The Science Thread

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History lesson : The danger of Uranium and Racism combined : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Rock_uranium_mill_spill

Several days after the spill, the Indian Health Service and the Environmental Improvement Division of New Mexico warned local residents over the radio and with signs written only in English not to drink from, water livestock at, or enter the Puerco River. Many Navajo people in the area speak only Diné, an Athabaskan language spoken by 150,000 people in the Navajo Nation.

The states of Arizona and New Mexico failed to make their residents immediately aware of the dangers of radiation.[20][21] United Nuclear Corporation employees were dispatched to warn Navajo-speaking residents downstream in accordance with a state contingency plan, but not until a few days after the spill.[3][22] The Navajo Nation asked the governor of New Mexico, Bruce King, to request disaster assistance from the US government and have the site declared a disaster area, but he refused, an action that limited disaster relief assistance to the Navajo Nation.[4]
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The accident released more radioactivity than the Three Mile Island accident.[2][3][4] The spill has been called "the largest radioactive accident in U.S. history," but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said that this is "an overstatement," and that "there have been a number of other events that have been more significant in terms of radiological impact. The event was more significant from an environmental perspective than from a human one."[1]
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At the same Congressional hearing, the United States Army Corps of Engineers testified that had the dam been built according to legal specifications, the failure would not have occurred.[27]
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In 2008, the US Congress authorized a five-year plan for cleanup of contaminated uranium sites on the Navajo reservation.[53]
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Yesterday I've been visiting the exhibition "Gods in Colour" (English-language web site here : https://buntegoetter.liebieghaus.de/en/ , Wikipedia article here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_in_Color ) , and I read in the exhibition's catalogue a very disturbing view : That the still too much present view of classical Greece & Roman statues being "as white as marble" is in fact an echo of the aesthetics of Fascism.

Meanwhile the colourfulness ["Polychromy"] of antique Roman & Greece statues is a proven fact for more than 100 years now ( ! ) , Fascism dictated that everything had to be devoid of colours.

Not only that, but there also still exists a common connotation of "colourfulness = inferiour", coming from the - still an echo of Fascism - belief that colourfulness seems to be a sign of not so "high" developed cultures like the western European ones.

Citing the exhibition's catalogue :

"The US-american Archaeologist Sarah Bond said 2017 in an interview in the economy magazine Forbes a connection betwern the "white supremacy" ideology of the US-american ultra-right and the erroneous vision of a white marble Antique of the Europeans. In this contect she pointed towards our research, which served her as a proof for a colourful European Antique. Sarah Bond received afterwards death threats.

More articles followed, among others a very precisely researched one in The New Yorker, but also 2019 a pointed, much observed contribution in the Satire show of Samantha Bee."

The head of the research mused in a small movie that he was wondering why - although proved to be wrong for about 100 years now - the image that all antique Greece & Roman statues were colourless marble ones still stubbornly persists so much in society.

Well, this is a completely different theme (one only worthy of my own topic "A thought", but I immeditely notoced that colourfulness in media (especially in games) is also strong in these times, together with the belief that colourfulness = childishness = inferior. Everything that is childish is inferior per se.

If I really really really really hard boil it down until nothing but mere salt crystals remain on the bottom of the cooking pot, then I must say that this belief that the "high Antique" as the perceived root/seed of European culture had no colours on its statues is in fact nothing but racism. Colourful art is still considered as "simple", "prmitive", "naive" and so on, and that's still an echo of Fascism and therefore of Racism which held the belief that colourless white marble = white man.


