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Jul 1, 2021

How Pesticide Companies Corrupted the EPA and Poisoned America

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, food, health, law

“I realized that in the middle-dose group, which is the one that mattered for the no-effects level, they had conveniently left out one of the two baseline measurement days,” said Sheppard. “The outrageous thing was that the group they declared as NOEL was only that because they left out data from their analysis.” In a peer-reviewed paper published in October 2020, Sheppard and her colleagues concluded that “the omission of valid data without justification was a form of data falsification.”


In any case, bifenthrin was not the only pesticide that dodged testing to see if it presented dangers. The EPA’s pesticide office granted 972 industry requests to waive toxicity tests between December 2011 and May 2018, 89 percent of all requests made. Among the tests on pesticides that were never performed were 90 percent of tests looking for developmental neurotoxicity, 92 percent of chronic cancer studies, and 97 percent of studies looking at how pesticides harm the immune system.

By law, the companies that submit their products for review pay for these tests, and in a presentation about the waivers last year, Anna Lowit, a senior science adviser in the office, emphasized the savings to these companies: more than $300 million. Lowit also noted that animal lives were saved — a goal that the Trump administration and the chemical industry prioritized within the agency. The EPA developed the guidelines for waiving the tests along with BASF, Corteva, and Syngenta, pesticide manufacturers that all stand to benefit significantly from having their products bypass toxicity testing.

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Jul 1, 2021

Moon-sized “zombie” star challenges what we know about celestial evolution

Posted by in categories: evolution, space

The star is only a little bit larger than Earth’s Moon, but more massive than the Sun and might be a Frankenstein zombie star.


Astronomers discovered the smallest and most massive white dwarf star, about the same size as Earth’s Moon with a mass greater than the Sun.

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Jul 1, 2021

Volvo to use fossil-free steel in cars by 2026

Posted by in category: futurism

Swedish companies Volvo and SSAB have announced a collaboration to jointly explore the development of fossil-free, high quality steel for use in the automotive industry.

Jul 1, 2021

Math Has a Fatal Flaw

Posted by in categories: computing, mathematics, quantum physics

Not everything that is true can be proven. This discovery transformed infinity, changed the course of a world war and led to the modern computer. This video is sponsored by Brilliant. The first 200 people to sign up via https://brilliant.org/veritasium get 20% off a yearly subscription.

Special thanks to Prof. Asaf Karagila for consultation on set theory and specific rewrites, to Prof. Alex Kontorovich for reviews of earlier drafts, Prof. Toby ‘Qubit’ Cubitt for the help with the spectral gap, to Henry Reich for the helpful feedback and comments on the video.

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Jul 1, 2021

Gene Therapy Basics

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Not just the results, but the vector used. I’ll post the paper below.


In this video we cover an experiment where gene therapies to overexpress TERT and Follistatin were used in a mouse model. The mice saw a 41 and 32% increase in median life span. The study also used a novel viral vector, cytomegalovirus for the delivery. Please note that this a preprint which is not peer-reviewed yet.

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Jul 1, 2021

Throwing an “Axion Bomb” Into a Black Hole Could Break a Fundamental Law of Physics

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

New research shows how the fundamental law of conservation of charge could break down near a black hole.

Singularities, such as those at the centre of black holes, where density becomes infinite, are often said to be places where physics ‘breaks down’. However, this doesn’t mean that ‘anything’ could happen, and physicists are interested in which laws could break down, and how.

Now, a research team from Imperial College London, the Cockcroft Institute and Lancaster University have proposed a way that singularities could violate the law of conservation of charge. Their theory is published in Annalen der Physik.

Jul 1, 2021

Blue Origin will fly female aviator Wally Funk, one of the Mercury 13, on 1st crewed launch

Posted by in categories: government, space travel

Wally Funk was one of 13 female aviators who lobbied for women to become astronauts in the early days of spaceflight.


Aviator Wally Funk wanted to be an astronaut in the earliest days of spaceflight. Sixty years later, on July 20, she’ll finally go to space with Blue Origin.

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Jul 1, 2021

UAE’s Hope Mars orbiter spots elusive aurora on Red Planet

Posted by in category: space

The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Hope Mars mission made its first major finding just a couple months after arriving at the Red Planet when it snagged unprecedented observations of a tricky aurora.

Jul 1, 2021

Antiaging Gene Therapies Extend Lifespan of Mice

Posted by in category: life extension

Antiaging gene therapies to overexpress TERT and Follistatin were used in a mouse model. The mice saw a 41 and 32% increase in median life span. The study also used a novel viral vector, cytomegalovirus for the delivery.

Liz Parish of Bioviva has treated herself with all of these antiaging gene therapies.

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Jul 1, 2021

New five-metal alloy makes for 2D catalyst to convert CO2 into fuels

Posted by in categories: chemistry, particle physics, sustainability

Researchers have created an unusual new alloy made up of not two, but five different metals, and put it to work as a catalyst. The new material is two-dimensional, and was able to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide effectively, potentially helping to turn the greenhouse gas into fuels.

The new alloy belongs to a class of materials called transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), which are, as the name suggests, made up of combinations of transition metals and chalcogens. Extremely thin films of TMDCs have recently shown promise in a range of electronic and optical devices, but researchers on the new study wondered if they could also be used as catalysts for chemical reactions.

The thinking goes that because reactions occur on the surface of a catalyst, materials with high surface areas will be more effective catalysts. And as sheets only a few atoms thick, TMDCs are almost nothing but surface area.