vaccinated group.

• "Plastic-eating worm discovered — could help reduce pollution ‘faster and more efficiently’, scientists say"--New York Post. "The larvae of a lesser-eating Kenyan mealworm can digest the ubiquitous pollutant," the article relates, "making it the only insect species native to Africa that has been shown to do this, the Conversation reported."
  
• "Archaeologists uncover a mysterious stone tablet in Georgia that contains an unknown language - and it's like NOTHING seen before"--Daily Mail. 

    Archaeologists have uncovered a mysterious stone tablet which contains traces of an ancient lost language.

    The basalt slab was discovered by accident in 2021 by a group of local fishermen who spotted it in the silt of Bashplemi Lake, Georgia.

    Carved into the surface are 60 characters arranged in seven rows - 39 of which are unique.

According to the article, the tablets may date to the Early Bronze Age (the article also says 14,000 years ago, but that is obviously wrong).

• "‘God of Darkness’ Asteroid Will Pass Extremely Close to Earth in 2029"--Legal Insurrection. The asteroid, Apophis, will pass close to the Earth in April 2029 (although this article does not give a date, other sources I've come across indicated that its closest approach will be on Friday, April 13). As the article goes on to explain, NASA is retasking the OSIRIS-REx space probe to study Apophis during its flyby of Earth, renaming the probe OSIRIS-APEX. 

    OSIRIS-APEX is a mission to study the physical changes to asteroid Apophis that will result from its rare close encounter with Earth in April 2029. That year, Apophis’ orbit will bring it within 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) of Earth’s surface — closer to Earth than our highest-altitude satellites. Our planet’s gravitational pull is expected to alter the asteroid’s orbit, change how fast it spins on its axis, and possibly cause quakes or landslides that will alter its surface.

    OSIRIS-APEX will allow scientists on Earth to observe these changes. Additionally, the OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft will dip toward the surface of Apophis ­– a “stony” asteroid made of silicate (or rocky) material and a mixture of metallic nickel and iron ­ – and fire its engines to kick up loose rocks and dust. This maneuver will give scientists a peek at the composition of material just below the asteroid’s surface.

• "65,000-year-old hearth in Gibraltar may have been a Neanderthal 'glue factory,' study finds"--Live Science.
  

    Archaeologists in the Iberian Peninsula have discovered a 65,000-year-old tar-making "factory" engineered by Neanderthals — a feat pulled off 20,000 years before modern humans (Homo sapiens) set foot in the region, a new study finds.

    The sticky tar helped Neanderthals produce glue to make weapons and tools. The so-called factory — a carefully designed hearth — enabled the Neanderthals to precisely control the fire and manage the temperature of the flame that produced their gooey creations.

•  "It's Official: Scientists Have Confirmed What's Inside The Moon"--Science Alert. Unfortunately, it was not a creamy, delicious center. Instead, scientists say it is "a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron."
• "The climate scaremongers: BBC admits it lied about vanishing polar bears"--Conservative Woman. In an article from August of this year reporting on a Canadian worker killed by two polar bears, the propagandist reporter for the BBC threw in a comment about polar bear populations being in decline and attributed the decline to global warming. Challenged by a reader, the BBC was forced to admit that "evidence from the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Polar Bear specialist group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature appears to suggest numbers are stable overall at present and not in decline as stated." 
• "Creepy Aztec Death Whistles Have a Strange Effect on The Human Brain"--Science Alert. The article relates concerning research of subjects listening to the whistles and other sounds: "Compared to the other tested sounds, which included some made by humans and animals, some from nature, musical sounds, and sounds made by tools, the skull whistle in particular activated the inferior frontal cortex, which deals with elaborate classification processing, and the medial frontal cortex, a region involved with associative processing."
• "Cynical tricks of food giants that are making so many obese. This is how the smartest people on earth make ultra-processed food irresistible and train you to snack, reveals DR CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN. And there's only one way to resist"--Daily Mail. Some of its psychological, such as designs of packaging, but others have to ratios of ingredients to make them more addictive. But this one was interesting as it fooled the body into eating more than it normally would:

    Brain scanning also showed that the texture of industrially produced food is massively important for making us crave it.

    Professor McGlone says that soft food 'short circuits' our brain's satiety mechanism so that we eat much more of it before we think we've had enough.

    With a crunchy carrot we have to spend a lot of effort chewing it, which tells our brains we are consuming food and should expect to feel full. But soft foods bypass this. That's handy for the UPF giants, because industrial manufacturing changes food textures and tends to make them much softer than natural foods.

    Even apparently crunchy foods, such as all those cheesy orange puffs, are incredibly soft – so that you can easily crush them flat with your tongue.

    There's no satiety-creating resistance in them, and you keep eating more.

    The food industry calls this money-spinning, craving-creating phenomenon 'vanishing caloric density'. These snacks have an incredible amount of energy per gram, but you feel like you've eaten nothing.

•  Nothing new for those who follow the Suspicious Observers YouTube Channel: "Electric field signals reveal early warnings for extreme weather, study reveals"--Phys.org.