Overheard

"The secret that scientists don't want you to know!!!"

Dude - have you ever met even one scientist? The people I know who're scientists are practically desperate to tell me all about their recent discoveries regarding the mating habits of brown marmorated stink bugs, or the benefits of longitudinal exploration relative to bi-lateral thought processes.

They're yelling at the top of their lungs, hoping someone - anyone - will listen as they describe what they've learned, and explain it in sometimes excruciating detail.

So, being skeptical is one thing. Pretending you're smarter than the people who are actually smart makes you sound dumber than you could ever imagine.

Deep Thought

The Milky Way is bigger

than your standard-issue galaxy.

The average galaxy has about

100 million stars.

The nerds' best guess right now

is that there's something like 2 trillion galaxies.

That's about 200,000,000,000,000,000,000

stars in the

"observable universe."

200 QUINTILLION STARS

Oops

Wait just gol-durn minute, Elmo.

"... it's most ambitious goals"?

Like trying to get the thing not to explode?

That seems like a very low bar

for a rocket scientist.

Are we sure we've got

the right guy working on this project?

You're Not A Cheese Cracker

Here's evidence of Click & Clack's theory that two guys can be dumber together than either of them is when he's alone.

You talk - a cheese cracker doesn't. Or if it does, maybe cut back on those THC gummies.

Smarterness

And then they found that every decade we were getting a few IQ points smarter.

Yes - that's a little fishy, especially so when we find out that after a while, IQ scores plateaued, and then started going down a bit.

So, what the fuck is up with this shit?

Adam Conover debunks the IQ Test, and Dr Rina Bliss pushes us to rejigger our perceptions of "intelligence".

Our general environment - air and water quality, stress, food and housing security, and a host of other factors - has a considerable impact on our overall intelligence genome, and the changes we experience in our own genetic makeup are passed along to our children, who of course then pass them along to their children.

The dumbing down of America is not just about reality TV and information siloes.

Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.

"Seize the learning moment."

“Neuroplasticity” refers to your brain’s ability to restructure or rewire itself when it recognizes the need for adaption. In other words, it can continue developing and changing throughout life.

1. Play video games
2. Travel
3. Make music
4. Learn a new language
5. Do some artsy stuff
6. Exercise

Lovin' The Nerds

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a micro-robot the size of a single biological cell.

This innovative micro-robot utilises both electricity and magnetic fields for navigation and is capable of identifying, capturing, and transporting individual cells. The micro-robot demonstrates remarkable precision in capturing single red blood cells, cancer cells, and bacteria without the need for tagging. Although tests have been conducted outside the human body, researchers hope to expand to in vivo testing for future applications.

Combining electrical and magnetic propulsion

The hybrid micro-robot, measuring only 10 microns in size, is inspired by bacteria and sperm cells, and is capable of both autonomous and controlled movement within the body. While electrical propulsion enables selective cargo loading, transport, and release, as well as cell deformation, the magnetic propulsion system offers precise steering and functionality across a wide range of temperatures and conductivity levels.

According to Gilad Yossifon, the corresponding author of the study, micro-robots which relied solely on electrical guiding mechanisms were ineffective in certain environments where the electric drive was less effective. This is where the complementary magnetic mechanism comes into play, allowing the micro-robot to overcome the limitations faced by its electrically powered counterparts.

Enhanced cell identification and capture

The hybrid micro-robot demonstrates an advanced ability to distinguish healthy cells from drug-damaged cells and dying cells undergoing natural apoptosis. This technology allows the micro-robot to capture non-labelled cells by sensing their status, making it the first study to use micro-robot-based sensing of label-free apoptotic cells.

Yossifon explains that their new development significantly advances the technology in two main aspects: hybrid propulsion and navigation. By combining both electric and magnetic propulsion systems, the micro-robot is better equipped to identify, capture, and transport single cells without the need for tagging, either for local testing or retrieval and transport to an external instrument.

Opening doors to multiple applications

This innovative hybrid micro-robot has the potential to support a wide range of medical applications, such as medical diagnosis at the single-cell level, introducing drugs or genes into cells, genetic editing, and targeted drug delivery within the body[. Additionally, it could contribute to environmental efforts by removing polluting particles, assisting in drug development, and creating a “laboratory on a particle” for further research and analysis.

The tests conducted so far have been outside the human body, but researchers are hopeful that in vivo testing will eventually become possible, unlocking even more potential for this groundbreaking technology. The study, detailing the development and capabilities of this hybrid micro-robot, was published in Advanced Science.

Today I Learned

"The lost secrets of the ancients" is kind of an all-time favorite fantasy for an awful lot of people. I can admit having been sucked into that shit back when I was maybe 20 years old, reading Von Daniken's collection of fairy tales in Chariots Of The Gods.

And while you have to be careful not to lose your sense of wonder, and the willingness to believe there may be something way bigger than anything you've been taught before, you do have to grow up, and you do have to apply a little healthy skepticism to everything people are telling you.

Because people will fool you. Because people know we all want to be fooled some of the time.

We go to 'magic shows'.

We pay 20 bucks to watch 2 hours of super heroes prancing about in their PJs doing impossible things.

We go to church.

The willing suspension of disbelief is a warm and fuzzy thing in a world of harsh realities.

It's important to stay open to new ideas. It's important-er to check things out. ☯

The Lion Man

About 40,000 years ago, somebody carved a figure - a fetish - from a piece of mammoth ivory.

