Recently in Science, Technology & Health Category

I've been wondering for a long time why we haven't seen anything like this: X PRIZE Healthspan.

The XPRIZE Foundation is proud to announce its newest competition, XPRIZE Healthspan. XPRIZE Healthspan is a 7-year, $101 million global competition to revolutionize the way we approach human aging.

Modern medicine focuses on treating symptoms of injury, illness, or disease once they develop. This reactive system extends life, but doesn't proactively improve health, leaving millions grappling with poor quality of life and related economic challenges in their later years.

Success from XPRIZE Healthspan would profoundly change our approach to aging and positively affect quality-of-life and healthcare costs. Working across all sectors, we can democratize health and create a future where aging is full of potential.

The thing is... if I found a way to reverse aging I could probably make more than $101m selling it.

Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott at the London Times provide the most comprehensive collection of evidence to-date describing how COVID-19 was intentionally created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as part of a bioweapon program run by the Chinese military and funded by American taxpayers.

Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world's most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began.

Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the Covid-19 outbreak.

The US investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.

With millions of dollars in funding from American taxpayers.

Its work protecting pets and endangered species did not attract substantial funding. But after the September 11 terror attacks and the Sars outbreak, the US began to see the importance of funding work combatting bioterrorism and pandemics. The trust began to focus on how viruses might cross from animals to people and spark a pandemic.

Shi's team provided the fieldwork for the trust's campaign and the laboratories to test and experiment on the viruses. In 2009, the trust was given $18 million over five years from a new programme, called Predict, to identify pandemic viruses. Shortly afterwards, the trust was rebranded as the EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak assumed the role of president. The Chinese collaborators who helped put him on the map were also rewarded: $1 million of the Predict grant was redirected to the Wuhan institute.

The article has a lot more information that is all very compelling. At this point I think it's virtually certain that the lab-leak hypothesis is true, and that it's very likely that COVID-19 was developed as part of a bioweapon program.

(HT: Powerline Blog and Instapundit.)

This seems insane. Why create a more transmissable and lethal version of COVID?

DailyMail.com revealed the team had made a hybrid virus -- combining Omicron and the original Wuhan strain -- that killed 80 per cent of mice in a study.

The revelation exposes how dangerous virus manipulation research continues to go on even in the US, despite fears similar practices may have started the pandemic.

Professor Shmuel Shapira, a leading scientist in the Israeli Government, said: 'This should be totally forbidden, it's playing with fire.'

Gain of function research - when viruses are purposefully manipulated to be more infectious or deadly - is thought to be at the center of Covid's origin.

We may never know the origin of COVID-19 with certainty, but gain-of-function research needs to stop.

This is quality.

As John Hinderaker helpfully explains, The "Green Revolution" Is Impossible due to constraints on input materials (among other reasons). Courtesy of Professor Simon Michaux:

The quantity of metal required to make just one generation of renewable tech units to replace fossil fuels, is much larger than first thought. Current mining production of these metals is not even close to meeting demand. Current reported mineral reserves are also not enough in size. Most concerning is copper as one of the flagged shortfalls.

All this posturing is about control, not the environment or the earth. The long-term future of energy is space-based solar and nuclear.

(HT: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

This is fantastic news that will hopefully turn into a treatment for people with spinal cord injuries and other nerve injuries.

A self-assembling gel injected at the site of spinal cord injuries in paralysed mice has enabled them to walk again after four weeks.

The gel mimics the matrix that is normally found around cells, providing a scaffold that helps cells to grow. It also provides signals that stimulate nerve regeneration.

Samuel Stupp at Northwestern University in Chicago and his colleagues created a material made of protein units, called monomers, that self-assemble into long chains, called supramolecular fibrils, in water.

When they were injected into the spinal cords of mice that were paralysed in the hind legs, these fibrils formed a gel at the injury site.

The researchers injected 76 paralysed mice with either the fibrils or a sham treatment made of salt solution, a day after the initial injury. They found that the gel enabled paralysed mice to walk by four weeks after the injection, whereas mice given the placebo didn't regain the ability to walk.

The team found that the gel helped regenerate the severed ends of neurons and reduced the amount of scar tissue at the injury site, which usually forms a barrier to regeneration. The gel also enhanced blood vessel growth, which provided more nutrients to the spinal cord cells.

