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David Geier was in the drug business. What was he selling before the FDA stepped in?

The post David Geier, Mail Order Pharmacist first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

While intermittent fasting may be growing in popularity, relatively little is known about how it impacts our gut microbiome – for better or for worse

An AI leaderboard suggests the newest reasoning models used in chatbots are producing less accurate results because of higher hallucination rates. Experts say the problem is bigger than that

Some parts of the Moon are more interesting than others, especially when searching for future places for humans to land and work. There are also some parts of the Moon that we know less about than others, such as the Irregular Mare Patches (IMPs) that dot the landscape. We know very little about how they were formed, and what that might mean for the history of the Moon itself. A new mission, called the LUnar Geology Orbiter (LUGO), aims to collect more data on the IMPs and search for lava tubes that might serve as future homes to humanity.

Extreme weather events are the most dramatic consequence of climate change, but there are many smaller ways it disturbs our daily life

The new Pope Leo XIV can make history by at long last releasing the World War II archives of the Vatican Bank and expose one of the church’s darkest chapters.

The Catholic Church has a new leader—Pope Leo XIV—born in 1955 in Chicago, Robert Francis Prevost is the first American to head the church and serve as sovereign of the Vatican City State. Many Vatican watchers will be looking for early signs that Pope Leo XIV intends to continue the legacy of Pope Francis for reforming Vatican finances and for making the church a more transparent institution.

There is one immediate decision he could make that would set the tone for his papacy. Pope Leo could order the release of the World War II archives of the Vatican Bank, the repository with files that would answer lingering questions of how much the Catholic Church might have profited from wartime investments in Third Reich and Italian Fascist companies and if it acted as a postwar haven for looted Nazi funds. By solving one of last great mysteries about the Holocaust, Pope Leo would embrace long overdue historical transparency that had proved too much for even his reform-minded predecessor.

The Vatican is not only the world’s largest representative body of Christians, but also unique among religions since it is a sovereign state.

What is sealed inside the Vatican Bank archives is more than a curiosity for historians. The Vatican is not only the world’s largest representative body of Christians, but also unique among religions since it is a sovereign state. It declared itself neutral during World War II and after the war claimed it had never invested in Axis powers nor stored Nazi plunder.

In my 2015 history of the finances of the Vatican (God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican), I relied on company archives from German and Italian insurers, Alliance and Generali, to show the Vatican Bank had invested in both firms during the war. The Vatican earned outsized profits when those insurers expropriated the cash values of the life insurance policies of Jews sent to the death camps. After the war, when relatives of those murdered in the Holocaust tried collecting on those life insurance policies, they were turned away since they could not produce death certificates.

When relatives of those murdered in the Holocaust tried collecting on life insurance policies, they were turned away.

How much profit did the Vatican earn from the cancelled life insurance policies of Jews killed at Nazi death camps? The answer is inside the Vatican Bank archives.

Also in the Vatican Bank wartime files is the answer to whether the bank hid more than $200 million in gold stolen from the national bank of Nazi-allied Croatia. According to a 1946 memo from a U.S. Treasury agent, the Vatican had either smuggled the stolen gold to Spain or Argentina through its “pipeline” or used that story as a “smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository [the Vatican].”

Photo by Karsten Winegeart

The Vatican has long resisted international pressure to open those wartime bank files. World Jewish Congress President Edgar Bronfman Sr. had convinced President Bill Clinton in 1996 that it was time for a campaign to recover Nazi-looted Jewish assets. Clinton ordered 11 U.S. agencies to review and release all Holocaust-era files and urged other countries and private organizations with relevant documents to do the same.

The Vatican refused to join 25 nations in collecting documents across Europe to create a comprehensive guide for historians.

The Vatican refused to join 25 nations in collecting documents across Europe to create a comprehensive guide for historians. At a 1997 London conference on looted Nazi gold, the Vatican was the only one of 42 countries that rejected requests for archival access. At a restitution conference in Washington the following year, it ignored Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s emotional plea, and it opted out of an ambitious plan by 44 countries to return Nazi-looted art and property, settle unpaid life insurance claims and reassert the call for public access to Holocaust-era archives.

Subsequent requests for opening the files by President Clinton and Jewish organizations went unanswered. Historians were meanwhile inundated with millions of declassified wartime documents from more than a dozen countries and only a handful of Jewish advocacy groups pressed the issue during the last years of John Paul II’s papacy and the eight years of Benedict XVI.

Pope Francis opened millions of the Church’s documents.

To his credit, in March 2020, Pope Francis opened millions of the church’s documents about its controversial wartime pope, Pius XII. That fulfilled in part a promise Pope Francis had made when he was the cardinal of Buenos Aires: “What you said about opening the archives relating to the Shoah [Holocaust] seems perfect to me. They should open them [the Holocaust files] and clarify everything. The objective has to be the truth.”