The thinking is that of course it's a religious thing. Cuz people back then were stupid and gullible. They couldn't possibly be trying to make sense of their own identities and the place in nature they occupy - contemplating the beginnings of life itself by thinking logically. It just had to be religion, because - well, it just had to be religion.

Maybe - just maybe - they were thinking about evolution instead of some bullshit religious fantasy. And maybe one of the really smart ones came up with the idea of visual aids in an attempt to explain how one life form leads to another life form.

It's just a guess. It's just my own ego telling me that as stupidly as we behave sometimes, humans are really pretty smart, and if we can figure out how to side-step the religious mumbo jumbo and the political fog that always accompanies religion, then maybe we can move this thing along a little better that what we've done so far.

Just sayin'.

Yay Nerds

Even in my ignorance, I think I can grok part of the concept - as much as my limited brain capacity allows me to do anyway. Especially the teleportation part.

Instead of thinking of it as COMMAND-X, and COMMAND-V, where you have to eliminate the subject from over there before you can reconstitute it over here, this quantum stuff says the subject could exist in two places at the same time (?)

Scientists Defy Physics, Basically Pull Energy Out of Thin Air

That’s not supposed to happen.

• A shelved theory appears to have new life in pulling energy from one location to another.
• Two experiments have now extracted energy and filled a vacuum.
• A fresh world of quantum energy science is opened with the new findings.

Energy teleportation sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but now, research shows that you can actually pull energy from nothing.

Using quantum mechanics, two different physics experiments prove it’s possible to conjure energy from an energy vacuum—essentially pulling energy out of thin air—by teleporting energy across microscopic distances, helping bolster a 2008 theory from Japanese physicist Masahiro Hotta, according to a new report from Quanta Magazine.

“This really does test it,” Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and not a member of the research teams, tells Quanta. “You are actually teleporting. You are extracting energy.”

When Hotta debuted his theory more than a decade ago, it wasn’t met with much fanfare. Pulling energy from the quantum vacuum wasn’t considered a realistic equation. But every vacuum still had some sort of fluctuation in the quantum fields. And pulling energy from nearby into the vacuum, and then using that energy, was something in the realm of reality known as the teleportation concept, since produced twice by scientists from University of Waterloo and Stony Brook University.

Hotta’s 2008 research led him first to negative energy, which he believed wasn’t an independent action. He then researched the quantum vacuum, which he believed—based on calculations—could actually fluctuate within quantum fields, allowing energy to move between two areas.

In a more modern-day experimentation, the team at Waterloo found that when energy was spent in one place, it allowed another—in this case, an energy vacuum—to access energy. “It was very neat to see that with current technology it’s possible to observe the activation of energy,” Nayeli Rodriguez-Briones, now at the University of California, Berkeley, and part of one of the experiments, tells Quanta.

“This is real physics–not science fiction,” Hotta says.

Nerds Rule

It's the rebound that gets ya.

Stay with it - the demonstration at the end is a pretty good payoff.

Bio-Engineering

Loss of epigenetic information as a cause of mammalian aging

Highlights

• Cellular responses to double-stranded DNA breaks erode the epigenetic landscape
• This loss of epigenetic information accelerates the hallmarks of aging
• These changes are reversible by epigenetic reprogramming
• By manipulating the epigenome, aging can be driven forward and backward

Summary

All living things experience an increase in entropy, manifested as a loss of genetic and epigenetic information.

In yeast, epigenetic information is lost over time due to the relocalization of chromatin-modifying proteins to DNA breaks, causing cells to lose their identity, a hallmark of yeast aging.

Using a system called “ICE” (inducible changes to the epigenome), we find that the act of faithful DNA repair advances aging at physiological, cognitive, and molecular levels, including erosion of the epigenetic landscape, cellular exdifferentiation, senescence, and advancement of the DNA methylation clock, which can be reversed by OSK-mediated rejuvenation.

These data are consistent with the information theory of aging, which states that a loss of epigenetic information is a reversible cause of aging.

PS) Cell Press is an all-science publisher of over 50 scientific journals across the life, physical, earth, and health sciences, both independently and in partnership with scientific societies. Many of Cell Press's journals are among the most reputable in their fields.

Today's Nerdy Thing

Humans were writing on walls 42,000 years ago

An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar

05 January 2023

Abstract
In at least 400 European caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens groups drew, painted and engraved non-figurative signs from at least ~42,000 BP (Before Present) and figurative images (notably animals) from at least 37,000 BP. Since their discovery ~150 years ago, the purpose or meaning of European Upper Palaeolithic non-figurative signs has eluded researchers. Despite this, specialists assume that they were notational in some way. Using a database of images spanning the European Upper Palaeolithic, we suggest how three of the most frequently occurring signs—the line <|>, the dot <•>, and the <Y>—functioned as units of communication. We demonstrate that when found in close association with images of animals the line <|> and dot <•> constitute numbers denoting months, and form constituent parts of a local phenological/meteorological calendar beginning in spring and recording time from this point in lunar months. We also demonstrate that the <Y> sign, one of the most frequently occurring signs in Palaeolithic non-figurative art, has the meaning <To Give Birth>. The position of the <Y> within a sequence of marks denotes month of parturition, an ordinal representation of number in contrast to the cardinal representation used in tallies. Our data indicate that the purpose of this system of associating animals with calendar information was to record and convey seasonal behavioural information about specific prey taxa in the geographical regions of concern. We suggest a specific way in which the pairing of numbers with animal subjects constituted a complete unit of meaning—a notational system combined with its subject—that provides us with a specific insight into what one set of notational marks means. It gives us our first specific reading of European Upper Palaeolithic communication, the first known writing in the history of Homo sapiens.