It's hard to know where to start with this. Internal Facebook documents confirm that the company "whitelists" powerful establishment people and permits them to post anything on the platform without censorship, while "normal" users are monitored, censored, and punished for "unacceptable" speech. This is possibly the most unAmerican business practice I can think of. Special speech rights for powerful, famous, rich people, and limited speech rights for everyone else. Disgusting and shameful.

The program, known as "cross check" or "XCheck," was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company's normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are "whitelisted"--rendered immune from enforcement actions--while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come. [...]

For ordinary users, Facebook dispenses a kind of rough justice in assessing whether posts meet the company's rules against bullying, sexual content, hate speech and incitement to violence. Sometimes the company's automated systems summarily delete or bury content suspected of rule violations without a human review. At other times, material flagged by those systems or by users is assessed by content moderators employed by outside companies.

Regardless of its profitability, Facebook is a national disgrace.

The company agonizes to an absurd degree over how its services are used and by whom -- an agony that telephone, electric, water, and trash-collection companies seem to manage just fine without.

Facebook's stated ambition has long been to connect people. As it expanded over the past 17 years, from Harvard undergraduates to billions of global users, it struggled with the messy reality of bringing together disparate voices with different motivations--from people wishing each other happy birthday to Mexican drug cartels conducting business on the platform. Those problems increasingly consume the company.

Time and again, the documents show, in the U.S. and overseas, Facebook's own researchers have identified the platform's ill effects, in areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking. Time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn't fix them.

Obviously all good people are united against drug cartels, teen depression and anxiety, and human trafficking -- but Facebook is no more an enabler of these ills than are the electric or telephone companies. In their absurd compulsion to lock out bad users, Facebook is shamefully restricting the free speech rights of all people everywhere in the world.

Human civilization needs to change how we see social media and internet communication more broadly -- it's a utility that should be required to serve all comers. We shouldn't burden these services with the moral responsibility to discriminate between good and evil, and the services shouldn't take that responsibility on themselves. Leave that burden to the People and their elected representatives, as protected by the Constitution and our God-given rights and dignity.

The global pandemic lock-down is starting to look like one of the worst public health decisions in history. A year ago everyone was scared and no one knew what would happen -- but time has now revealed which leaders made good choices and which didn't. It's not random.

Even some Florida Democrats are wondering whether Gov. Ron DeSantis' widely panned COVID response might turn out to be right, Axios Tampa Bay's Ben Montgomery and Selene San Felice write.

More than 32,000 Floridians have died, a number the state's leaders rarely acknowledge. But the death rate is no worse than the national average -- and better than some states with tighter restrictions.

The L.A. Times compared Florida and California:

"California imposed myriad restrictions that battered the economy ... Florida adopted a more laissez-faire approach decried by public health experts -- allowing indoor restaurant dining, leaving masks optional."

On Sunday's front page, the N.Y. Times explored the positives -- from the sizzling real-estate market to Florida's low unemployment rate -- of an early reopening: "Much of the state has a boomtown feel."

Florida's unemployment rate is 5.1%, compared to 9.3% in California, 8.7% in New York and 6.9% in Texas, The Times notes.

The bottom line: "Despite their differing approaches," AP reports, "California and Florida have experienced almost identical outcomes in COVID-19 case rates."

Yes, you can still get COVID-19 and get very sick or die, but cases are down 77% over the past six weeks and it looks like the pandemic is basically over. The disease will never disappear completely, but we should be able to return to normal soon.

Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we'd call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.

There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.

Democrat Senator Ron Wyden is right.

"Secret encryption back doors are a threat to national security and the safety of our families - it's only a matter of time before foreign hackers or criminals exploit them in ways that undermine American national security," Wyden told Reuters. "The government shouldn't have any role in planting secret back doors in encryption technology used by Americans."

The agency declined to say how it had updated its policies on obtaining special access to commercial products. NSA officials said the agency has been rebuilding trust with the private sector through such measures as offering warnings about software flaws.

Americans are a free people, and our government must protect our natural right to "keep and bear" strong encryption.

Democrat Senator Ron Wyden is right.

"Secret encryption back doors are a threat to national security and the safety of our families - it's only a matter of time before foreign hackers or criminals exploit them in ways that undermine American national security," Wyden told Reuters. "The government shouldn't have any role in planting secret back doors in encryption technology used by Americans."

