174
A qualified doctor challenging the Germ Theory of Disease after 1900? Wow.
This is just a smattering - just a random tasting - of the thousands - or perhaps millions - of studies showing that contagious diseases are contagious.
Dog to dog transmission of a novel influenza virus (H5N2) isolated from a canine
To determine whether the novel H5N2 was ...
123
TL;DR
The detection of phosphine is not conclusive evidence of life on Venus; it simply indicates that there are unknown chemical pathways on the planet that are producing it. While these may be biological in nature, they also may not be. Therefore, the discovery might be evidence of life on Venus.
What the article claims
I should start by noting that the ...
88
A summary of recent evidence suggests:
In children with initial low calcium intake, an increase in milk/dairy intake is associated with an increase in bone density.
In adults, milk/dairy consumption is not or only weakly associated with lower risk of bone fractures.
Basic explanation:
90% of peak bone mineral density (the amount of calcium and phosphorus ...
59
We cannot be sure exactly what happened 7 centuries ago; we only have the one account. However something akin to this experiment did occur, albeit without the controlled conditions. In Romania during Communism thousands of children were consigned to orphanages where they were grossly neglected (warning: the linked article contains distressing details).
Many ...
26
As the top answer to this related question states, plants in general are oxygen neutral. In other words, whatever oxygen is emitted today will be emitted as CO2 later. So what really matters from a climate perspective is CO2 storage, not oxygen emission.
That said, short-term oxygen emission is apparently difficult to measure, but it is largely a function ...
24
Theoretically that is rough-ballpark-correct. But that is assuming that you would need only one sperm per woman, which is unrealistic.
Using the... erm... "normal" way, not every sperm finds its way to the ovum, if there is a (fertile) ovum to be found. That is why males produce so many of them. It's a shotgun approach by evolution; the most mobile, ...
20
Not directly related to your source(s), but see the article pit of despair on Wikipedia. Warning, the article and the experiment itself can be rather disturbing.
Harlow's first experiments involved isolating a monkey in a cage surrounded by steel walls with a small one-way mirror, so the experimenters could look in, but the monkey could not look out. The ...
19
Any strong claims made by news outlets are journalistic rather than scientific.
The linked article is pretty cautious, and reflects the researchers' position rather well. Other stories have gone a little further: Sky News, for example Signs of alien life detected on Venus --
Microbes unlike any life on Earth could be thriving high in the clouds of Venus, ...
16
In addition to the other answers I would like to clarify that Salimbene indeed described an experiment in which the children died of social isolation. Here is the original excerpt1:
Secunda eius superstitio fuit quia voluit experiri, cuiusmodi linguam et loquelam haberent pueri, cum adolevissent, si cum nemine loquerentur. Et ideo precepit baiulis et ...
15
In a sciencemag.org article, which was apparently about this study, they state that:
In the process of destroying free radicals, vitamin C turns into what's called a vitamin C radical. If certain metal ions are nearby, vitamin C radical can turn compounds called lipid hydroperoxides into genotoxins, which switch bases around in DNA, disrupting its delicate ...
13
Based on some information in the answer by DevSolar I will estimate the number of sperm in the range of 190-290 million a day, which as noted has a fair amount of uncertainty. However, I'm willing to do a little back-of-the-envelope guesswork to refine the estimate regarding the number of fertile women.
Currently, there are approximately 7.7 billion people ...
10
Like most saltwater species, sardines are not farmed in any significant number. Marine fishes accounted for only 2.8 percent of the world aquaculture production tonnage in 2017, according to this report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In practice, wild-caught sardines are often ground up and used as fish meal for larger fish ...
9
I've been served pomegranate seeds by our canteen contractor on a regular basis, as a "special extra" on burgers...
They are definitely edible (and high in fiber!). They contain anthocyanins, which contribute to their color (also contained in black currant, raspberries, cherries etc.), but are — despite the "cyan" in there — harmless.
8
While it is certainly not obvious to the eye, the fact that the closest relatives of crocodiles are birds appears to be well-established. These two clades are the only living members of a group known as archosaurs (Green et al. 2014):
Crocodilians, birds, dinosaurs, and pterosaurs are a monophyletic group known as the archosaurs. Crocodilians and birds ...
7
Yes. They can. And many if not most or the vast majority will. Technically and practically they are not very suitable to begin with.
That is yes for many brands out there and yes for many possible applications if a homemade mask is made out of them. Because there are so many possible combinations out there, finding one such bag is difficult if that bag ...
6
Larian's answer suitably covers some logical issues with the claim, which is enough to perhaps comfort you in your skepticism, but it doesn't empirically answer the question for us.
It seems the association of the moon with mushrooms is ancient. Some ancient knowledge is derived from observation, but most of it is steeped in superstition and religious/occult ...
5
Is there a species of locust-eating wasp that will check its burrow repeatedly if its food is moved?
It seems that Fabre's original claim has been greatly exaggerated by subsequent writers, and that the wasps are not nearly as stereotyped as those subsequent authors have claimed; Fabre's own description noted that not all wasps of the species showed this rigid behavior, and later studies have not supported it.
The Sphex story is an anecdote about a ...
5
Summary
The estimation of prevalence of lactose intolerance may be too high because of:
surveys in which they included individuals with self-diagnosed and not just officially diagnozed lactose intolerance
false positive diagnostic tests (up to 20% according to American Family Physician) due to other problems, such as irritable bowel syndrome, sensitivity ...
5
First I want to be clear that the headline claim of the question is not directly stated in the quotation by Dr. Campbell. The quote in the question states two separate things, one about "what is quite possible to do" and the other about the fact that "there exists viruses contained within biological warfare laboratories". He does not directly claim that the ...
4
I have managed to gain access to the full text of the referenced article. I can't pretend to understand it fully (not being a biochemist), but the authors do not state whether the vitamin C they used in their experiments was synthetic or a plant extract, and none of the results in the paper feature a comparison of different types of vitamin C.
Therefore I ...
4
For a slightly more extensive summary that doesn't require someone to read 20-page paper... Jeffrey Lockwood (who also wrote a book on the topic of entomological warfare, writes in a 2012 paper broader in scope:
Yellow fever became the mainstay of the Camp Detrick’s entomological program, when it was
discovered that mosquito larvae would uptake the ...
4
The word "standardized" seems like an over-statement to me. The US certainly did investigate the possibility of using yellow fever as a bioweapon during the Cold War, according to Hay (1999):
The literature obtained under the Freedom of Information Act provides
some insight into the working of the United States biological weapons
programme. [...] The ...
3
As discussed by Brian the claim is somewhat vague in that it states the theoretical possibility of something and then asserts the existence of something else.
But if take the claim to be existence of such viruses with on-purpose [GoF] enhanced transmissibility, it is true, although the claim (interpreted that way) exaggerates the deadliness of the actual ...
3
Hesitant to answer this given the preliminary nature of the knowledge, but there is one paper that proposed to use the Diamond Princess (since it's a "finished" natural experiment) as a proxy to calibrate the CFR (case fatality ratio) in other populations/countries. One needs to be careful to adjust for the different age-structure of populations/...
answered Apr 17 at 13:25
SX welcomes ageist gossip
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2
The precise question being asked here is not that clear to me, but here is a brief and accessible article from The Lancet a few weeks ago which outlined the challenges of calculating COVID-19s general CFR (Case Fatality Rate). It concludes:
Although highly transmissible, the CFR of COVID-19 appears to be lower
than that of SARS (9.5%) and Middle East ...
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