Introduction
Around 37,000 years ago humans transitioned from marking abstract images such as handprints, dots and rectangles on cave walls to drawing, painting and engraving figurative art. These images, whether created on rock surfaces in the open air, in caves, or carved and engraved onto portable materials, were almost exclusively of animals, mainly herbivorous prey critical to survival in the Pleistocene Eurasian steppes. In most cases it is easy to identify the species depicted, and often the characteristics they exhibit at particular times of year. In Lascaux around 21,500 years ago, body shapes and pelage details were used to convey information about the sequence of rutting of several prey species on the cave's walls, in what was essentially an ethological calendar (Aujoulat Reference Aujoulat2005), and elsewhere, indicators such as the presence of antlers and aggressive confrontations are widespread indicators that seasonality, particularly that relating to creation, was a major characteristic of the earliest figurative art, as one might expect for hunter-gatherers.

Alongside these images, sets of abstract marks, particularly sequences of vertical lines and dots, <Y> shapes and various other marks are common throughout the European Upper Palaeolithic, occurring either alone or adjacent to and superimposed upon animal depictions, as has long been recognized (e.g. Hayden Reference Hayden2021; Leroi-Gourhan Reference Leroi-Gourhan1966; Reference Leroi-Gourhan, Leroi-Gourhan and Allain1979). These may occur on rock walls, but were commonly engraved onto robust bones since at least the beginning of the European Upper Palaeolithic and African Late Stone Age, where it is obvious they served as artificial memory systems (AMS) or external memory systems (EMS) to coin the terms used in Palaeolithic archaeology and cognitive science respectively, exosomatic devices in which number sense is clearly evident (for definitions see d’Errico Reference d'Errico1989; Reference d'Errico1995a,Reference d'Erricob; d'Errico & Cacho Reference d'Errico and Cacho1994; d'Errico et al. Reference d'Errico, Doyon and Colage2017; Hayden Reference Hayden2021). While the nature of accumulation of these is well known, and it is uncontroversial to assume that they mark information such as the passing of time and events within it, their specific meaning has remained elusive.

Our interest is with those non-figurative signs of the European Upper Palaeolithic associated with animal depictions, a relationship found with ~66 per cent of figurative images, according to Sauvet (Reference Sauvet1987). A variety of signs are associated with animal depictions, because of which it is sensible to assume that they had several meanings (Crellin Reference Crellin2020). This should be unsurprising, given that hunter-gatherers world-wide have used a wide range of recording, counting and communications systems involving subjects and numbers (e.g. de Smedt & de Cruz Reference de Smedt and de Cruz 2011; Overmann Reference Overmann 2013; Thornton Reference Thornton 2003).

We focus specifically on two clear and simple patterns: animals associated with sequences of dots/lines (assumed to function similarly here), and the branching <Y> sign in which a second line diverges from a first (Figs 1 & 2). Although these occur throughout the Upper Palaeolithic, the greater majority of known examples date to the Late Upper Palaeolithic, possibly suggesting their meaning changed over time or they became far more common aspects of depictions from the Mid Upper Palaeolithic (Gravettian) onwards. As the identification of the animal with which the signs are associated is unambiguous, we investigate the meaning of the dots/lines and <Y> sign in ethological context. We do this by testing ecologically grounded hypotheses about prey behaviour using a database of such depiction-associated sequences. We reason that investigating the numbers of signs associated with images and the position of <Y> within line/dot sequences provide useful indicators of their meaning, based on the uncontroversial assumption that dots/lines represent numbers. By simple reasoning, the association of a number with an unambiguous subject—a horse, for example—might provide the foundation of a notational system that we could potentially analyse for further meaning. We reveal a system that was stable over a wide geographical area and over a period of tens of thousands of years.

- more -

Not A Documentary

Funny how the "fuck your feelings" crowd seems always to go in big for anything contrarian, as long as it makes them feel good about their ignorance. 

The Anti-Vaccine Documentary Died Suddenly Wants You to Feel, Not Think

Clearly, the makers of Died Suddenly don’t want you to do your own research.

People want to feel like their concerns are heard. Being dismissed can lead to loss of trust, which can send people looking for empathy in the wrong places.

Members of the anti-vaccination movement and of its media arm excel at portraying themselves as “those who care.” The rest of us—scientists, doctors, politicians, journalists—are represented as either apathetic or simply evil. The latest “documentary” to emerge from this movement, Died Suddenly, is an exercise in reframing compassion. It also represents the apogee of conspiritualist ideas, where grand conspiracy theories surrounding vaccines are painted on a canvas so large, they involve a Biblical war between the forces of absolute good and those of pure evil.

Who are portrayed as ringing the alarm for Armageddon in Died Suddenly? Embalmers.
A tale made out of whole clot

The documentary’s smoking gun is the alleged discovery of long, white, fibrous clots in the deceased bodies of people who, we are told, got vaccinated against COVID-19. Sometimes, their blood also looks dirty, like it contains coffee grounds. This claim seems to have originated from Richard Hirschman, an embalmer in Alabama, who spoke about it to The Epoch Times, a frequent vehicle for misinformation and grand conspiracy theories. Hirschman and a few other embalmers testify to their findings in Died Suddenly, with some being blurred out, their voices altered, like they are sharing secrets so damning they’re about to be shipped to their local witness protection program.

