Recent Posts

Fake papers from China, Iran, flood science journals

By Jo Nova

If someone wanted to sabotage Western science, this would be a useful technique

A research team has used AI to analyze 2.6 million cancer papers and found a quarter of a million have used suspicious tortured phrases, incorrect reagents, fabricated data and altered or reused figures — all hallmarks of fakery at the industrial paper-mill. A dumb AI will change “energy use” to vitality utilization or convert “raw data” to crude information.

The commentariat is blaming profit and greed for the flood of fake papers, but what if this is no accident? If I were an enemy of The West, and I wanted to sabotage scientific research, this would work like a DDOS on science. Researchers would spend hours running meta-analyses of dud results. They might change their own experiments, scurrying down pointless rabbit holes in search of an effect that doesn’t exist. Or, they might drop a useful approach if they thought someone had tried it and failed. And it can’t be too good for the cancer patients either, can it?

Even businesses might find it appealing to slow down or confuse the competition. Or perhaps they’d like to quote a paper to get their […]

January 31st, 2026 | Tags: , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Remarkable boost for immune systems after fasting

There’s a fascinating study out this week suggesting that if we fast for three or four days a couple of times a year we can regenerate white blood stem cells. Fasting cuts down the number of white blood cells during the fast, but afterwards they recover, and then some.

This new result comes from both mice and phase I clinical human trials. Probably in paleolithic times, famine or at least hungry days were a part of nearly everyone’s life. Many different philosophies and religions have fasting traditions. Apparently our genes are selected to deal with that, and being short of food makes the immune system do a kind of efficiency sweep. Perhaps access to unnaturally continuous food stops our stem cells from reactivating? Something to think about from Killjoy Jo. 😉 Yes, fasting is not exactly fun, but nor is cancer. For what it’s worth, the hard part of a fast is usually the start.

Obviously, consult your doc, do your own research, etc.

The NZ Herald

Fasting for three days can regenerate the entire immune system, even in the elderly, scientists have found in a breakthrough described as remarkable.

University of Southern California

Fasting triggers stem cell […]

June 8th, 2014 | Tags: , , | Category: Health, Stem Cells | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Cutting calories can stop cancer cells from spreading

Something different to discuss – for the medical-revolution cynics among us. Cells from a human triple-negative breast cancer were implanted in mice under their mammary fat pads. Triple negative breast cancer is a nastier form of breast cancer which is harder to treat because these cells don’t respond to the usual anti-estrogenic drugs.

The mice were then allowed to eat only 70% as many calories as they would normally freely choose to eat. This is a particularly interesting study because it shows that calorie restriction inhibited the expression of certain micro RNAs even from foreign (non mouse) implanted breast cancer cells, and this apparently kept the cancer from spreading. Notably fatalities from cancers don’t usually come from the initial solid tumor but from the metastasized version, so this is potentially very useful.

The mechanism involves strengthening the matrix around the cancer cells. When these cancer cells have metastasized they produce more of these particular micro RNA’s which in turn appear to stop production of proteins that strengthen the extracellular matrix. In other words, the cancer cells probably use the micro RNA’s to degrade the cellular matrix around them in order to spread. The implications of this are both that the […]

May 31st, 2014 | Tags: , , | Category: Cancer, Diet, Health, Medicine | Print This Post Print This Post | |