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A team developed a nanoparticle technology that offers an effective solution to diagnose and treat atherosclerosis, in a non-invasive manner. Atherosclerosis is the build-up of plaque in the arteries which causes their narrowing and is a primary cause of ischemic heart disease (IHD) and ischemic stroke (IS), major contributors to deaths caused by cardiovascular diseases globally. This theranostic approach represents a significant advancement in the field of cardiovascular medicine as it offers a promising alternative to current medical practices for the management of atherosclerosis.

A team developed a human iPS cell-derived kidney organoid-based proximal tubule-on-chip -- OPTECs-on-Chip -- that mimics in vivo renal physiology more closely than ever before. This model exhibits enhanced expression and polarity of essential renal transporters, making it a powerful tool for assessing drug transport and nephrotoxicity.

Researchers want to transform the natural and abundant resource wood into useful materials, and central to that is a molecular machine found in fungi that decomposes the complex raw material into its basic components. Researchers have come up with a test feed for the fungal molecular machine that allows them to observe its close-to-natural action, opening the door to improving it and to putting it to industrial application.

A group synthesized multilayer perovskites with four and five layers, which were difficult to synthesize in the past. Analyzing the materials revealed a unique function in which they switch their ferroelectricity expression mechanism depending on whether the number of layers is odd or even. This property expands the uses of the material in the development of new electronic devices.

A survey reveals that a significant proportion of UK general practitioners (GPs) are integrating generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, into their clinical workflows. The results highlight the rapidly growing role of artificial intelligence in healthcare -- a development that has the potential to revolutionize patient care but also raises significant ethical and safety concerns.

Scientists have shown that a type of qubit whose architecture is more amenable to mass production can perform comparably to qubits currently dominating the field. With a series of mathematical analyses, the scientists have provided a roadmap for simpler qubit fabrication that enables robust and reliable manufacturing of these quantum computer building blocks.

Scientists have shown that a type of qubit whose architecture is more amenable to mass production can perform comparably to qubits currently dominating the field. With a series of mathematical analyses, the scientists have provided a roadmap for simpler qubit fabrication that enables robust and reliable manufacturing of these quantum computer building blocks.

A new study has successfully used porous liquids to achieve liquid-liquid separation for the first time, creating exciting potential for advancing both environmental sustainability and public health.

Chemists present two studies that open up new possibilities for biotechnological applications.

Well, the Free Press article by Ashley Rindsborg below argues that yes, Wikipedia definitely leans towards the Left, favoring Left-wing over Right-wing sources as more reliable, and giving more favorable coverage to Democrats than Republicans (see the figures in the article). Click to read:

You’ve probably noticed some bias in some articles, and it gets worse if you go to the “talk” page on Wikipedia articles and see the editors fight out the contents of a given article.  The debates and biases mentioned in the Free Piece press piece involve whether Kamala Harris was really the “border czar”, whether the Hunter Biden laptop issue was a Russian fabrication, whether the idea that Covid might have resulted from a Wuhan lab leak was a “conspiracy theory”, and, as you see below, the material on Zionism.

I won’t go into those controversies, as you can read the article yourself, but I do want to highlight several assertions in the piece. The crux of the matter is that what goes into Wikipedia depends on whether there are not only sources for assertions, but reliable sources. It turns out that the list of “reliable” sources seems biased and, to my mind, dubious, and the policy on what’s reliable was in fact confected by a single man, the anonymous “MrX”. An excerpt:

Wikipedia articles present their subject matter with a casually authoritative, almost stolid tone. But beneath the surface lies endless argumentation played out in rounds of procedural maneuvering that would shame the most deft legislative hand. User bans, discretionary sanctions, requests for comment, arbitration cases, topic bans, page bans, deprecated sources—all encoded in a shorthand jargon—lie behind the “consensus” displayed in an article’s seemingly ripple-free surface. In a way, this arcana of behind-the-scenes conceptual machinery is Wikipedia’s most impressive feature. It’s what keeps it from grinding to a halt on infighting and intransigence.

The problem is—like with the Harris border czar reference, which is still omitted from the czar article (and will almost certainly stay that way)—the consensus it achieves often lines up with the prerogatives of the Democratic Party and the media establishment that supports it.

