Bad Science

More than 100 years ago, two researchers began combing downtown Toronto in search of dogs for their medical experiments. They had already gone through about a dozen dogs provided by the University of Toronto, but the pair had killed them all: one using too much anesthetic, another in surgery during which the dog bled out, and most of them due to infections from surgeries performed in unsanitary conditions.

It is amazing how many reports, meant to scare the public into compliance, are so wrong. No matter how often this occurs, most of the media just repeats what they are told, which makes them worthless, and dangerous.

The study had been given a provocative title — Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity — and the findings were intriguing. Its author, a star researcher at Harvard Business School, had shown that people who lied about whether they’d correctly predicted the outcome of a coin toss were more innovative than their honest peers.

Italy officially banned lab-grown meat this week in a bid to protect the nation’s farmers and food heritage from the Great Reset-style push towards synthetic foods.

Voting by a measure of 159 to 53, the Italian parliament voted to prohibit the sale of lab-grown meat for food or animal feed that was “produced from cell or tissue cultures deriving from vertebrate animals”.

IN DANTE’S Inferno, Hell is, counter-intuitively perhaps, freezing cold. In the 9th Circle the Devil is entrapped in a lake of ice. An imaginative inversion of what we normally take Hell to be.

Clearly the 14th century Italian poet didn’t get the memo from UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, for whom the Hell we currently suffer is boiling hot. Or if he did get it, perhaps he binned it. I wouldn’t blame him.

A rogue Chinese scientist who was jailed for creating the world’s first genetically edited babies has described his “huge unease” over the future of the children, now aged about four.

He Jiankui, 39, was sentenced to three years in prison in 2019 after an international outcry when it emerged that he had altered the genes of twin girls, known as Lulu and Nana, at the embryonic stage with a technique called Crispr in an attempt to make them immune to HIV infection.

Crispr Crunch? Mutants on demand? Genetic Class Warfare?

In the heart of Siberia, a team of Russian scientists is working to reawaken ancient viruses, sparking concerns that a mishap could trigger a new pandemic.

Scientists at the Vector research centre in Russia’s Novosibirsk region are analysing the remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and other Ice Age animals to identify and revive prehistoric viruses, also known as paleoviruses. The animals were almost perfectly preserved in the frozen earth of Yakutia, a vast region in northeast Siberia where winter temperatures can plunge as low as minus 55C. The research, which began last year, is aimed at researching how viruses evolve.

Leading Alzheimer’s theory undermined: Did tampering waste 16 years of research?

Hundreds of millions of dollars and years of research across an entire field may have been wasted due to potentially falsified data that helped lay the foundation for the leading hypothesis of what causes Alzheimer’s disease.

The allegations centre around a landmark 2006 study — a paper which has been cited nearly 2,300 times — whose findings identify a protein called amyloid beta as a cause of Alzheimer’s. Since then, the hypothesis that sticky deposits of amyloid beta form plaques in the brain that slow cognition has dominated Alzheimer’s research and treatment development.