Every conspiracy demands its whistleblower, and Hirschman serves as one of many for this documentary. He can boldly speak out while his colleagues self-censor, he tells us, because he doesn’t work for a funeral home. The movie cozies up to the body horror genre by repeatedly showing us images and clips of these lengthy strings of organic matter being pulled out of post-mortem incisions. The power of these alien, rubbery artefacts grows in the telling: in the Epoch Times piece, a cardiologist says these clots have “nearly the strength of steel.” Given the shock that these visuals can give to the untrained eye, it’s no wonder these supposed “vaccine clots” are making the rounds on TikTok.

The problem is that embalmers and funeral directors are not medical professionals. Don’t take it from me, but from the National Funeral Directors Association in the United States, whose representative told me as much, and from Ben Schmidt, a funeral director and embalmer with a bachelor’s degree in natural science. Schmidt wrote a detailed explanation of what is happening here. Clots can easily form after death, as the liquid and solid parts of blood separate and as formaldehyde and calcium-containing water used in the embalming process catalyze clotting. Refrigeration can also be to blame, especially when a rapid influx of bodies due to COVID necessitates longer stays in the cooler as embalmers make their way through their backlog.

Then there are the clots that happen prior to death. Embalmers do not typically know that someone who died was “in normal health,” as is often claimed in the documentary, nor do they reliably know someone’s vaccination status. Blood clots do happen in life, for a variety of reasons. The COVID-19 vaccines made by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson were indeed associated with rare—and I must repeat, rare—cases of blood clots, but risk factors for blood clots in general include obesity, cancer, a sedentary lifestyle, pregnancy, family history, and smoking. Oh, and COVID-19 itself, which you won’t learn from Died Suddenly. This may surprise you, but an American dies of a blood clot every six minutes. Clots, either before or after death, are common.

As anatomical pathology specialist Irene Sansano told a fact-checking website, the clots shown by Hirschman do not look different from the ones pathologists regularly see in blood clot autopsies at the hospital. To know if there really was an uptick in clots seen during embalming, we can’t rely on a scattering of anecdotes. We would need a database to monitor trends, and as Schmidt points out, this database does not exist.

But if the sight of strings of clotted material isn’t scary enough, Died Suddenly is willing to make its title even more manifest by showing us rapid-fire montages of people fainting and seemingly dropping dead. Out of context, these videos are distressing. However, The Real Truther account on Twitter has demonstrated that many of them are not what they seem. The woman who passes out and falls into a moving train? Her name is Candela. She fainted because of low blood pressure and survived with a fractured skull. That young basketball player who collapses on the court? His name is Keyontae Johnson, and his fainting took place on December 12, 2020, before the COVID-19 vaccines were readily available. He has since been medically cleared to play and recently signed with Kansas State. These people are not dead. To borrow a phrase from the conspiracy playbook, we have been lied to.

Given that syncope, the medical term for a temporary loss of consciousness brought about by a drop in blood pressure, affects one in five over their lifetime, and given the ubiquity of cameras in our world, that’s a lot of fainting episodes captured on video that can be used to bolster a narrative that “something’s not right.”

Outside of the documentary, its Twitter account and many more in the anti-vaccination space have used “died suddenly” as a rallying cry. One of the producers of the movie, Stew Peters, interviewed a woman who claimed that Canadian physicians were dropping like flies in the prime of their lives. Peters didn’t mince words: “We absolutely know 100% what is going on. They want to cover it up. The doctors are dying, and they’re dying from these stupid shots.” Their evidence comes from the Canadian Medical Association’s In Memoriam webpage. I had a look. Peters’ interview was released on August 22nd of this year. I looked at the last ten doctors who had been memorialized at this point. For most, the cause of death is not mentioned. For the others, it’s Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia, COVID-19, and a two-year spell with brain cancer. The average age at which these ten physicians died? 82. The youngest was 64. Hardly in the prime of their lives. That same woman making the claim goes on to hypothesize that Alberta was sent the most toxic batch of the vaccines because its residents don’t typically vote for Justin Trudeau. How else to explain its high mortality during the pandemic?

The Died Suddenly Twitter account, which boasts an authoritative blue check mark it received after paying $8 a month, memorializes a long list of people who, we are led to believe, died of the vaccine, including the voice of Batman, Kevin Conroy, who very recently passed away from intestinal cancer. Except that scrolling through these names, it becomes apparent the list includes anyone who died suddenly, who died after a short illness, who died after a long illness, who died of cancer or of an immune condition or of a viral infection. Their vaccination status is often not even known. Basically, everybody dying after the vaccines were rolled out has now been killed by the jab.

One of the funeral directors interviewed in Died Suddenly, who now identifies as an anti-vaxxer, tells us to go on Google and type in “died suddenly.” I listened to him and did the exercise.

Disturbingly, I found a 13-year-old boy who died suddenly after collapsing while playing in a schoolyard; a 38-year-old publisher who died suddenly at home, with no known health issues; even actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s brother who died suddenly at 36. What I didn’t tell you is that I did the search for the year 2010. Sudden deaths are not new. I even found a particularly distressing example. Her name was Kalina and she had shown no sign of illness before suddenly falling ill and dying that very evening. She was only 25 years old and was the third adult to die from her place of work in a four-month period.

Scary stuff, isn’t it? Except that Kalina was a killer whale who died at SeaWorld Orlando in 2010.

