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Researchers have developed a cheap and rapid test that reveals a person’s full history of viral infections from a single drop of blood.

The test allows doctors to read out a list of the viruses that have infected, or continue to infect, patients even when they have not caused any obvious symptoms. The technology means that GPs could screen patients for all of the viruses capable of infecting people

When a droplet of blood from a patient is mixed with the modified viruses, any antibodies they have latch on to human virus proteins they recognise as invaders. The scientists then pull out the antibodies and identify the human viruses from the protein fragments they have stuck to.

On Monday October 20, 2014, the Regents, as part of their effort to promote new national Common Core standards and mystically prepare students for non-existing 21st century technological careers, voted unanimously that students did not have to pass both United States and Global History exams in order to graduate from high school and maintained that they were actually raising academic standards.

The Global History exam will also be modified so that students will only be tested on events after 1750, essentially eliminating topics like the early development of civilizations, ancient empires, the rise of universal religions, the Columbian Exchange, and trans-Atlantic Slave Trade from the test.

As a result, social studies is no longer taught in the elementary school grades

Thousands of genetic “dimmer” switches, regions of DNA known as regulatory elements, were turned up high during human evolution in the developing cerebral cortex, according to new research from the Yale School of Medicine.

these switches show increased activity in humans, where they may drive the expression of genes in the cerebral cortex, the region of the brain that is involved in conscious thought and language. This difference may explain why the structure and function of that part of the brain is so unique in humans compared to other mammals.

Noonan and his colleagues pinpointed several biological processes potentially guided by these regulatory elements that are crucial to human brain development.

Often, pronouncements about either subject are accompanied by the politician’s mea culpa: “I’m not a scientist, but ... ”

It’s the butthat has caused heartburn among scientists, many of whom say such skepticism has an impact on public policy.

“They’ve been using it as if they can dismiss the view of scientists, which doesn’t make any sense,”

We have clear directives about what is really worth our fear. Participants in the real parade of horrors include radical changes in the carbon cycle, the rate of species extinction, extreme weather, genetically modified food, institutional financial misconduct that puts our security at risk. The archive of very real menaces threatening us now is so full, it would seem we hardly know how to choose what to be scared of.

Except that we do choose, and what we choose are generally the ordinary fears such as heights, public speaking, insects, reptiles. They are all things that have about as much chance of harming us as the characters behind some of this season’s top trending scary costumes: zombies, werewolves and cast members from “Duck Dynasty.”

while we fear snakes, spiders, darkness, open spaces and closed spaces, we do not fear the more likely instruments of danger — knives, guns, cars, electrical sockets — because, he says, “our species has not been exposed to these lethal agents long enough in evolutionary time to have acquired the predisposing genes that ensure automatic avoidance.” Which is to say, fear, real fear, deep fear, the kind that changes our habits and actions, is not something on which we are likely to follow sensible instruction.

If you go back to the intellectuals of the 1950s, you get the impression that they thought individuals could very much determine their own beliefs.

Busy fighting communism and fascism, people back then emphasized individual reason and were deeply allergic to groupthink.

We don’t think this way anymore, and in fact thinking this way can get you into trouble. I guess the first step was the rise of perspectivism

a high-fiber diet came with a 40-percent lower than average risk of heart disease. Fiber also seems to protect against metabolic syndrome.

One of the mechanisms behind these benefits appears to be that fiber essentially feeds the microbes in our guts, encouraging diverse populations. Those microbes are implicated in a vast array of illnesses and wellbeing. A diet heavy on meat and dairy is necessarily lower on fiber.

The basic idea behind Paleo is that humans evolved under certain circumstances over millennia, and then those circumstances changed tremendously in the last century, and our bodies did not keep pace. We find ourselves sedentary and overfed on amalgamations that distort our body’s expectations of “food.”

Chronic social isolation has debilitating effects on mental health in mammals -- for example, it is often associated with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in humans. Now, a team of Caltech researchers has discovered that social isolation causes the build-up of a particular chemical in the brain, and that blocking this chemical eliminates the negative effects of isolation. The work has potential applications for treating mental health disorders in humans.

For example, when encountering a threatening stimulus, mice that have been socially isolated remain frozen in place long after the threat has passed, whereas normal mice stop freezing soon after the threat is removed. These effects are seen when mice are subjected to two weeks of social isolation, but not to short-term social isolation -- 24 hours -- suggesting that the observed changes in aggression and fear responses require chronic isolation.

The researchers found that chronic isolation leads to an increase in Tac2 gene expression and the production of NkB throughout the brain. However, administration of a drug that chemically blocks NkB-specific receptors enabled the stressed mice to behave normally, eliminating the negative effects of social isolation. Conversely, artificially increasing Tac2 levels and activating the corresponding neurons in normal, unstressed animals led them to behave like the stressed, isolated animals.

hose with hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms are known to have elevated dopamine, the main area of focus for available treatments for psychosis, but it was unclear how this could lead to hallucinations. The researchers found that elevated dopamine could make some patients rely more on expectations, which could then result in hallucinations.

