Category: Science

Brain Researchers Are Finally Waking Up From Their Alzheimer’s Errors

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For the last twenty plus years researchers have single-mindedly chased the amyloid hypothesis as the solution to Alzheimer’s Disease.  And this has led nowhere.  Finally after hundreds of drug trials and billions of dollars spent, they’re waking up from their delusion and realizing that amyloid is a symptom of the disease not its cause.

More than anything this is an indictment of the system of selecting research and development targets in biomedical science.  But ti also may reflect the waning of the scientific method in the West too.  Considerable fraud was involved in a landmark research project that perpetuated the mistaken direction of Alzheimer’s research for decades.

The government/industry/academic “partnership” is at the center of the dysfunction that has become endemic across America and Europe.  The complex no longer rewards merit and is highly influenced by gender and racial politics and other irrelevant considerations that limit the scientific method.

But at least now maybe some progress can be made in this terribly debilitating disease.  In fact it might turn out that small molecule solutions that aren’t as costly or require such long development times as the antibody drugs might turn up now.

“Lasers” Are No Longer Just for Bond Villains

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It turns out that cheap drone weapons are re-energizing research and development of laser weapons.  Apparently, the differential cost of offensive and defensive missiles is forcing countries to reconsider building defensive laser weapons.  Israel’s successful Iron Dome anti-missile system is demonstrating that if an enemy is willing to flood the field with cheap missiles, they can bankrupt the defender using effective but expensive anti-missile missiles.

Lasers on the other hand after the initial purchase cost of the system uses about ten dollars in electricity per kill.  Of course, lasers are limited by weather conditions.  The quote from the article says, ““With lasers, if you can see it, you can kill it; typically rain and snow are not big deterrents,” says Robert Afzal, an expert on lasers at Lockheed Martin. “But a thundercloud—that’s hard.””

And the range of targets is impressive but not unlimited:

““A laser of that class (100 kW) can be effective against a wide variety of targets, including cruise missiles, mortars, UAVs, and aircraft,” says Perry. “But not reentry vehicles [launched by ballistic missiles].” Those are the warheads, and to ward them off, he says, you’d probably have to hit the rocket when it’s still in the boost phase, which would mean placing your laser in orbit. Laser tech is still far from performing such a feat.”

The Russians, Israelis and Americans all have active fiber laser weapons programs in the 100 – 300 kW range which is the current state of the art.  But now that the economic necessity for these systems has been demonstrated I imagine more powerful and multi-weapon platforms can’t be far behind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgUnDeED9MM&t=89s

Well all I can say is it’s about time.  We were promised lasers back in the sixties.  Even Dr. Evil had sharks with frikkin’ laser beams back thirty years ago.  Slackers.

20NOV2022 – OCF Update – This’N’That – Of Mice and Math

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Sunday, the day of rest.  A good day to regroup and sets things in order for the upcoming week.  Especially this week.  Had a blast with the old grandsons yesterday.  Fun outing, good food.  Got home and skipped dinner.  Skipped all food and drink and maybe that was a mistake.  I was still recovering from that virus that was in the house the last couple of weeks.  But I figured I could skip the cold meds.  Big mistake!  Woke up at 4:30 am with a splitting sinus headache.  So, I beat a hasty retreat to the cold medicine and then sat up for a half hour to let it knock down my sinus inflammation.

But today I’m definitely on the mend.  So, I spent time working on minutia.  I’ve been using the Logitech M570 Wireless Trackball Mouse as my pointing device for the last six or so years.  It’s a great device in most ways.  But unfortunately, the switches for the left and right click buttons give out after a couple of years.  So now I have three of these things that double click when they shouldn’t.  I finally looked into the problem and found a YouTube video that shows how to replace the microswitches and eliminate the problem.  Now I’ll have to buy a soldering iron and some other bits of gear and become a technician.  Well, that’s kind of fun.  Plus, I’ll fix the other two mice and become mouse anti-fragile for the foreseeable future.  Yeah me.