What Died Suddenly does is akin to grave-robbing. It raids online obituaries, with complete disregard for consent or basic journalistic integrity, and stitches a pseudoscientific horror story with the faces of the deceased.

The makers of Died Suddenly don’t want you to think; they want you to feel. For all of the anti-vaccination movement’s admonitions to “do your own research,” the thing that consistently sinks their arguments is doing your own research. It’s fact-checking if what they are telling you is correct.

None of this is new, though the conspiracy they are selling is growing to epic proportions.

Cut from the same clot

Died Suddenly can serve as a teachable moment for those of us who study the post-COVID-19 anti-vaccination movement, to help us recognize its traits and see its progression.

We witness motivated reasoning: starting from the conclusion that the vaccines cannot be safe and looking for evidence that matches the conclusion. We see a thick coating of “after the fact, therefore because of it,” as anybody dying from 2021 onwards is said to be the victim of a vaccine that can kill you instantly, with a delay, or simply worsen a pre-existing condition. The “VAERS scare” tactic is also briefly adopted, as the database of “bad things that happened after getting a vaccine” is easily trawled for hits.

Died Suddenly also features fake experts, a characteristic of science denial. The VAERS scare itself is brought up in the documentary by entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, who is seen stopped by police after repeated, uninvited visits to the private residence of Dr. Grace Lee, the chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He tells the cops he’s “a journalist for Substack,” a fancy term for “blogger” if there ever was one. In the documentary, he confidently asserts that no one wants to know what’s in the vaccines and that no journalist has ever asked, “What’s in the vials?” Funny how there was so much worry about what was in the COVID-19 vaccines, their manufacturers released a list of their ingredients at the beginning of the roll-out, which was covered by the mainstream press. But this is the kind of accuracy you can expect from a grown man who literally called me a chicken on his blog for refusing to debate him.

Meanwhile, a military whistleblower tells us that deaths are up 40% in the 18-to-64 age group, pointing the finger at the vaccines. Except that it’s not the vaccines; it’s the COVID-19 pandemic itself. From blood clots to excess mortality, everything caused by the virus is blamed on the vaccines.

Died Suddenly premiered on both Twitter and Rumble, the alternative video platform favoured by conservatives who loudly proclaim their right to free speech, to a combined 8 million views as of this writing. The text box below the documentary is filled with sponsor links that echo the concerns of the people living outside the mainstream: survival food, “manly” supplements, and precious metal investments. There’s also a link to Mike Lindell’s MyPillow company. The subtleties of the anti-vaccination movement have been shed: the box asks viewers to “support anti-vax activism.” The masks are off.

Meanwhile, the movie throws everything onto the conspiracy cork board, with Jeffrey Epstein, Anthony Fauci, Justin Trudeau, Greta Thunberg, and Bill Gates flashing before our eyes, next to mentions of MKUltra and a clip from that infamous Sasquatch hoax video.

A clip of Tom Hanks explaining Malthusian theory during a press tour is borrowed, which introduces us to the ultimate thesis of the documentary: the COVID-19 pandemic was apparently an excuse to roll out a deadly vaccine engineered to decimate our military forces, affect pregnant women, and kill as many people as possible. As Thomas Malthus once wrote, our population will someday exceed in numbers our ability to provide for everyone. The Powers That Be thus had to come up with a solution: an injectable bioweapon.

And this is where conspirituality comes in. As Died Suddenly ramps up to its climax, religious beliefs are made clear and the full scope of the conspiracy is laid out. This is spiritual war, we are told. The depopulation agenda was written by the forces of Evil and it is our God-given role to fight back.

The anti-vaccination movement no longer sees itself as merely opposing an industry; its vociferations are a clarion call for divine salvation.

Those who care

I have already read superficial denunciations of the movie by media outlets that do not address the core claims the movie makes. I get it. The escalation of the anti-vaccine rhetoric into a mad fever pitch is so pronounced, it can leave us speechless. We resort to dismissal, anger, and accusations of widespread idiocy.

I worry that this sort of drive-by skepticism—quick, often smug—, excusable though it may be, plays right into the hand of a movie like Died Suddenly. Its brave “truthtellers” are shown as people who care. They want to prevent deaths. They are tearing through the wall of passivity and the thicket of wickedness they see in order to save human lives. Propped up by the shallow depth of field of the camera, the professional lighting, the unnerving music, and the storytelling power of a good edit, it makes for convincing fodder.

Our casual dismissal of these propaganda pieces doesn’t help, in my opinion. If we want to persuade the people caught in their wake—not the die-hard believers, who can hardly be swayed, but those who are scared yet still willing to listen to reason—we must fact-check with empathy. We must show how easy it is to topple the scarecrows of anti-vaccine propaganda.

We need patience, as hard as it can be to find these days.

Today's Deep Thinking

What if the universe we know is actually a computer simulation, and there's nothing real but our imaginations?

Sorry not sorry, but to me, this is pretty good food for thought when you're sitting around smoking some really killer weed with your new best buddies in your dorm room at 3:00 on a random Tuesday, or if you watched The Matrix and concluded it was a documentary.

Also sorry not sorry, but how is this "new" "theory" anything other than a substitute for God?

All that said, I'll try to keep an open mind about "proving or disproving" the existence of this new god - or concept of god - or GOD.EXE - or whatever the fuck we're talking about here.

Shit just makes my head hurt.