Those with hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms are known to have elevated dopamine, the main area of focus for available treatments for psychosis, but it was unclear how this could lead to hallucinations. The researchers found that elevated dopamine could make some patients rely more on expectations, which could then result in hallucinations.

This tendency to inflexibly hear what was expected was worsened after giving a dopamine-releasing drug, and more pronounced in participants with elevated dopamine release, and more apparent in participants with a smaller dorsal anterior cingulate (a brain region previously shown to track reliability of environmental cues).

Given that human cognition is never the product of pure dispassionate reason, but a subjective interpretation of the facts based on our feelings and biases and instincts, when can we ever say that we know who is right and who is wrong, about anything? When can we declare a fact so established that it’s fair to say, without being called arrogant, that those who deny this truth don’t just disagree…that they’re just plain wrong.

This isn’t about matters of faith, or questions of ultimately unknowable things which by definition can not be established by fact. This is a question about what is knowable, and provable by careful objective scientific inquiry, a process which includes challenging skepticism rigorously applied precisely to establish what, beyond any reasonable doubt, is in fact true.

With enough careful investigation and scrupulously challenged evidence, we can establish knowable truths that are not just the product of our subjective motivated reasoning.

Why ask “Why trust science?” When many people worry about the safety of genetically modified food, parents resist the advice of pediatricians to vaccinate their children against common childhood diseases, religious people still say they take the earth to be fewer than 10,000 years old, and the president of the United States declares climate change to be a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, public trust in scientific research would seem to be in dire straits. The time is ripe for reassurance. Even to pose the question indicates that something has gone wrong.

We need to know why to trust science, then, in part because we need to know why to believe the scientific consensus on climate change, and Naomi Oreskes is the obvious person to provide the answer. Her new book takes up the question explicitly; it grows out of her Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Princeton in late 2016, and includes commentaries by a historian, a philosopher, and three social scientists.

Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.

By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.

Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.

But human memory is inherently flawed, and eyewitness misidentification plays a role in two-thirds of convictions overturned through DNA testing nationwide.

Although most of us trust our recollections, cognitive scientists like Elizabeth Loftus have shown that suggestions and post-event information can modify memories

Eyewitness testimony is particularly powerful precisely because the emotion fueling it is often completely genuine. The person delivering the testimony may believe in its fidelity regardless of its accuracy. But as Ms. Beerntsen’s case reminds us, it’s devastatingly easy for a witness to misidentify, so we need safeguards to ensure that those convicted are genuinely deserving.

Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220

It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.

Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.

Scientists and journalists live for facts. Our methods may be very different, but we share a deep belief that by questioning, observing and verifying, we can gain a truer sense of how the world works.

So when people question the scientific consensus on issues such as climate change, vaccine effectiveness or the safety of genetically modified organisms (SN: 2/6/16, p. 22), it’s no surprise that one of the first inclinations of journalists and scientists has been to think, hey, these doubters just don’t know the facts.

Ethicists and physicians are concerned that, amid a desire to put an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, developers of drugs and vaccines have become overly enthusiastic about the chances their products will work.

Oxford has recently walked back some of its optimism, but for months, it set a tone that its vaccine was the most promising, without any solid evidence that this was based in fact.

Third, one leader in the Oxford team has gone so far as to denigrate other teams trying to get a Covid vaccine on the market, calling their technology "weird" and labeling it as merely "noise." Such name-calling is highly unusual and aggressive among scientists.

If, as expected in the next few weeks, regulators give those vaccines the green light, the technology and the precision approach to vaccine design could turn out to be the pandemic’s silver linings: scientific breakthroughs that could begin to change the trajectory of the virus this winter and also pave the way for highly effective vaccines and treatments for other diseases.

Vaccine development typically takes years, even decades. The progress of the last 11 months shifts the paradigm for what’s possible, creating a new model for vaccine development and a toolset for a world that will have to fight more never-before-seen viruses in years to come.

Long before the pandemic, Graham worked with colleagues there and in academia to create a particularly accurate 3-D version of the spiky proteins that protrude from the surface of coronaviruses — an innovation that was rejected for publication by scientific journals five times because reviewers questioned its relevance.

an unusually large number of books about rationality were being published this year, among them Steven Pinker’s “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” (Viking) and Julia Galef’s “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t” (Portfolio).

When the world changes quickly, we need strategies for understanding it. We hope, reasonably, that rational people will be more careful, honest, truthful, fair-minded, curious, and right than irrational ones.

And yet rationality has sharp edges that make it hard to put at the center of one’s life

there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs.

they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention

An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.