The other thing today was about was to delve into vector analysis.  I never had the time back in the day to play around with the more advanced theorems to get a solid handle on the tensor notation.  In the past I’ve been exposed (as if to a disease) to Del Notation, Dyadics, the Laplacian and equally complex concepts.  The Kronecker delta and how to expand the determinant was something I had to memorize in order to solve some problems in physics.  But if I’m being honest there was very little comprehension on my part at the time as to how these manipulations made sense.  Now I’ve got some time I think I’ll take another whack at it.  The question as to whether I still have sufficient brain cells to thread my way around it and whether those brain cells can retain it remains to be seen.  But it might be fun.

So, amid my other occupations I’ve added electronic technician and math student.  That should make Thanksgiving week an interesting time.  Maybe I’ll buy the microswitches and soldering iron on Black Friday and get some huge discount.  I’ll probably also have to buy some kind of giant magnifying glass on a flexible arm just to see the attachment points for the switches.  It’s a pity I can’t purchase new eyes too.  But once again, the future we were promised all those years ago before Blade Runner hasn’t quite materialized yet.  Well, no need to get all whiny about it.  Magnifying glass works too.

So here we go into Thanksgiving Week.  Turkey, gravy, stuffing, pumpkin pie, old movies and family.  What’s better than that?

String Theorists – The Snake Oil Salesmen of Theoretical Physics

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This video is a “debate” between a string theorist and two actual physicists (including a Nobel Laureate) over the legitimacy of the multiverse model of reality.  It’s really quite embarrassing.  The string guy sounds like a penny stock broker trying to hawk his wares by touting the “research” that is just around the corner and right at the edge of proving all the ridiculous tenets of his unprovable or inconsistent or even haphazard concepts.

The other two physicists and the moderator all seem exasperated by repeatedly slapping down both the substance of his argument and the sleight of hand attempts to conflate the standard understanding of quantum mechanics with the string theory basis for the multiverse model.  In fact, these physicists provide arguments against both of these things separately and still the string guy keeps on coming up with cutesy analogies for using space-based probes to look for the equivalent of the “ultrasound image of the gestating baby universe in the first microseconds after the Big Bang.”  He even manages to talk about the umbilical cord of this fetal universe.  It’s beyond silly.

If you’re interested in watching a string theorist getting slapped around this video might be of interest to you.  I know I enjoyed it.  String theory seems to be the physics equivalent of communism.  It’s a theory that has never worked but provides its practitioners with a funhouse version of reality that they can bloviate about and if they manage to get put in charge of resources waste them endlessly until they bankrupt their host.

Highly amusing.  I was especially amused to hear that the string guy works at my alma mater.  Ah, the pride is back.

How Far Out There is Out There?

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Have you ever wondered how far away is the farthest visible galaxy?  Or what is the heaviest balck hole so far observed>  How about what is the fastest orbital speed of an object revolving around another stellar object?

Being a life-long nerd I enjoy nothing better than to see the latest high-end astrophotography and reading the highest exponential distances, masses and speeds tacked onto these images.

Well Astronomy Magazine has an article called “The most extreme celestial objects in the universe.” that answers some of those questions with lots of beautiful and intriguing astro-photos and other visuals.

Well, sometimes we have to step back from politics and smell the roses or gawk at the latest eye-candy taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).  After all this is Orion’s Cold Fire.

 

 

 

Joe Biden Cures Cancer

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Recently the odious fungoid that infests 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was raving about his imaginary “war against cancer.”  Under ordinary circumstances I assume that every pronouncement that emanates from that malignant wretch is a lie.  But when it comes to wars on cancer, I have a special level of scorn.

Since the 1960s America has been bombarded with headlines on how the titanic energies of the federal government and the medical science infrastructure would finally defeat cancer “within twenty years.”  Now this twenty-year estimate is very similar to the one that has been promising us nuclear fusion energy “within fifty years.  We’re currently on the eightieth year of that guesstimate.