One of the reasons for this cuts to the very heart of how Wikipedia works. The encyclopedia is governed by a raft of policies like Wikipedia:Notability (subjects of articles should meet a threshold of notability), Wikipedia:Recentism (overdue emphasis must not be placed on recent events), and Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View (self-explanatory). None, however, play even close to the outsize role that Wikipedia:Verifiability plays, with its insistence that claims “must be attributable to reliable, published sources.” The obvious question this standard raises is which sources are considered reliable. While some Wikipedia policies invite ambiguity, on this the site is clear. The Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources page filters media sources into categories of “Generally reliable,” coded in a green-filled cell on the page’s table, yellow for those on which there is “No consensus,” and red for “Generally unreliable.”

The breakdown of sites filtered into each respective category is telling. The cadre of news outlets that collectively make up the mainstream media—ABC, CBS, and NBC News, Associated Press, Vanity Fair, Vogue, The Atlantic, Axios, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Wired, CNN, AFP—are classified green for reliable. Strongly left-leaning outlets like Vox, Mother Jones, The Guardian, HuffPost, and The Intercept are as well. But so are outright leftist or socialist outlets, including Jacobin, The Nation, and The Independent, as is civil rights advocacy NGO Southern Poverty Law Center.

Conservative outlets like Fox News (on politics and science), The Federalist, The Post Millennial, and The Washington Free Beacon are red for generally unreliable. A lower ring of “deprecated sources,” whose use is outright prohibited, includes the Daily Mail, The Daily Caller, The Sun, NewsMax, and The Epoch Times. The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal (the latter of whose news pages are known for tilting more leftward than its right-of-center opinion page) are the only American conservative outlets with a green rating. Right-leaning tabloid New York Post is red; left-leaning tabloid New York Daily News is green.

While conservative American media is almost uniformly red, the same cannot be said of foreign outlets with dubious agendas. State-owned networks China Daily and Xinhua—whose purpose is to spread Chinese government propaganda to the English-speaking world—get a yellow for “no consensus.” Al Jazeera, owned by Qatar, an authoritarian state, is blessed with a green reliability rating.

The Post is red and the Daily News is green? And, seriously, the Southern Poverty Law Center is green?–the center that was sued by Maajid Nawaz for classifying him as an anti-Muslim extremist (he’s a Muslim, for crying out loud!), and had to fork over $3 million to Nawaz for defamation. The SPLC is well known as unreliable, but it’s still green. You can judge the list above. The NYT, for example, is certainly biased towards the progressive Left in both its news and op-ed sections.

One more thing before I move on. Who made the decisions about sources? Yep, one anonymous guy:

Given all this, you might think Reliable sources/Perennial sources is a foundational aspect of the site, ratified early on by some vote or community procedure. But you’d be wrong. While the policy of using reliable sources originated in 2005, the Reliable sources/Perennial sources list was created as recently as 2018. Its originator was neither a panel nor a commission of Wikipedia editors. The list was never formally adopted by the community. Rather, it was the creation of a single influential editor who, until his departure from the site in 2020, went by the handle MrX.

MrX created the list during the heady days of Trump-related political controversies when Wikipedia’s Talk pages were marked by as much tumult as the political discourse in the broader culture. His first iteration of the list included only a single source green-coded as generally reliable: The New York Times. The Daily Mail was, already from the list’s inception, classed as red. At the same time, MrX—who, by the time he left the site, was in the top 99.998 percentile of users by number of edits—was engaging in fraught debates on the site, sometimes devolving into what’s known as edit wars, on topics of extreme political sensitivity. He was highly influential in the editing of the article on Donald Trump, which (perhaps unsurprisingly) remains the first result on a Google search for Trump’s name. Between 2015 and 2020, MrX made nearly 600 edits to the Donald Trump article alone, not including edits to Trump-related articles.

I believe Greg Mayer also has his own issues with Wikipedia, but I’ll let him weigh in below, either on this post or in the comments.

At any rate, this article from United With Israel (click below) reports similar distortions of the term “Zionism”:

 

An excerpt from the article above. You can of course check the changes on the “Talk” page for “Zionism.”

A heated debate has erupted on social media over recent changes made to the Wikipedia entry for Zionism, sparking accusations of historical revisionism.

Users on social media have over the past several 24 hours posted a comparison between the 2023 and 2024 versions of the Wikipedia page, with one user, Liv Lovisa, claiming that “history is being rewritten.”

Blake Flayton, a vocal commentator on Jewish and Israeli issues, responded to the post, calling the changes “egregious” and urging someone with expertise to edit the page to reflect what he considers to be a more accurate portrayal.

At the center of the debate are key changes in the language used to describe Zionism, the movement that called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in what is now Israel.