The agency declined to say how it had updated its policies on obtaining special access to commercial products. NSA officials said the agency has been rebuilding trust with the private sector through such measures as offering warnings about software flaws.

Americans are a free people, and our government must protect our natural right to "keep and bear" strong encryption.

The headline writer says, "Unconscious learning fosters belief in God, study finds", but that's wrong in a very significant way. The study only demonstrates a correlation between a belief in God and an ability to predict complex patterns.

People who unconsciously predict complex patterns are more likely to hold a strong belief in God -- a god who creates order in an otherwise chaotic universe -- according to research published Wednesday.

"Belief in a god or gods who intervene in the world to create order is a core element of global religions," Adam Green, an associate professor of psychology at Georgetown University, said in a news release.

"This is not a study about whether God exists, this is a study about why and how brains come to believe in gods," said Green, who also serves as the director of the Georgetown Laboratory for Relational Cognition. "Our hypothesis is that people whose brains are good at subconsciously discerning patterns in their environment may ascribe those patterns to the hand of a higher power."

From what I can see, the fault lies with the writer of the headline, not the study authors. Any of these four possibilities could be true:

1. Belief in God leads to the ability to make better predictions
2. The ability to make better predictions leads to believe in God
3. Both belief in God and the ability to make better predictions are caused by some third unidentified factor
4. The correlation discovered by the study is anomalous

The first three possibilities are all interesting.

Are primordial black holes common in the universe? It doesn't seem like it.

What would a universe flooded with primordial black holes look like? That's the million-dollar question, which we need to answer if we want to test this hypothesis.

For one thing, the black holes may randomly crash into other things, gravitationally attract other things, and just generally cause mayhem. Kilogram-mass black holes hitting the Earth could trigger earthquakes. A silent black hole may pull apart binary pairs of stars or disrupt entire dwarf galaxies. A black hole ramming into a neutron star could ignite a terrible explosion. Even the hypothetical Planet Nine could be a black hole no bigger than a tennis ball. ...

Alas, despite all our attempts, we cannot reconcile the existence of primordial black holes with the universe that we see. For every possible observational avenue, the primordial black holes cause so much mayhem that it would be noticeable to us.

In other words, as difficult as it is to explain the masses of the merging black holes that LIGO witnessed, if you want a universe with those black holes to be primordial, it would be detectable in other ways.

Ok, may as well quote from the "Planet nine black hole" story also, even though Pluto is already planet #9. I guess the Space.com folks got confused and meant planet ten.

Over the past few years, researchers have noticed an odd clustering in the orbits of multiple trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which dwell in the dark depths of the far outer solar system. Some scientists have hypothesized that the TNOs' paths have been sculpted by the gravitational pull of a big object way out there, something five to 10 times more massive than Earth (though others think the TNOs may just be tugging on each other).

This big "perturber," if it exists, may be a planet -- the so-called "Planet Nine," or "Planet X" or "Planet Next" for those who will always regard Pluto as the ninth planet. But there's another possibility as well: The shepherding object may be a black hole, one that crams all that mass into a sphere the size of a grapefruit.

I sure hope there's a tiny black hole in our solar system -- that's practically the only way we humans would ever have a chance to examine one up close.

In March Anthony Fauci and other health experts told the public not to wear masks to protect ourselves from COVID-19:

"You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider," Surgeon General Jerome Adams said during an appearance on "Fox & Friends" earlier this month.

"If it's not fitted right you're going to fumble with it," warned Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar late last month, when asked about N95 respirator masks.

"Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and a public face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, on CBS' "60 Minutes" earlier this month. He, like the others, suggested that masks could put users at risk by causing them to touch their face more often.

Apparently they were intentionally lying to us. Now we're told:

"Masks are not 100 percent protective. However, they certainly are better than not wearing a mask. Both to prevent you, if you happen to be a person who maybe feels well, but has an asymptomatic infection that you don't even know about, to prevent you from infecting someone else," Fauci said.

"But also, it can protect you a certain degree, not a hundred percent, in protecting you from getting infected from someone who, either is breathing, or coughing, or sneezing, or singing or whatever it is in which the droplets or the aerosols go out. So masks work," Fauci added.

Why did they lie?

[Fauci] also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn't feel the strain of a shortage of PPE.

That's still a lie. Masks weren't "not recommended" -- experts recommended against wearing masks.

Remember this whenever you consider giving the government more power over anything.