The idea that a moron like Joe Biden is going to solve a biological mystery like curing all cancers is truly absurd.  Sure, he’s only talking about funding a research initiative but the scope of what he’s proposing to do dwarfs the resources he’s talking about by a factor of a million to one.

The mistake that people make when they compare biology to something like technology or economics is thinking that there is a linear relation between what you know and what you don’t know.  Everyone was told that once we had decoded the human genome everything else in human biology would be a matter of reverse engineering solutions to every disease and problem.  Boy was that stupid.  The genome gives us the code for figuring out the peptide sequence in all the proteins that the body uses.   But it turns out that understanding how these proteins interact with all the other chemical substances in the body is so complicated that all knowing the compositions of the proteins does is mock us with the actual complexity of our cells.

Even the shape of these protein molecules is a mystery that has to be painstakingly determined with X-ray crystallography and other complicated and exacting techniques.  And even then, we don’t know the shape the molecule assumes in the specialized environment when other molecules are associated during various interactions.  Recently artificial intelligence has been tasked with automating the calculation of the shapes of all the proteins known to man.  And this is surely a boon.  The countless man-hours saved by the machine cataloguing the shape of two hundred million proteins is stunning.  But as is freely admitted by the AI’s creators, these shape estimates are extremely questionable.  They only form the basis for a more through examination of the protein.  Maybe they really only help to narrow a research effort down from an even larger problem down to just an enormous one.

The metabolic pathways associated with the human immune system is one of those areas where protein shape is critical.  An enormous amount of effort has been expended in trying to understand how the human body differentiates between pathogens and self when it tries to protect from viruses, bacteria and other organisms.  When the immune system becomes too active, we end up with auto-immune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis or Crohn’s Disease where the body attacks its own cells.  And yet that same immune system is also charged with attacking cancer cells.  Tumor necrosis factors exist in the body for this purpose.  These delicate balances and how they fail is the subject of endless research.

Practical results have been made.  Antibodies have been manufactured with the ability to target the exact cancer cells that a patient is producing.  There have been cures.  But failure is the rule, success the exception.  Once again, what we know is still an infinitesimal part of what needs to be learned.

It can be hoped that AI will eventually be an accelerant for the research being done.  But I suspect that what we are looking at is a multi-generational effort that will involve incremental progress.  In fact, it’s possible that fundamental biological research not even aimed at cancer will provide the stepping stones that one day will allow truly effective cancer treatment.

One thing I can guarantee is that Joe Biden will never be thought to have done anything meaningful to help advance cancer research.  In fact, I’ll go one better.  Joe Biden will never be thought to have done anything meaningful to help anyone but himself.

Nuclear Power is Coming Back

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Even that animated haircut Gavin Newsom realizes that shutting down the nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon would get him bounced out of his job as governor of the stupidest state in the union.

He’s put the closure on hold until 2030 when he’ll be safely out of politics and doing harm in some other capacity.

And this same realization is coming to all the other geniuses who thought windmills and solar panels could replace the gigawatts of power we currently use to fuel a modern civilization.

“Across the United States, according to the fifth annual ecoAmerica survey, support for nuclear energy has risen to 60% (up from Gallup-reported 51% in 2015. Business Wire says support for nuclear has never been higher, though the survey also reported a majority still harbor fears about nuclear solid waste disposal, health and safety, security and weaponization, and cost.”

And overseas other nations are changing their minds about nuclear power.

” The British – who are even calling for fracking and renewed oil and gas exploration and development in the North Sea – are bullish on nuclear energy today despite plans to close five of its eight old reactors. France, Japan, China, India, Finland and Hungary are also building new nuclear plants, and Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic want to go nuclear.”

Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Austria have still maintained their pledges to shut down their existing nuclear plants but even the Germans with their dominant Green movement, are probably starting to wonder if reality will allow them to do this in the face of the loss of Russian natural gas.

The hippies dealt the US nuclear industry a seemingly lethal wound after Three Mile Island.  But now the hippies are in nursing homes and maybe their just as stupid children may be forced to decide which they hate more fossil fuels or nuclear power.  They’re going to have to choose one.  Tilting at windmills won’t keep the lights on.