The 2023 version of the page framed Zionism as a nationalist movement born in the 19th century that sought to secure Jewish self-determination. In contrast, the 2024 version of the entry introduces more charged terminology, describing Zionism as an “ethno-cultural nationalist” movement that engaged in “colonization of a land outside of Europe,” with a heightened focus on the resulting conflicts with Palestinian Arabs.

“Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible,” it reads.

. . . . Critics, including Flayton, argue that the new language in the Zionism entry distorts the historical narrative, positioning Zionism in a more negative light by drawing parallels to colonialism and downplaying the movement’s core goal of creating a safe homeland for Jewish people.

The use of the term “colonization,” in particular, has been a flashpoint, as it evokes a political context that some feel misrepresents the motivations behind the establishment of Israel and overlooks the historical persecution faced by Jews that led to the Zionist movement.

Another Twitter pro-Israel voice, Hen Mazzig, wrote: “The new Wikipedia entry on Zionism isn’t just inaccurate, it’s downright antisemitic. It asserts that the origin of Ashkenazi Jews is ‘highly debated and enigmatic,’ echoing Khazar theory, the dangerous lie that Ashkenazi Jews are converts and not descendants of the Jews exiled from the Land of Israel.”

Call me a biased Jew, but to me Zionism is simply the 2023 definition: the view that there should be a Jewish state to serve as a refuge for those subject to the Holocaust, pogroms, or bigotry. But as the war proceeds, the idea that Zionism (which of course created the UN-approved state of Israel) is a nefarious plot has strengthened. This goes along with the current tendency to call Jews “Zionists” (yes, most of them are), but to also say, falsely, that anti-Zionism is NOT anti-Semitism.

To counteract that last trope, here’s Natasha Hausdorff in the Munk debate debating and defending the view that anti-Zionism is indeed anti-Semitism; see especially the bit starting at 3:10, making an analogy which is sheer genius. Hausdorff and her debate partner, Douglas Murray, won that debate. (By the way, i think that Hausdorff, a British barrister who an expert in international law and an officer in the UK Lawyers for Israael, deserves her own Wikipedia page!).

If you have comments on biases or the lack thereof in Wikipedia, please put them in the comments section.

Spanning 23 million light years, or 220 Milky Way galaxies, a set of giant, newly discovered black hole jets known as Porphyrion may change our understanding of black holes and the structure of the universe

Experiments in a state-of-the-art wave tank suggest we have underestimated the potential size and power of rogue waves and the risk they pose to offshore infrastructure

Simple words like "force" and "particle" can mislead us as to what reality is actually like. Physicist Matt Strassler unpacks how to see things more clearly

An artificial intelligence model that can identify the calls of eight whale species is helping researchers track the elusive whale behind a perplexing sound in the Pacific

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “laugh 2” is a resurrection, so to speak, from 2009. The artist is apparently still on holiday, but I doubt you’ve seen this one.  I wonder if religious bookstores have “humor” sections.  I know there are funny books about Jews, like books about Jewish jokes and, of course, Leo Rosten’s incomparable The Joys of Yiddish. (The latter book was given to me by my advisor when I graduated from college, along with Crow and Kimura’s Theoretical Population Genetics; I was told that these two books were all I needed to equip me for a career in population genetics. The field is, of course, heavily Jewish.)  But I digress.  Here the barmaid is laughing:

The New Zealand radio station “The Platform” had me on yesterday for a 25-minute segment on the country’s attempt to teach Mātauranga Māori (Māori “ways of knowing”) as coequal with modern science.  The host, Michael Laws, did a pretty good job, though he thought I was in New York,. Click on the screenshot below to listen to my thoughts and Laws’s questions. As usual, I can’t stand to hear my voice, which seems unduly nasal, and the sound quality on my end isn’t so great because I was at home using my landline (first time in years). Finally, my cellphone rang at the beginning of the interview because I forgot to turn it off.

That said, as I recall I said what I needed to say, and I thought the bit at the end about racism was appropriate.

As you might guess “The Platform” is a bit heterodox and goes against the local Zeitgeist, so you could think of it as New Zealand’s radio equivalent of “The Free Press”. I may have been preaching to the choir, but right now that’s the only way you can even be heard in New Zealand.