As a software engineer who has worked in academia and industry, it's no surprise to me at all that the Imperial College coronavirus pandemic model is full of errors. Making computer models is extremely difficult, and just because you're an expert in epidemiology doesn't mean that you'll be able to build a functional epidemiological computer model. Computer modeling is a specialization of its own, not an add-on to other sets of expertise. And it's not just about individual expertise: institutional expertise is at least as important.

Processes not people. This is important: the problem here is not really the individuals working on the model. The people in the Imperial team would quickly do a lot better if placed in the context of a well run software company. The problem is the lack of institutional controls and processes. All programmers have written buggy code they aren't proud of: the difference between ICL and the software industry is the latter has processes to detect and prevent mistakes.

For standards to improve academics must lose the mentality that the rules don't apply to them. In a formal petition to ICL to retract papers based on the model you can see comments "explaining" that scientists don't need to unit test their code, that criticising them will just cause them to avoid peer review in future, and other entirely unacceptable positions. Eventually a modeller from the private sector gives them a reality check. In particular academics shouldn't have to be convinced to open their code to scrutiny; it should be a mandatory part of grant funding.

Frankly, I wouldn't trust any modeler who isn't risking their own money on the accuracy of their model.

Wesley J. Smith makes the cogent point that we seem to be forgetting the purpose of the shutdowns:

The point of the national economic shutdown seems to have shifted in Cuomo's mind. The purpose of mitigation, to use Dr. Fauci's terminology, was to "flatten the curve" -- meaning reduce the number of people seriously ill at any given time and have people's illnesses spread over a longer period -- to prevent medical resources from being overwhelmed as happened in Northern Italy. That goal may have been accomplished, which is why President Trump is encouraging a phased restart of the economy.

But it seems that Cuomo now believes the point of keeping everyone at home is for nobody to get sick. That's impossible, particularly with a virus this communicable and one that is going to be with us for some time even if researchers successfully create a vaccine, which is no sure thing.

Tens of thousands of health care workers across the United States are going without pay today, even as providers in the nation's hot spots struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic

This "tale of two hospitals" is a function of clumsy, if well-intentioned, federal and state directives to halt all non-emergency procedures, which appeared at first blush to be a reasonable precaution to limit unnecessary exposure and safeguard staff, beds and equipment.

But instead of merely preserving hospital beds and other resources, this heavy-handed injunction has created a burden of its own design: a historic number of empty beds in systems left untouched by the pandemic.

The curve is flat in America, except for New York; asymptomatic COVID-19 infections appear to be more widespread than previously thought.

Based on results of the first round of testing, the research team estimates that approximately 4.1% of the county's adult population has antibody to the virus. Adjusting this estimate for statistical margin of error implies about 2.8% to 5.6% of the county's adult population has antibody to the virus- which translates to approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county who have had the infection. That estimate is 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the county by the time of the study in early April. *** The number of COVID-related deaths in the county has now surpassed 600.

This is great news because it equates to a fatality rate in a range between .0014 and .0027. Standard seasonal flu viruses typically have a fatality rate around .001.

Seems like the shutdowns have mostly succeeded, and we can begin loosening the restrictions. We can't "return to normal" yet, but we can probably get by in most of America by isolating the vulnerable population and letting others take appropriate precautions and get back to work.

There are a lot of numbers we don't know yet about the China coronavirus that's plaguing the world right now, but there's at least one number we should know that I haven't seen reported: the excess death rate:

I have no doubt the number of deaths there now is higher than usual and that there are excess deaths, perhaps a huge number, particularly in certain regions of the north where the virus has been concentrated. But how much higher? Italy ordinarily has a particularly high rate of death from the flu, for example, which might make the "excess death" figure especially important to know. Are significant numbers of the deaths we're seeing in Italy deaths that would be taking place anyway from the flu or other illnesses we're accustomed to and which sometimes cause the death of elderly people who are already ill? And if so, how many?

One of the huge problems with COVID-19 is that so far it seems to have caused localized outbreaks that burden a health system and in particular hospital ICU resources. That in turn results in some people dying who might otherwise be saved but for the sudden influx. That is particularly frightening, and many of the strategies being brought to bear in the US are a result of trying to prevent such a calamity. But in order to know how much we need to do and what we can expect in the worst-case scenario, wouldn't figures for excess deaths in Italy be helpful?