( The development of these aesthetics is a bit more complicated, in fact, starting with the Renaissance, but Fascism pressed its own heavy thumb on everything much later. )

Wikipedia entries :

Polychromy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychrome

Polychromy/colourfulness in architecture : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_art#Polychromy:_painting_on_statuary_and_architecture

Colourfull ancient paintings : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_art#Panel_and_wall_painting
 
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I've been browsing around on the web site of the Cambridge University. Here are my results :

- Ancient Roman town measured completely without digging : Through radar scan : https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/roman-city-rises

- Skates can repair themselves : https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/skate

- Dinosaur footprints in Great Britain : https://www.cam.ac.uk/dinotracks

- The "Trumpington Cross" : https://www.cam.ac.uk/trumpingtoncross

- "Why we can't stop eating" : On obesity and gut hormones and socitety : https://www.cam.ac.uk/cantstopeating

- Trying magic on certain birds - and learning through that how the human mind works : https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/akindofmagic

- Probably the ancestor of modern birds : the so-called "Wonderchicken" : https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/wonderchicken

- Human genome diversity : https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news...tudy-reveals-our-complex-evolutionary-history

- "How we lost our collective memory about epidemics" : https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/collectivememory

- Racism : The Great University Land Grab : https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/great-university-land-grab
and here : https://www.landgrabu.org/

- Social : "School segregation by wealth creates unequal learning outcomes for children in the global south" : https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news...ing-outcomes-for-children-in-the-global-south

- Social : "People in England's poorest towns lose over a decade of good health, research finds" : https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news...e-over-a-decade-of-good-health-research-finds

- Social : "Local food solutions during the Coronavirus crisis could have a lasting benefit" : https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/globaltolocal

- Ketamine can shut off brains : https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news...porarily-switch-off-the-brain-say-researchers

- gender-based society in modern Japan : https://www.cam.ac.uk/CoolJapaneseMen
 
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The old question:
Is light a wave or a particle? | Great debates in physics
 
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In the we page of the Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich, there is a page for downloads.
Of the many downloads there I can highly recommend the PDF file "Aus Pharaos Werkstatt", because of its pictures, which will show you how statues and monuments were made by the ancient Egyptian people - documented by themselves through pictures in tombs.
I have never seen pictures like these, and I have learned a lot there.
https://smaek.de/smaek-digital/downloadbereich/
 
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Found this in the online version of the Science magazine :
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6520/1040

Protecting consumers from collusive prices due to AI

Price-setting algorithms can lead to noncompetitive prices, but the law is ill equipped to stop it
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Summary :

Summary
The efficacy of a market system is rooted in competition. In striving to attract customers, firms are led to charge lower prices and deliver better products and services. Nothing more fundamentally undermines this process than collusion, when firms agree not to compete with one another and consequently consumers are harmed by higher prices. Collusion is generally condemned by economists and policy-makers and is unlawful in almost all countries. But the increasing delegation of price-setting to algorithms (1) has the potential for opening a back door through which firms could collude lawfully (2). Such algorithmic collusion can occur when artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms learn to adopt collusive pricing rules without human intervention, oversight, or even knowledge. This possibility poses a challenge for policy. To meet this challenge, we propose a direction for policy change and call for computer scientists, economists, and legal scholars to act in concert to operationalize the proposed change.
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An article on the climate :
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6520/1095

A dangerous trend
How anthropogenically driven climate change is affecting heat waves and drought is one of the most important environmental issues facing societies around the globe. Zhang et al. present a 260-year-long record of temperature and soil moisture over inner East Asia that reveals an abrupt shift to hotter and drier conditions (see the Perspective by Zhang and Fang). Extreme episodes of hotter and drier climate over the past 20 years, which are unprecedented in the earlier records, are caused by a positive feedback loop between soil moisture deficits and surface warming and potentially represent the start of an irreversible trend.
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An article on exceptions in cancer therapy :
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6520/1020

Summary
Although even the best cancer drugs don't buy much time for most people with advanced cancer, there are rare exceptions: patients whose tumors melt away and who remain healthy years later. Researchers have long dismissed these "exceptional responders" as unexplainable outliers. Now, an effort to systematically study them is yielding data that could help improve cancer treatments. The project, led by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, examined tumor DNA and the immune cells found around or within the cancers in 111 exceptional responders. In 26 of the patients, scientists found clues that may explain why a drug that didn't work for most people shrank the tumors for months or years. The results suggest new drug combinations and highlight the value of conducting genomic tests of patients' tumors in order to customize treatments.
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