7th August 2022, 3 min read

Science and Technology links (August 7 2022)

1. Increase in computing performance explain up to 94% of the performance improvements in field such as weather prediction, protein folding, and oil exploration: information technology is a a driver of long-term performance improvement across society. If we stop improving our computing, the consequences could be dire.
2. The coral cover of the Great Barrier Reef has reached its highest level since the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) began monitoring 36 years ago.
3. The leading Alzheimer’s theory, the amyloid hypothesis, which motivated years of research, was built in part on fraud. The author of the fraud is professor Sylvain Lesné. His team appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments. Effectively, they “photoshopped” their scientific papers. Not just one or two images, but at least 70. Note that all clinical trials of drugs developed (at high cost) on the amyloid hypothesis have failed. The total cost is in the billions of dollars. Meanwhile, competing theories and therapies have been sidelined by the compelling amyloid hypothesis. It will be interesting to watch what kind of penalty, if any, Lesné receives for his actions. You may read the testimonies of researchers whose work was made difficult because they did not believe in the amyloid hypothesis. E.g., The maddening saga of how an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure for decades (from 2019) or the story of Rachael Neve. The net result? No progress despite massive funding:
   

In the 30 (now 35) years that biomedical researchers have worked determinedly to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, their counterparts have developed drugs that helped cut deaths from cardiovascular disease by more than half, and cancer drugs able to eliminate tumors that had been incurable. But for Alzheimer’s, not only is there no cure, there is not even a disease-slowing treatment.

We have two decades of Alzheimer’s research based partly on deliberate fraud that may have cost millions of lives.

1. For years, we have been told that depression was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, specifically low serotonin levels. Antidepressants were initially proposed to work by rectifying the serotonin abnormality. A new paper published by Nature shows not only that depressed people do not have lower serotonin levels but, moreover, long-term antidepressant use may lead to lower serotonin levels.
2. Science has been ‘covided’:
   

Across science, 98 of the 100 most-cited papers published in 2020 to 2021 were related to COVID-19. A large number of scientists received large numbers of citations to their COVID-19 work, often exceeding the citations they had received to all their work during their entire career.

1. The Earth is getting greener due to increase CO2 presence in the atmosphere and this is predicted to lead to substantial cooling according to an article in Nature.
2. The Sahara was green from 14,000 to 5,000 years ago. Some researchers believe that it became a desert due to the sudden cooling of the Atlantic Ocean.