Scientists Say Conservatives Happier Than Liberals. Duh!

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Apparently believing that dysfunction is normal and good is evil isn’t conducive to peace of mind.  I guess trying to see that two plus two equals five all the time must hurt their brains.  Well there is the consolation that these people are at least scared and miserable.  Now if we can find a way to prevent them from inflicting their madness upon us we’ll be ecstatic.

The ZMan Explains How Gaia Hates Plastic Bags

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The ZMan tells the story of how his local Wegman’s has compelled him to honor Gaia and stop using plastic bags.  This amusing tale is the green revolution writ small.  And honestly it’s probably the least crazy part of the whole movement.  Plastic has become so ubiquitous in our lives that we no longer even think about it.  Paper bags or even reusable bags might make sense.  But square this with the behavior that occurred during the COVID crisis when reusable anything was suspected of killing old people.

It’s obvious that “science” is not what’s going on with these decisions.  We’re being ruled by cultists who don’t understand the reality behind the narratives.  But read the story for ZMan’s trademark humor and bile.

The Paper Bag Test

Will America Pass the Test?

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We live in troubled times.  Many very strange ideas are loose in the world.  For the last hundred years or so Western Civilization has become increasingly unstable.  And now most of the first world has embraced its own destruction.  The idea of eliminating the majority of humanity from the planet in pursuit of some ecological paradise is a common philosophy among millennials.  And the belief that subsistence conditions that include eating bugs and giving up mobility and things like climate-controlled homes is being promulgated by the government and “thought leaders.”

I think we will find out very soon whether the majority of our countrymen agree with these ideas.  After all we are a “democracy” or something like one.  If the ayes have it, we’ll get bugs and electric cars.  But something leads me to believe that the whole world won’t succumb to this plan.  I have to believe that there remains a substantial group of people that aren’t fools and know that human ingenuity is substantially more capable of overcoming problems than what’s currently on display from the “green revolution” crowd.

I guess the question will be where will that ingenuity be allowed to flourish.  Up till recently the United States was the premiere center of innovation.  And we were also a magnet for entrepreneurs from across the world who were looking for a chance to pioneer new concepts in everything from robotics to medicine.  But now this trend is reversing.  Many innovators are returning home to their own countries to launch new companies and build factories.  Places like China and India are rejecting the green revolution in response to the need to reap the benefits of twentieth century technology that was made possible by fossil fuel powered industry.

Wind mills and solar panels are being deployed in the West but the rest of the world is burning coal, oil and natural gas.  And if things continue in the direction they’re going, eventually nuclear power plants will also become a common sight in the non-Western countries.  When that happens where will the center of innovation be located?

That’s the main question.  Which culture will have the confidence to continue the legacy that the Western World has already bequeathed to humanity?  What a strange thought that maybe in fifty years Europe and North America will be living in some kind of post-modern poverty with a marginal economy based on some socialist model while some currently third world country takes the lead and raises the standard of living of their people even higher than what we currently enjoy.

Strange or not, it might be the future.  I’m far from confident that Americans will come to their senses and demand better for their children than the message of deprivation and mediocrity that we’re being fed by the Democrats and their corporate allies.  We’re currently at a very critical juncture in our history.  We’ve recently been given a vision of energy prices becoming unsustainable while the government is using huge subsidies to convince Americans to buy electric cars.  And at the same time foods like meat and milk are also becoming prohibitively expensive.  This would be the time for angry consumers to lash out at the Democrats and punish them at the polls.  But what if they don’t?

That would tell me that the old America is gone for good and the current crop will be led by the nose to whatever fate the elites have planned for them.  And that will be a good time to start looking around and figure where the new center of human flourishing will end up.

I hope we don’t fail this test.  My whole world is anchored to this country.  All my relatives and especially my descendants are all here.  I want them to be part of the best society on the planet.  And so, I pray there are still enough people with common sense to keep us on the right track and moving into the future.  But from where I’m standing it looks like a fifty-fifty shot.