Click to listen (there may be a slight delay after you click before you get to the site):

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most commonly diagnosed neurodevelopment disorders and seems to be on the rise, in both children and adults. The diagnosis in children requires having various symptoms of attention deficit or hyperactivity which is functionally impairing with onset by age 12. Recognition of the disorder actually goes back farther than you might think – the observation that […]

The post Why Is ADHD On The Rise first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The second-closest planet to the sun is more geologically active than we thought and could have more than 17,000 venusquakes a year

Located in the constellation Ursa Major, roughly 300 light-years from Earth, is the Sun-like star HD 118203 (Liesma). In 2006, astronomers detected an exoplanet (HD 118203 b) similar in size and twice as massive as Jupiter that orbits very closely to Liesma (7% of the distance between Earth and the Sun), making it a “Hot Jupiter.” In a recent study, an international team of astronomers announced the detection of a second exoplanet in this system: a Super Jupiter with a wide orbit around its star. In short, they discovered a “Cold Super-Jupiter” in the outskirts of this system.

Gracjan Maciejewski – an Associate Professor with the Institute of Astronomy at Nicolaus Copernicus University (NCU) in Torun, Poland – led the study, which recently appeared in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. He was joined by researchers from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Pennsylvania State University (PSU), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, the Agencia Espacial Española (AEE), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC), and the Center for Astrophysical Surveys at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

According to their study, the planet (HD 118203 c) is up to eleven times the mass of Jupiter and orbits its parent star at a distance of 6 AU (six times the distance between Earth and the Sun) with a period of 14 years. Astronomers discovered the parent star in 1891 using the Draper telescope, now located in the NCU Institute of Astronomy in Piwnice, near Torun. Liesma is a G-type yellow dwarf (like our Sun), but 20% more massive and twice as large. Astronomers estimate that the star and its entire planetary system are slightly older than the Sun (an estimated 5 billion years).

Henry Draper’s Astrograph (1891), donated by Harvard College Observatory in 1947. Credit: Andrzej Romanski

While astronomers have known that a fairly massive planet orbits HD 118203 for nearly twenty years, it was only in 2006 that it was confirmed using Radial Velocity (Doppler Spectroscopy) measurements. However, these measurements indicated a linear trend that indicated there may be a companion planet with a wider orbit. The presence of another planet would indicate that the system has a hierarchical orbital architecture, which could help astronomers learn more about the origins of hot Jupiters. As Prof. Andrzej Niedzielski, a co-author of the study, explained in an NCU news story:

“Doppler observations, however, indicated that this was not the end of the story, that there might be another planet out there. Therefore, we immediately included this system in our observational programs. At first, as part of the Torun-Pennsylvania exoplanet research program, conducted in collaboration with Professor Aleksander Wolszczan, we tracked the object with one of the largest optical instruments on Earth, the nine-metre Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas.”

The results were so promising that the international team continued observing the star using the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory. But first, it was necessary to rule out the possibility that more planets were hiding in the system. “I analyzed photometric observations obtained with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite space telescope, showing that there were no other planets around HD 118203 larger than twice the size of Earth, and therefore not massive enough to be relevant for studying the dynamics of the system,” said Julia Sierzputowska – an astronomy student and co-author of the study.

By 2023, the team obtained solid data of a Super Jupiter with a wide orbit, demonstrating that HD 118203 was a hierarchical planetary system. Said Prof. Maciejewski:

“Patience pays off. The new observations collected in March 2023 proved crucial in determining the planet’s orbital parameters. Moreover, because it takes a planet several years to orbit its star, we were able to combine our Doppler observations with available astrometric measurements to unambiguously determine its mass. This allowed us to build a complete model of this planetary system and study its dynamical behaviour.”

Astronomers from the NCU have discovered a new planet in the constellation Ursa Major. Credit: Andrzej Romanski

The configuration is peculiar, where one planet orbits closely with its star (forming a pair) while a second orbits them wide enough to form another pair with the first one. While both planets are massive and have rather elongated orbits, their mutual gravitational influence does not destabilize the system over the course of eons. According to their study, this is due to the effects of General Relativity, which prevents the planets from constantly changing the shape of their orbits and orientation in space.

This makes HD 118203 one of only a handful of hierarchical systems known to astronomers, which will help address theories of how massive planets form. This will, in turn, allow astronomers to learn more about the formation and evolution of the gas giants in our Solar System – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The international team also plans to keep gathering data on this system in the hopes of finding additional exoplanets.

Further Reading: NCU News, Astronomy & Astrophysics

The post Astronomers Have Found a Star with a Hot Jupiter and a Cold Super Jupiter in Orbit appeared first on Universe Today.

Some lizards dive into streams to escape predators, and a specialised bubble-breathing technique enables them to stay submerged for up to 18 minutes