Category Archives: science news

March 15, 2019

Coming Soon (Maybe): The Human Jellyfish?

By leeduigon

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Hi! I’m your pet jellyfish, and you can call me Farfel!

You think it’s easy, writing headlines? Imagine having to write a headline for this.

“In 2016, a Japanese scientist reported that three months after the death of his pet jellyfish, a sea anemone-like polyp rose out of the degraded body, and then astonishly aged backwards, reverting to a younger state” (https://sg.news.yahoo.com/harvard-university-uncovers-dna-switch-180000109.html).

We’d love to check this story, but there are so many unanswered questions. What was this scientist’s name? Where did he report his findings? How does anybody wind up with a pet jellyfish? I mean, I’m sure they’re nice and all that, but I never heard of anyone keeping a jellyfish for a pet. What would you name it? Oh–and what was this guy doing, hanging on to the “degraded body” of a jellyfish for three months?

But wait, there’s more!

Scientists at Harvard have discovered a “DNA switch that controls genes for whole-body regeneration,” suggesting it might someday lead to people being able to re-grow lost arms or legs. Uh-uh. They have discovered this gene in worms. Worms are great at growing stuff back. It can also be found in human beings, but we’re not so great at growing stuff back. Not so much as a finger.

Even so, regeneration is the great humanist hope of immortality–that, or loading your mind into a robot. Once they work out the details, George Soros and Nancy Pelosi can stick around and screw up our country for another 700 years. No corrupt rich person will ever have to die!

I think Robert Silverberg wrote a science fiction novel about that, back in the 1950s, but I’m running too late to look it up.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in science news

March 14, 2019

‘Humanist Doomsday Myth Scares Children’ (2009)

By leeduigon

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See? They’ve been doing it for years–scaring children (and adults) with their global warming gloom and doom. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t invent it.

In 2009 a poll found “one in three children” aged six to eleven “fear the demise of the planet.” I interviewed the head honcho of “Habitat Heroes,” who tried very hard to distance himself from the scare merchants. Judge for yourselves whether he succeeded.

https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/humanist-doomsday-myth-scares-children

What we have with the Climate Change scam is a humanist, no-God-involved, End Times scenario. And if there’s any God in it at all, it’s a weak, pitiful God who can only wring His hands as we destroy His creation by driving cars, having air conditioners, and using toilet paper.

It’s ten years later and they’re still at it. Shame on us for allowing them to scare us with it.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Interviews, science news

March 14, 2019

Climate Cult: ‘This is How We Stopped Climate Change’

By leeduigon

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Honest, you’ll like it! (Or else)

Paid for by the defenseless American taxpayer, National Public Radio recently featured “It’s 2050, and This Is How We Stopped Climate Change” (https://knpr.org/npr/2019-03/its-2050-and-how-we-stopped-climate-change). Yowsah, yowsah, “A world without climate change!”

Where do you even begin, with such fat-headed hubris? A world without climate change? Hey, aren’t you guys the ones who are always clubbing us over the head with “settled science”? Do any of you have a Geology 101 textbook? Aren’t you supposed to be able to look at the rocks and tell what happened in the past? I mean, how did all those seashells wind up on the tops of mountains? What are all those whale fossils doing in the middle of the Sahara Desert? Think there might have been some climate change involved there? Don’t you bother to learn your own “science”?

So where the devil was this “world without climate change”? Oh–what’s that? It couldn’t happen until you guys came along, to make it happen? Hubris, man. That’s hubris.

Anyway, here’s how they’re gonna “stop climate change” by 2050, creating a paradise on earth.

*Solar and wind power will replace any and all other methods of generating electricity, giving us a “zero-carbon world.” See, we gotta have zero greenhouse gases by 2050, or we’re all gonna die. Or something.

*”Urbanization of everything”! Oh, peachy. No more suburbs allowed, no more cars, no more private homes, shove five families into every house–a la the Soviet Union, circa 1930. All housing will be multifamily housing, you’ll walk to work and like it, and no one, but no one, will ever be stressed out by being forced to live without space, without privacy.

Wait a minute–hasn’t that book already been written? Sure it has: The Hunger Games. They want us to live like we’re in The Hunger Games.

*Cut way back on the consumption of beef, replacing it with lots and lots of artificial food brewed up in the labs (“Soylent Green is people”) and it will taste real good, you won’t want White Castles anymore.

What do you want to bet our noble and glorious leaders, and their pet savants of Science, will continue to enjoy lavish mansions, private jets, limousines, and all the beef they can stuff into their mouths with both hands?

