Just the other week, hundreds of residents who live near Luke air force base in Arizona were advised not to drink their water, when tests detected high levels of toxic chemicals. Scientists have found these substances in the blood of nearly all the people they tested in the US. No country or region on earth …
Continue reading ‘The decimation of fertility. No. 3 (last comments)’ »
The end of humankind? It may be coming sooner than we think, thanks to hormone-disrupting chemicals that are decimating fertility at an alarming rate around the globe. A new book called Countdown, by Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, finds that sperm counts …
Women are having fewer children than at any time on record. What are the implications? The U.S.’s total fertility rate, or the number of babies each woman is expected to have during her lifetime, reached a record low of 1.705 births per woman (that’s 1 point 705!)in 2019, the latest year for which data is …
A Russian academic has said that humans will one day be able to live forever and bring the dead back to life. “Death seems to be a permanent event, but there is no actual proof of its irreversibility,” said “transhumanist” Alexey Turchin. He added that there are four different paths to indefinite life so that …
John Ratcliffe, Donald Trump’s former intelligence director, recently said: “There are a lot more sightings of UFOs than have been made public.” He continued that in some of the cases “we don’t have good explanations” about what the UFOs might have been, adding: “I actually wanted to get this information out and declassify it before …
“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us”. (Bill Watterson) My reaction: Why would any intelligent being from outer space want to visit this riven planet? I write this after seeing the news about the white supremacists and other violent crazies, armed to …
People with extremist views are less able to do complex tasks. The Cambridge University team say their findings could be used to spot people at risk from radicalisation: Our brains hold clues for the ideologies we choose to live by, according to the research, which has suggested that people who espouse extremist attitudes tend to perform …
“If it was racist to call the virus the ‘Chinese virus’ or ‘Wuhan virus,’ why do you insist on referring to the ‘U.K. variant?’” —Chuck in Wisconsin For whatever reason, we — media, health experts, politicians, humans in general — have historically referred to novel viruses by their unique new “thing.” But not only is …
More than 25% of Americans are likely to refuse the vaccine, according to an international study Only 11% of US citizens said they trusted their government to be a reliable source of information on vaccines, compared with 30% in the UK. Three out of four Republicans don’t think Joe Biden won the election legitimately. About …
Oklahoma is trying to return its $2 million purchase of hydroxychloroquine and get a refund from the manufacturer. Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt ordered the purchase of the malaria drug in April, when President Trump was promoting it as a “miracle” treatment for Covid-19. Studies, however, have found the drug inappropriate (actually useless, to be honest, except …
Birds fly at tens of thousands of metres high. Ice forms on the wings of planes at this altitude, so why don’t the birds freeze? Birds can sometimes reach astonishingly high altitudes. The record is a massive 11,278 metres by a Rüppell’s vulture that collided with an aircraft. The resulting “snarge” – that is to …
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When cosmologists came up with cosmic inflation, the idea that the early universe ballooned exponentially in a moment, they quickly realised they may have got more than they bargained for. Inflation can happen anywhere in space and time. It happened in our patch of the universe a long time ago, and it made our corner …
How will Moderna make the 100 million doses contracted for in the first quarter of 2021 and the 200 million doses it has to provide the federal government (for $3.2 billion) by the end of June? A big part of the answer is outsourcing production to a contract manufacturer that will make the vaccine on …
Continue reading ‘Catulent – a name you are probably unfamiliar with’ »
Ecosystem collapse a risk in one fifth of the world’s countries The spread of intensive farming threatens to jeopardize the world’s chances of meeting the term of the Paris agreement on the climate crisis. Nitrous oxide is given off by the overuse of artificial fertilizers, and by organic sources such as animal manure, and has …
A man who lived in Siberia about 14,000 years ago is the earliest known person in the world to have the specific mix of genes seen in people with Native American ancestry, analysis of DNA from a fossilised tooth has revealed. This suggests the link between ancient Siberian and Native American people is much deeper …