Expert Proposes a Method For Telling if We All Live in a Computer Program

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the Universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets, and ultimately life to develop?

The expansive force of the Universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests it should be – allowing matter to clump together rather than being ripped apart.

A common answer is that we live in an infinite multiverse of Universes, so we shouldn't be surprised that at least one Universe has turned out as ours. But another is that our Universe is a computer simulation, with someone (perhaps an advanced alien species) fine-tuning the conditions.

The latter option is supported by a branch of science called information physics, which suggests that space-time and matter are not fundamental phenomena. Instead, the physical reality is fundamentally made up of bits of information, from which our experience of space-time emerges.

By comparison, temperature "emerges" from the collective movement of atoms. No single atom fundamentally has temperature.

This leads to the extraordinary possibility that our entire Universe might in fact be a computer simulation.

The idea is not that new. In 1989, the legendary physicist, John Archibald Wheeler, suggested that the Universe is fundamentally mathematical and it can be seen as emerging from information. He coined the famous aphorism "it from bit".

In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom from Oxford University in the UK formulated his simulation hypothesis. This argues that it is actually highly probable that we live in a simulation.

That's because an advanced civilization should reach a point where their technology is so sophisticated that simulations would be indistinguishable from reality, and the participants would not be aware that they were in a simulation.

Physicist Seth Lloyd from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US took the simulation hypothesis to the next level by suggesting that the entire Universe could be a giant quantum computer.

Empirical evidence

There is some evidence suggesting that our physical reality could be a simulated virtual reality rather than an objective world that exists independently of the observer.

Any virtual reality world will be based on information processing. That means everything is ultimately digitized or pixelated down to a minimum size that cannot be subdivided further: bits.

This appears to mimic our reality according to the theory of quantum mechanics, which rules the world of atoms and particles. It states there is a smallest, discrete unit of energy, length and time.

Similarly, elementary particles, which make up all the visible matter in the Universe, are the smallest units of matter. To put it simply, our world is pixelated.

The laws of physics that govern everything in the Universe also resemble computer code lines that a simulation would follow in the execution of the program. Moreover, mathematical equations, numbers, and geometric patterns are present everywhere – the world appears to be entirely mathematical.

Another curiosity in physics supporting the simulation hypothesis is the maximum speed limit in our Universe, which is the speed of light. In a virtual reality, this limit would correspond to the speed limit of the processor, or the processing power limit.

We know that an overloaded processor slows down computer processing in a simulation. Similarly, Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity shows that time slows in the vicinity of a black hole.

Perhaps the most supportive evidence of the simulation hypothesis comes from quantum mechanics. This suggest nature isn't "real": particles in determined states, such as specific locations, don't seem to exist unless you actually observe or measure them. Instead, they are in a mix of different states simultaneously. Similarly, virtual reality needs an observer or programmer for things to happen.

Quantum " entanglement" also allows two particles to be spookily connected so that if you manipulate one, you automatically and immediately also manipulate the other, no matter how far apart they are – with the effect being seemingly faster than the speed of light, which should be impossible.

This could, however, also be explained by the fact that within a virtual reality code, all "locations" (points) should be roughly equally far from a central processor. So while we may think two particles are millions of light years apart, they wouldn't be if they were created in a simulation.

Possible experiments

Assuming that the Universe is indeed a simulation, then what sort of experiments could we deploy from within the simulation to prove this?

It is reasonable to assume that a simulated Universe would contain a lot of information bits everywhere around us. These information bits represent the code itself. Hence, detecting these information bits will prove the simulation hypothesis.

The recently proposed mass-energy-information (M/E/I) equivalence principle – suggesting mass can be expressed as energy or information, or vice versa – states that information bits must have a small mass. This gives us something to search for.

I have postulated that information is in fact a fifth form of matter in the Universe. I've even calculated the expected information content per elementary particle. These studies led to the publication, in 2022, of an experimental protocol to test these predictions.

The experiment involves erasing the information contained inside elementary particles by letting them and their antiparticles (all particles have "anti" versions of themselves which are identical but have opposite charge) annihilate in a flash of energy – emitting "photons", or light particles.

I have predicted the exact range of expected frequencies of the resulting photons based on information physics. The experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools, and we have launched a crowdfunding site to achieve it.

There are other approaches too. The late physicist John Barrow has argued that a simulation would build up minor computational errors which the programmer would need to fix in order to keep it going.

He suggested we might experience such fixing as contradictory experimental results appearing suddenly, such as the constants of nature changing. So monitoring the values of these constants is another option.

The nature of our reality is one of the greatest mysteries out there. The more we take the simulation hypothesis seriously, the greater the chances we may one day prove or disprove it.

Climate Change vs Paleontology

Just in case somebody is tempted to say. "Hey, maybe there's some good news in all this gloom-n-doom climate stuff after all. Look - a lion tooth."

No. Stop that immediately.

The Mississippi is drying up. The biggest, most important river system in North America is going bust. The 4th largest river system in the world, and easily the biggest economic producer on this whole fucking planet is dying.

And the lion tooth? That's a warning. Another one of those no-so-little signals the universe sends us, as it tries to help us get it through our thick monkey skulls into our dumbass monkey brains that we need to resist thinking the connection between humans and this thousand-pound apex predator is really kinda cool. Because we call that connection

extinction

The lion had no way of knowing what was happening. He may have noticed he wasn't getting laid too often anymore, but oh well, what the hell, more time for antelope huntin'.