Photo by Ashwin Vaswani

And while Pope Francis was responsible for reforming a bank that had often served as an offshore haven for tax evaders and money launderers and frustrated six of his predecessors, he nevertheless kept the Vatican Bank files sealed.

Pope Leo XIV is the Vatican Bank’s sole shareholder. It has only a single branch located in a former Vatican dungeon.

Pope Leo XIV is the Vatican Bank’s sole shareholder. It has only a single branch located in a former Vatican dungeon in the Torrione di Nicoló V (Tower of Nicholas V). The new Pope can order the release of the wartime Vatican Bank archives with the speed and ease with which a U.S. president issues an executive order. It would be a bold move in an institution with a well-deserved reputation for keeping files hidden sometimes for centuries. It took more than 400 years for the Church to release some of its Inquisition files (and at long last exonerate Galileo Galilei), and more than 700 years before it cleared the Knights Templar of a heresy charge and opened the trial records.

Opening the Vatican Bank’s wartime archives would send the unequivocal message that transparency is not merely a talking point, but instead a high priority that the new Pope plans to apply to the finances of the church, both in its history as well as going forward. Such a historic decree will mark his Papacy as having shed some light on one of the church’s darkest chapters. In so doing, Pope Leo will pay tribute to the families of victims of World War II who have been long been demanding transparency and some semblance of justice.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That truism, now known as the "Sagan standard" after science communication Carl Sagan, has been around in some form since David Hume first published it in the 1740s. But, with modern-day data collection, sometimes even extraordinary evidence isn't enough - it's how you interpret it. That's the argument behind a new pre-print paper by Luis Welbanks and their colleagues at Arizona State University and various other American institutions. They analyzed the data behind the recent claims of biosignature detection in the atmosphere of K2-18b and found that other non-biological interpretations could also explain the data.

Most astronomers agree that life is likely common throughout the Universe. While Earth is the only world known to have life, we know that life arose early on our world, and the building blocks of life, including amino acids and sugars, form readily. We also know there are countless worlds in the cosmos that might be home for life. But just because life is likely, that doesn't mean proving it will be easy. Many of the biosignatures we can observe can also have abiotic origins. So how can we be sure? One way is to compare our observations of a habitable world with other worlds in the system.

Researchers have developed a new way to create hydrogels using ultrasound, eliminating the need for toxic chemical initiators. This breakthrough offers a faster, cleaner and more sustainable approach to hydrogel fabrication, and produces hydrogels that are stronger, more flexible and highly resistant to freezing and dehydration. The new method also promises to facilitate advances in tissue engineering, bioadhesives and 3D bioprinting.

Researchers have developed a new technique called 'Skia' to help computer processors better predict future instructions and improve computing performance.

Kepler's Supernova, seen in 1604, is one of the most famous exploding stars ever seen, and now astronomers think it may have been an interloper from another galaxy

Researchers have developed a system, called ProxiCycle, that logs when a passing car comes too close to a cyclist (four feet or less). A small, inexpensive sensor plugs into bicycle handlebars and tracks the passes, sending them to the rider's phone. The team tested the system for two months with 15 cyclists in Seattle and found a significant correlation between the locations of close passes and other indicators of poor safety, such as collisions.

Researchers have developed two unique energy-efficient and cost-effective systems that use urea found in urine and wastewater to generate hydrogen. The unique systems reveal new pathways to economically generate 'green' hydrogen, a sustainable and renewable energy source, and the potential to remediate nitrogenous waste in aquatic environments.

A team partially replaced lithium in a lithium antimonide compound with the metal scandium. This creates specific gaps, so-called vacancies, in the crystal lattice of the conductor material. These gaps help the lithium ions to move more easily and faster, resulting in a new world record for ion conductivity.

Researchers have developed an innovative photodetector capable of detecting a broad range of mid-infrared spectra.

Researchers have developed an innovative photodetector capable of detecting a broad range of mid-infrared spectra.

A research team used the German environmental satellite EnMAP (Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program) to simultaneously detect the two key air pollutants carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in emission plumes from power plants -- with an unprecedented spatial resolution of just 30 meters. The newly developed method allows for tracking of industrial emissions from space with great precision and enables atmospheric processes to be analyzed in detail.

A research team used the German environmental satellite EnMAP (Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program) to simultaneously detect the two key air pollutants carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in emission plumes from power plants -- with an unprecedented spatial resolution of just 30 meters. The newly developed method allows for tracking of industrial emissions from space with great precision and enables atmospheric processes to be analyzed in detail.

Researchers have developed AI technology similar to a fellow songwriter who helps create music.