Tanya Harrison has the story. As always, a reminder that people who want to settle Mars should hope that we don’t find life there.
Category Archives: General Science
The Jaguar
…is made for the age of humans. A nice nature piece from Nadia Drake.
And though this is a leopard, not a jaguar, it’s interesting.
It's always seemed pretty clear to me that my cats knew what a mirror was, and didn't treat it like another cat. But maybe the leopard is figuring it out. https://t.co/8z4UnokOs6
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) May 10, 2018
Fasting
It may aid in the regeneration of stem cells. I do this almost every day. Not quite 24 hours, but I often don’t eat from when I go to bed until dinner the next evening. Other than morning coffee, which I don’t think would count, given its utter lack of nutrients.
Simone Giertz
This is terrible news. But she’s tough, she’ll beat this thing.
[Afternoon update\
There are two gofundme pages for this. I can’t make any recommendations about either one.
Preventing Aging
Is it mathematically impossible?
I haven’t read the article in detail, but I doubt it. I suspect they’re going after a straw man.
The History Of Sugar And Its Health Impacts
An interesting interview with Gary Taubes:
In the science in which I was raised—physics and chemistry, the hard sciences—the last thing you want to do is get an assumption accepted into the theory of how things work without rigorously testing it, because then people will build on it and it will grow and infect the whole thought construction. You end up with, I’m going to beat this metaphor to death, but sort of a house of cards. And there will be no way to go back on it. In a field like nutrition and obesity research, you’ve now got these enormous institutional dogmas built in that I and others are arguing are simply wrong. How do you get the institutions to change their belief systems?
The British Medical Journal is running a series on nutrition policy, and their way of dealing with it is by assigning writers from these different belief systems. So I’m a co-author on an article on dietary fat, along with the former head of the Harvard nutrition department who thinks I’m the worst journalist he’s ever met and who does a form of science that I consider a pseudoscience.
It’s just nuts.
Genetics And Racial Quotas
Michael Barone points out the obvious.
Earth Surface Temperatures
Anthony Watts has been vindicated after all these years.
Prestigious Science Journals
…struggle to achieve even average reliability.
Mind blowing . . . makes blogs look relatively reliable, since comments and wider discussion quickly point out any flaws https://t.co/5yEL637k3v
— Judith Curry (@curryja) February 20, 2018
Sea-Level-Rise Acceleration
Judith Curry’s latest thoughts (this is part of a series, to be continued).
The more times goes on, the less concerned I get about climate change (not that it may not change for the worse — that’s always a possibility — but in the sense that we really understand and can predict it). For example, consider the Iceland event of 1783. If that happened today, it would be much larger than anything we’ve been doing with CO2, and it’s entirely unpredictable.
As always, our best bet is to get as wealthy as possible so we’ll have the resources to deal with whatever the future holds. Instead the climate alarmists advocate polices that make energy needlessly more expensive (and hence everything more expensive, inhibiting economic growth).
[Update late afternoon]
Judith’s weekly climate roundup, which is usually interesting.