You may notice, up near the top of my little blog is a countdown to the time when we won't have a hooker's chance in church to save our asses from the worst Mama Nature has to offer.

As for humans faced with these changes? "Oh well, what the hell, more time for treasure hunting."

Drought Reveals Rare American Lion Fossil in Dried Up Mississippi River

Low water levels have also stranded barge traffic and threatened drinking water

While exploring a newly exposed sandbar in the drought-stricken Mississippi River, Wiley Prewitt spotted something black sticking out of the sand.

Upon closer inspection, Prewitt realized the find was a tooth—and a big one at that. He suspected it belonged to a carnivore but decided to take his discovery to a Mississippi Fossil and Artifact Symposium & Exhibition event and ask the experts for confirmation.

Paleontologists now say the tooth—which is attached to part of a fossilized jaw bone—once belonged to a large American lion (Panthera atrox), a species that has been extinct for roughly 11,000 years. The big cats prowled throughout North America during the Pleistocene, first appearing at least 340,000 years ago, but fossilized evidence of their existence in the eastern United States is extremely rare. Prewitt’s tooth is now just the fourth specimen found in Mississippi.

Coincidentally, the fossil and artifact event had been featuring the previously discovered American lion fossils when Prewitt walked in with his new find. George Phillips, curator of paleontology at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, described the surreal scene to McClatchy News’ Mark Price as “one of those true moments where you blink a couple of times, because you can’t believe your eyes.”

Scientists estimate American lions were roughly 25 percent larger than today’s African lions, per the National Park Service. They stood four feet tall at the shoulders and measured five to eight feet in length. Some of the biggest American lions may have topped 1,000 pounds, while others weighed between 500 and 800 pounds.

“Because the American lion is just a different subspecies, but the same species as the African lion, it would have looked like a larger version of the African lion,” says Kate Lyons, a paleoecologist at the University of Nebraska, to Newsweek’s Pandora Dewan. “However, we don't know whether or not it had a mane like African lions, as preservation of things like skin or hair are very rare in the fossil record.”

Experts hope Prewitt will share his find with a museum or lab collection for further study, but so far, he hasn’t mentioned his plans for the tooth.

Prewitt, who is from Oxford, Mississippi, made the discovery near Rosedale, a small town on the Mississippi-Arkansas border about 140 miles northwest of Jackson. But up and down the typically mighty river, drought is causing the waters to dry up. Low water levels are delaying barge traffic and threatening drinking water in some places; they’ve also revealed the remains of a 100-plus-year-old ferry and a more modern sunken casino boat.

The river basin really needs rain, but meteorologists are predicting another dry winter with warmer-than-normal temperatures in southern and eastern regions, as the country enters a third straight year of La Niña.

“Across the lower Mississippi Valley, we are favoring continuation of below-normal precipitation,” Jon Gottschalck, chief of the Operational Prediction Branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, tells Reuters’ Karl Plume. “That would certainly, if the prediction is realized, lead to continued low water levels and exacerbate drought conditions there.”

We are so fucked.

Today I Learned

Giant crinoid colony - from 195 million years ago

Crinoids

Crinoids are marine animals that make up the class Crinoidea, one of the classes of the phylum Echinodermata, which also includes the starfish, brittle stars, sea urchins and sea cucumbers. Those crinoids which, in their adult form, are attached to the sea bottom by a stalk are commonly called sea lilies, while the unstalked forms are called feather stars or comatulids, being members of the largest crinoid order, Comatulida. They live in both shallow water and in depths as great as 9,000 meters (30,000 ft).

Adult crinoids are characterized by having the mouth located on the upper surface. This is surrounded by feeding arms, and is linked to a U-shaped gut, with the anus being located on the oral disc near the mouth. Although the basic echinoderm pattern of fivefold symmetry can be recognised, in most crinoids the five arms are subdivided into ten or more. These have feathery pinnules and are spread wide to gather planktonic particles from the water. At some stage in their lives, most crinoids have a stem used to attach themselves to the substrate, but many live attached only as juveniles and become free-swimming as adults.

There are only about 600 living species of crinoid, but the class was much more abundant and diverse in the past. Some thick limestone beds dating to the mid-Paleozoic to Jurassic eras are almost entirely made up of disarticulated crinoid fragments.

Today's Birthday

Carl Sagan, Nov 9, 1934 - Dec 20, 1996

"...to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot - the only home we've ever known."

Another Chicken Comes Home To Roost

Sir William Ramsay

Seems like it wasn't all that long ago that "problems with the nation's strategic helium reserves" was very popular as joke fodder on the late night talk shows.

Yeah, go ahead - yuk it up, laughing boy.

The World is Running Out of Helium, Worrying Doctors

Liquid helium, the coldest element on Earth, is needed to keep the magnets in MRI machines running. Without it, doctors would lose a critical medical tool.

A global helium shortage has doctors worried about one of the natural gas’s most essential, and perhaps unexpected, uses: MRIs.

Strange as it sounds, the lighter-than-air element that gives balloons their buoyancy also powers the vital medical diagnostic machines. An MRI can’t function without some 2,000 liters of ultra-cold liquid helium keeping its magnets cool enough to work. But helium — a nonrenewable element found deep within the Earth’s crust — is running low, leaving hospitals wondering how to plan for a future with a much scarcer supply.

“Helium has become a big concern,” said Mahadevappa Mahesh, professor of radiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Baltimore. “Especially now with the geopolitical situation.”

Helium has been a volatile commodity for years. This is especially true in the U.S., where a Texas-based federal helium reserve is dwindling as the government tries transferring ownership to private markets.

Until this year, the U.S. was counting on Russia to ease the tight supply. An enormous new facility in eastern Russia was supposed to supply nearly one-third of the world’s helium, but a fire last January derailed the timeline. Although the facility could resume operations any day, the war in Ukraine has, for the most part, stopped trade between the two countries.

Tragedy of The Commons

In economics, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.

Today's Nerdy Thing

The guys who wrote the bible did their best to piece it together, and figure it out, and put it into a form that people back then could understand. We have to remember, even the smartest guys on the planet still didn't know where the sun went at night.

Of course over time - and I'll bet dollars-to-dingleberries on this - the politicians (aka that era's clergy) knew they could influence or outright control the rubes' behavior by embellishing the tale and claiming to know what a wrathful god would visit upon them if they didn't do what the politicians/clergy told them to do. But that's a different rant.

Here's an update on something from years ago.

Joe Hanson:

Today's Über Nerd

(pay wall)

Nobel in medicine awarded to Svante Pääbo for discoveries on human evolution

The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist whose work on ancient DNA helped change our understanding of human origins.

Pääbo, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, led groundbreaking work to sequence the genome of long-extinct Neanderthals from 40,000-year-old bone fragments. It was a “seemingly impossible task,” said Anna Wedell, a member of the Nobel committee.

The work was transformative, showing that Neanderthals mixed with prehistoric humans after they migrated out of Africa, and the vestiges of those interactions live on today in the genomes of present-day people. Pääbo’s efforts laid the foundation of a new field of science that uses ancient DNA as a new stream of information to probe human evolution.

Pääbo, 67, learned he had won the prize in a midmorning phone call from the Nobel committee.

“He was overwhelmed. He was speechless, very happy,” said Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Assembly. “He was incredibly thrilled about this award.”As a young scientist, Pääbo focused on understanding how adenoviruses interacted with the immune system. But he retained an interest in human origins, and worked on isolating DNA from Egyptian mummies as a side project.

At the time, the ancient DNA field was “kind of a joke,” full of incredible claims that would turn out to be incorrect as scientists tried to recover DNA from dinosaurs, said John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“It was Svante, who came along and made this into a science,” Hawks said.

For decades, Pääbo chipped away at the difficult task of analyzing ancient DNA, devising ways to overcome the technical challenges of working with samples that degrade over time and are easily contaminated. He worked largely on DNA from extinct animals, but always with the goal of bringing the techniques he was developing to modern humans’ extinct, big-brained relatives, Neanderthals.

Once he had developed those methods, he brought together a large consortium of scientists and built the relationships necessary to obtain the ancient bone fragments needed to take on the monumental task of trying to decipher the genome of Neanderthals.

That work disrupted the prevailing view of human origins. Homo sapiens originated in Africa about 300,000 years ago, but they emerged into a world filled with other hominid species — and mixed with them as they migrated.

Pääbo and colleagues showed that Neanderthals, extinct for 30,000 years, live on in our DNA. As modern humans migrated outside of Africa, they mixed with Neanderthals, making up about 1 to 2 percent of the genomes of non-African people today. From a finger bone found in a cave in the Altai Mountains in Russia, he discovered a new species of early hominid, the Denisovans.

This genetic inheritance is relevant for understanding aspects of human health today. A version of a gene that gives people an advantage at high altitude that is common among people living in Tibet today has Denisovan origins. Some genes that influence how present-day people’s immune systems respond to infections are inherited from Neanderthals.

“These are profound things that happened to human biology, and we need to know about it — it is an important part of the inheritance,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. “It’s changed our biology and the history of everybody. We all know we are all mixed.”

Reich said the prize was a thrilling recognition for a scientist he considers a close friend and collaborator — and for a burgeoning field of science that has transformed science’s view of the human species.

Reich was a key part of the consortium that helped determine that Neanderthals had mixed with humans, and said that when he joined the project, he — like many in the field — expected to find little evidence of mixing between Neanderthals and humans.

“When we saw the first evidence that it had occurred … it was surprising and unexpected, and I thought it was likely to be an error of our analysis — and I spent a lot of time trying to make it go away,” Reich said.

Ultimately, multiple lines of evidence supported the conclusion.

Before Pääbo’s contributions, scientists were limited to studying ancient bones and artifacts to understand human ancestors. His work has established a new field of science, paleogenomics, that uses ancient DNA analysis to probe questions about prehistoric questions.

While Pääbo’s scientific work has been transformative, some wondered whether it would win a Nobel, often considered science’s highest honor, because it wasn’t an obvious fit to the categories. In science, Nobels are awarded to medicine or physiology, physics and chemistry.

Hawks, however, argues that understanding human ancestry and evolution is a direct window into understanding deep questions about health and disease. Ancient DNA opened the window to asking deep questions about ancient humans and their relatives that would otherwise be inaccessible.

“This isn’t just a strange thing about our evolution that we’re learning — it’s relevant to our health,” Hawks said. “It matters because our ancestry is what is affecting our health, and when you uncover the genes that we inherited from these distant ancestors that matter to our health, you’re going to open a new window into understanding human disease.”

And it turns out the guy's a legacy, but I won't hold that against him - looks like he's earned it.

Forty years earlier, Pääbo’s father, Sune Bergström, won a Nobel Prize.