But so far I haven't found anything written for the public discussing that issue. I realize that, since the disease only began a few months ago, we don't have figures for total excess deaths. But shouldn't we have some preliminary figures to compare to average figures per day or per week or per month during a bad flu season and during a good flu season in the localities involved?

Basically, how many people are dying now than we'd expect to be dying in a "normal" year? We can attribute the difference to the China coronavirus.

Twitter's hateful conduct policy now forbids dehumanizing and hateful speech targeted at age groups. Presumably this includes unborn humans, who by virtue of their age are continually assaulted with dehumanizing and eliminationist rhetoric on Twitter.

You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories.

A quick survey reveals that there are innumerable Twitter accounts whose primary purpose is to advocate for the right to slaughter very young humans. This hateful conduct needs to stop.

We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category.

Tropes like "a fetus is just a clump of cells" are clearly and intentionally dehumanizing towards unborn babies.

Note: individuals do not need to be a member of a specific protected category for us to take action. We will never ask people to prove or disprove membership in any protected category and we will not investigate this information.

You don't need to be an unborn baby to take action. Even if you are not a member of the category you can still stand up for the dignity of the unborn.

The VASCO team ("Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations") is investigating 150,000 candidate objects that have appeared or disappeared from the sky since the 1950s.

A project lead by an international team of researchers use publicly available data with images of the sky dating as far back as the 1950s to try to detect and analyse objects that have disappeared over time. In the project "Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" (VASCO), they have particularly looked for objects that may have existed in old military sky catalogues from the 1950s, not to be found again in modern sky surveys. Among the physical indicators that they are looking for are stars that have vanished in the Milky Way.

"Finding an actually vanishing star--or a star that appears out of nowhere-- would be a precious discovery and certainly would include new astrophysics beyond the one we know of today," says project leader Beatriz Villarroel, Stockholm University and Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain.

When a star dies it either undergoes very slow changes and becomes a white dwarf or it dies with a sudden bright explosion i.e. supernova. A vanishing star can be an example of an "impossible phenomenon" that could be attributed either to new astrophysical phenomena or to extra-terrestrial activity. Indeed, the only non-ETI (extra-terrestrial intelligence) explanation for a vanishing star would be exceedingly rare events called "failed supernovae." A failed supernovae is theoretically predicted to occur when a very massive star collapses into a black hole without any visible explosion. Other physical indicators of ETI activity that the authors are looking for are signs of red interstellar communication lasers and Dyson spheres. A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical giant structure surrounding a star to harness its energy.

To be honest, it would be a lot more interesting if there were only a handful of examples -- 150,000 disappearing objects makes me think that it isn't aliens.

Some physicists are speculating that "Planet 9" might be a small black hole. I sure hope so.

For nearly 5 years, growing numbers of scientists have blamed the weird orbits of distant solar system objects on the gravitational effects of an as-yet-undiscovered "Planet Nine" that lies in the icy realm far beyond Neptune. But a pair of physicists is now floating an intriguing idea that could offer a new way to search for the object: What if that supposed planet is actually a small black hole? ...

But if the object is a planet-mass black hole, the physicists say, it would likely be surrounded by a halo of dark matter that could stretch up to 1 billion kilometers on every side. And interactions between dark matter particles in that halo--especially collisions between dark matter and dark antimatter--could release a flash of gamma rays that would betray the object's presence, the researchers propose in a forthcoming paper posted on the preprint server arXiv.

It would be absolutely amazing for humanity to have physical access to a black hole! Just imagine all the science we could do with it.

Just because a few dozen scientists in 2006 decreed that Pluto isn't a planet doesn't make it so.

Saturday 24 August 2019 marked a vexing anniversary for planetary scientists. It was 13 years to the day that Pluto's official definition changed - what was once numbered among the planets of the Solar System was now but a humble dwarf planet.

But not everyone agreed with the International Astronomical Union's ruling - and now NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has added his voice to the chorus declaring support for Pluto's membership in the Solar System Planet Club.

"Just so you know, in my view, Pluto is a planet," he said during a tour of the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Scientists classify things in all sorts of ways for many different purposes -- and maybe it's useful to think of Pluto as a "dwarf planet" for some purposes. That's fine. But our planets are more than scientific curiosities, they're cultural, civilizational, and species-ational icons with tremendous legacy and substance. No small group of humans has the power or authority to strip Pluto of it's iconic status or dictate to humanity what label we must use for it.