Peter Daszak — a longtime collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and recipient of grants from Anthony Fauci — spoke with Science magazine for a story attempting to absolve himself from blame for his alleged role in the creation and cover-up of COVID-19 where an insect escaped from a cage during the interview. The insect’s escape from a terrarium in Daszak’s office follows the EcoHealth Alliance President serving as one of the loudest critics of the “lab leak” theory, which enjoys support from several former high-ranking public health and intelligence officials. As the Science article chronicling Daszak recounts: He is gregarious, funny, and unguarded, an avuncular type who can make complicated ideas engaging to nonscientists. […] After a cricket that has escaped from one of the terrariums in the office — home to a dozen snakes and lizards — hops by his feet, I make a joke about lab leaks. He is not amused. Claiming “we have done nothing wrong,” in reference to the work of EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak uses the interview to lament the attacks on the group’s collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party-run Wuhan Institute of Virology, including work on viruses he described as “killers.”
Science & Technology
An award-winning Canadian scientist said he has been refused two federal government grants for his research on the grounds of “lack of diversity” — even though he is originally from India and has repeatedly suffered racism. […] Kambhampati’s work explores the cutting edge of super-fast laser science, a field that spans everything from telecom to medicine. He believes Canada can become a world leader in the field. If I want to focus on merit, fairness and equality, then you get called out as a racist or sexist. But his application for a $450,000 grant this month from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) was turned down because, the council said, “the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion considerations in the application were deemed insufficient.” His grant application a year ago to the federally funded National Frontiers in Research Fund — whose object is “to support world-leading interdisciplinary, international, high-risk/high-reward, transformative and rapid-response Canadian research” — was also turned down on similar grounds.
There are no credible scientists warning of a ‘climate emergency’ — not a single one. Many will agree that human activities are impacting the planet, and that this may cause us problems in the future, but 1) these researchers are likely adhering to the ‘upside-down pyramid‘ that Dr. Nakamura talks of–where today’s AGW science is built on the work of just a few climate modeler pioneers, and 2) buzzwords like ‘crisis’ and ‘catastrophe’ aren’t used by scientists — such extremist terms are only bleated by alarmists and activist-journalists. However, the waters have been muddied by a reticence from those in the relevant academic fields, a silent complicity — because while scientists aren’t saying that we’re in the grips of an existential climatic threat, they aren’t widely dismissing it, either. This odd hush is due to the current political climate on the topic. It is career suicide to publicly denounce CAGW, and the wreckage of many a career lay strewn before us as proof. It’s akin to the transgender debate. Biologists daren’t wade in. Science isn’t enough when combating the claims of extreme activists, and logic isn’t accepted when debating their forged ideologies.
Some 20,000 years ago, winters in Israel were colder — with the lowest temperatures recorded in January about five degrees Celsius less than contemporary ones, while the level of precipitation was similar to the current one, a group of researchers have found in an innovative project documenting some 10 millennia of climate in the area. By analyzing botanical remains from 10,000 to 20,000 years ago from the Hula Valley in northern Israel, archaeologists from Tel Aviv University, Tel Hai College and the University of Montpellier in France were able to reconstruct how the weather evolved during that period. Their findings were recently published in the journal Quaternary Science Review. “I have been very interested in environmental reconstruction — and by analyzing botanical remains, I have been working on reconstructing climate and ecology history of the region, which I believe is a key to answer important questions about human evolution,” said TAU archaeobotanist Dr. Dafna Langgut. Some 60 plant sediments were radiocarbon-dated, and for every several samples, pollens were extracted for a total of several hundred. This allowed the researchers to develop a pollen-based paleoclimate model.
A Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is underway after several frozen vials labeled “smallpox” were discovered at a Merck facility in Pennsylvania. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday, a lab worker was clearing out a freezer at a facility in Montgomery County when the vials were found. Reports said the worker was wearing gloves and a face mask and there is no indication that anyone has been exposed to the vials. However, it remains unclear how the vials got to the facility in the first place. It was reported that a total of 15 questionable vials were discovered. Five of which were labeled “smallpox” and ten which were labeled as “vaccinia.” “We all know what happens to things that get in the back of the freezer. So, we’ve all had it happen. A, the question is, is it really smallpox or not? And B, how did it get there? And I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the bottom of it or hear what that final result was,” said Dr. Angie Nicholas, the chief medical officer at Einstein Medical Center. Only two facilities in the world are allowed to have the deadly virus, including the CDC’s main lab in Atlanta and a facility in Russia.
“If you want to send robots where you don’t want to send soldiers, you need a solution for that,” said Elad Levy, CEO and founder of ROBOTEAM. His company, together with Elbit Systems, on Tuesday, announced the debut of what they are calling “the mothership of unmanned vehicles:” ROOK, a multi-payload military 6X6 Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV). The UGV’s innovative design and built-in autonomy suite offers improved capacity, maneuverability and agility from its previous models, creating “a human machine” that is “really part of the team,” said Yoav Poizner, the senior director of Elbit C4I and Cyber. He said the ROOK is the next step toward enabling “everything that happens in the sky” through use of drones and aerial robots to occur on the ground and in the field where soldiers need it, too. The ROOK was developed based on the operational experience accumulated through fielding of the 4×4 PROBOT UGV systems, which became operational a few years ago through a first collaboration between the two companies. What makes ROOK most unique is that it started as a connected system, the teams said. “Because we built it from the first screw, we know how the robot works with the software,” Levy said.