Boy, if we actually let them do this stuff to us–! Well, then we’d deserve it, wouldn’t we?

 

 

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Pop Culture, science news

March 14, 2019

‘Scientists Say the Darnedest Things! (A Job for Dead Astronauts)’ (2016)

By leeduigon

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“Mission Control, we have a problem.”

Hey! Maybe we can get life started on other planets by dumping out dead astronauts there!

https://leeduigon.com/2016/10/28/scientists-say-the-darnedest-things-a-job-for-dead-astronauts/

See, the dead astronaut, besides being instantly transformed into a reliable Democrat voter, will have a body full of microbes; and when they find themselves on a lifeless planet orbiting another star, why, they’ll just naturally start evolving! Maybe by the time we’ve figured out how to get a spaceship there without the astronauts dying on the way, they’ll have evolved their own Soupy Sales.

Uh, dude! Didn’t you say Evolution, like, takes millions and billions of years for a microbe to Evolve into, say, one of those fish-things? Like, who wants to wait that long to see if your experiment works?

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in science news

March 11, 2019

Shock Poll! Men Competing as, ahem, Woman are Cheating

By leeduigon

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“I’m from the National Health Service, and I’m here to help you!”

Wow. Two-third of Britons, in a new poll, think “trans women”–uh, men, actually–who compete in women’s sports have “an unfair advantage,” and are “cheating” (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6793607/Almost-two-thirds-Britons-believe-trans-women-unfair-advantage-sport.html).

This was said first by famous lesbian tennis star Martina Navratilova, and the poll found that two out of three agree with her and only 12% think it’s okay for men to compete in women’s sports. This got the trannies in an uproar, so Navratilova went into grovel mode, explaining that she wasn’t talkin’ about all “trans men,” just the ones who “cynically changed gender” so they could do well in women’s sports. Mon, that’s an awful lot of cynicism.

This comes on the heels of Britain’s National Health Service deciding that “trans women”–that is, men–who have not yet been surgically mutilated into sham “women” are to be cared for in women’s wards in the hospitals. So if you’re a real woman and you need a hospital bed, and they turn you away because some guy got the last bed–well, that’s tough.

If the UK medical establishment honestly believes these men are honest-to-pete “women,” then they’re crazy. If they know the men are not women but go along with it anyway, then they have no integrity and shouldn’t be trusted to practice their version of medicine on anyone.

You’ve heard of “settled science.” Well, this is settled pseudo-science.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Pop Culture, science news

March 6, 2019

‘Elixir of Life’ Found… in Tomb

By leeduigon

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Some things never change

So we read this headline the other night, “‘Elixir of Life’ Found in Ancient Chinese Tomb,” and both exclaimed at the same time, “What’s it doing in a tomb?” Like, what’s wrong with this picture? (https://bgr.com/2019/03/05/immortality-elixir-china-archaeology-tomb/)

The search for an elixir that would prolong life indefinitely was once a big thing in Chinese culture, especially among the elite. Emperors wanted to live forever, but had no religion to sustain that hope; so they went to great lengths trying to find a worldly solution to the problem of mortality. This solution, for instance, contained a mixture of potassium nitrate (used in many fertilizers) and aluminum potassium sulfate. It would not be nice to drink and could possibly kill you. Back to the drawing board on that one.

The tomb dated from 202 B.C., and archeologists were surprised to discover a bronze vessel that still had liquid in it after some 2,200 years. Why didn’t it dry up?

Today we turn on the radio and hear ads for elixirs that grow hair on bald heads. The elixir industry has always been with us. The fact that none of them ever seem to work doesn’t kill the market.

But c’mon–immortality juice in a tomb? Not a good advertisement!

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in news, science news

March 5, 2019

Are You Ready for ‘Smart Chips’?

By leeduigon

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No, boys ‘n’ girls, it’s not a new breakfast cereal–although maybe someday it could be. We’re talking about hi-tech “brain chips” that’ll make their lucky owners superintelligent (https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/03/04/northwestern-neuroscientist-researching-brain-chips-to-make-people-superintelligent/).

A Northwestern scientist is currently researching the project, which he expects will lead to some people having IQs of around 200. To hear him tell it, it’ll be easy: the chip gives your brain an Internet connection, it goes to Wikipedia, “and when I think this particular thought, it gives me the answer.” That is, it gives you the ability to spit out whatever is on Wikipedia. If you don’t understand what you’re parroting, so what? Wikipedia is never wrong!

