Schneider Shorts 10 December 2021 – the incredible clinical partners of Cassava Sciences, Duke University expands quack operations, bullies bulling bullies at Max Planck Society, French COVID-19 suppository cancelled but we can target telomeres instead, plus there’s always oleandrin, