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The big alcohol study that didn't happen
Why did a huge alcohol RCT get cancelled? A strange story of science, academia, bureaucratic maneuvering, ambition, politics, capitalism, the deep state, secret emails, and slippery ethical slopes.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 409 posts.
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021 was awarded jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian "for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch"
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BepiColombo’s First Views of Mercury
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has captured its first views of its destination planet Mercury as it swooped past in a close gravity assist flyby last night.
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The Martians of Budapest
The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933. The term refers to—what appeared, from the perspective of Americans—to be a…
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Antiviral Molnupiravir Reduces Risk of Hospitalization/Death by ~50 Percent
At the Interim Analysis, 7.3 Percent of Patients Who Received Molnupiravir Were Hospitalized Through Day 29, Compared With 14.1 Percent of Placebo-Treated Patients Who were Hospitalized or Died Merck Plans to Seek Emergency Use Authorization in the U.S. as Soon as Possible and to Submit Applications to Regulatory…
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Safety of Nuclear Energy
Explore global data on nuclear energy production and the safety of nuclear technologies.
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Sustainable coffee grown in Finland with cellular agriculture
VTT has successfully produced coffee cells in a bioreactor through cellular agriculture. The innovation can help to make the production of coffee more sustainable. The first batches produced by VTT in a laboratory in Finland smell and taste like conventional coffee.
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Dog parasite is developing resistance to treatments
Hookworms have evolved to evade all FDA approved medications used to kill them.
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The Geometry of Color Perception
The previous pages have explained three very different methods for defining a color: (1) the measurement of the color stimulus as a spectral emittance or reflectance curve in colorimetry ; (2) the proportional responses to the stimulus by the L , M and S cones, represented as a chromaticity diagram ; and (3) the…
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The physics anomaly no one talks about: What’s up with those neutrinos?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Losing Covid-19 antibody immunity after six months after Pfizer vaccine
Case Western Reserve University researchers, in partnership with Brown University, examine vaccine’s effectiveness over time on seniors and their ca...
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Tianwen-1 attitude in Mars orbit
It has been a while since the last time I wrote an update about Tianwen-1’s attitude . In that post I showed that Tianwen-1 had changed to a sun angle of 0 degrees with respect to the spacecraft’s X axis on 2020-10-22. Since then, nothing changed, even after the spacecraft arrived to Mars orbit on February 2021, so I…
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Common cold combats Covid-19
A new Yale-led study finds that immune system activity jump-started by rhinovirus exposure could prevent or treat the early stages of COVID-19 infection.
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Engineers grow pancreatic organoids that mimic the real thing
MIT engineers developed a way to grow tiny replicas of the pancreas, using either healthy or cancerous pancreatic cells. Their models could help researchers develop and test potential drugs for pancreatic cancer.
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Why can’t I go faster than the speed of light?
I should state from the very beginning that the title of this post is a bit of a tease. I don’t know why nothing can go faster than the speed of light. No one does. It is a fundamental pos…
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What if I were 1% charged? (2013)
In case you hadn’t heard, the universe is governed by four fundamental forces. But when it comes to understanding nature at almost any level larger than a nucleus and smaller than a planet, …
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How strong would a magnetic field have to be to kill you?
There’s a great joke in Futurama, the cartoon comedy show, about a horror movie for robots. In the movie, a planet of robots is terrorized by a giant “non-metallic being” (a mons…
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MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy
For the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created. The demonstration helps resolve the greatest uncertainty in the quest to build the first fusion power plant that can produce more energy than…
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New Evidence Against the Standard Model of Cosmology
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Why Does the Sunlight Always Come from the North in Shaded Relief Maps?
If you've got a sharp eye and a knack for details, you might have noticed the sun coming from an unrealistic angle in most shaded relief maps: the north. In this article we explain why.
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Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know (2018)
[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.] Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chrono…