The scientist, says the CBS nooze article, is “collaborating with Silicon Valley bigwigs he’d rather not name.” Is that supposed to reassure us? Silicon Valley bigwigs are never wrong, either! They’d never, never, never do anything but what was really, truly good for us. And did I mention that I am the Sultan of Swat?

He’s being cagey about potential societal prombles cropping up if the few people who can afford it get brain chips and become superintelligent while the rest of us are left behind. But the price would be bound to come down if they figured out how to serve them up as breakfast cereal.

From “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!” to “Brain Chips for Genius!” doesn’t seem like that big a jump.

15 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in science news

March 3, 2019

‘Writing with Jurassic Ink’ (2013)

By leeduigon

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Not that it was ever going to be a commercial success, but scientists in 2013 successfully wrote with ink taken from the fossilized ink sac of a squid from the Jurassic Period, supposedly 150 million years ago.

https://leeduigon.com/2013/10/18/writing-with-jurassic-ink/

The ink is still good after all that time? Really? Holy moly.

Either it wasn’t really all that old, or they, like, totally misidentified the fossil, or our understanding of fossilization is all wet. Pick one!

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in science news

February 24, 2019

The Secular Humanist Apocalypse

By leeduigon

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Alas! Woe is us! Our “global modern civilization” is going to tip over and capsize! Scientists say so, and scientists are never wrong (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse).

We get to the meat of this doom-and-gloom when we encounter a chart of “four warning signs” that our civilization is headed for the glue factory.

“Climate change.” See? Toldja we shoulda paid a carbon tax! How is government supposed to control the climate if we don’t let ’em control us?

“Inequality.” Uh, when was the last time Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders showed up at your door with a nice big check to make you more equal to them? And with the possible exception of very small hunter-gatherer groups eking out a marginal living in the Kalahari Desert, where have we ever seen “equality”?

“Environmental impact.” Doesn’t stop ’em from paving over everything, does it? When farms get paved over for strip malls with nail salons and trendy restaurants, how is that a good thing? I remember back when local governments used to oppose this sort of thing: but the courts and the state crushed them into submission.

“Complexity.” Well, yeah, OK–who can say he completely understands today’s goings-on? Yer darn tootin’ we’re dealing with more complexity than we can handle. And who, pray tell, visited that upon us? Scientists and bureaucrats, that’s who.

So these are the four horsemen of the humanist apocalypse. No divine intervention need apply. None of this “the earth is the Lord’s” jazz. Only scientists and bureaucrats can save us now.

The authors at “BBC Future” do understand that a lot of civilizations have come and gone: they’re just trying to figure out why. Once they know why, the all-powerful government can step in to prevent collapse and we can enjoy another thousand years of Oscar nights and rap music.

On second thought…

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in religion, science news

February 13, 2019

This Is Journalism? Teens Demanding Vaccinations?

By leeduigon

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The gang at the Chicago Tribune–do they truly think we can’t see their bias?

The headline reads, “Unvaccinated teens fact-checking their parents and trying to get shots on their own” (https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/health/ct-anti-vaccine-parents-20190210-story.html). Like, how many times, when you were 14 or 15 years old, did you find yourself sitting on the porch steps and thinking, “Gee whiz, I wish I could get more vaccinations! Confound my parents! What could they be thinking of?” Hint: never.

The Trib digs up one 18-year-old who posted such a thought on Reddit–“god [sic] knows how I’m still alive”–and from it extrapolates a mass movement among teenagers who want to be vaccinated against freakin’ everything. This kid’s parents didn’t think so. The fact that he’s still alive casts doubt on the urgent necessity for beaucoup vaccines. His Reddit post did get a lot of comments, from which the Trib deduces “a growing discussion online.”

And they begin a sentence with the words, “As anti-vaccination movements metastasize…” You know–like cancer. Cancer metastasizes. Ooh! Doggone dogma!

This is ideology. Secular humanists keep promising to deliver us an earthly paradise, free from disease and poverty and bad dates, etc., if only we’ll all do as they say. In their world, no disease will be allowed–so there, God! You couldn’t do that, but we can! If only the ignorant rabble will obey us. So their own dogma demands that everyone be vaccinated against everything; and then, if a disease does turn up somewhere, it must be because some religious fanatics failed to heed the government.

I wonder what my parents would have thought of me “fact-checking” them. They didn’t generally use the word “hubris,” but in that event it would have come in handy.

I really shouldn’t need to add that some vaccinations have done good (the smallpox vaccine, just to name one)–but to vaccinate against every possible disease is just utopian humanism running wild. But then it doesn’t know any other way to run.

10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in news, science news

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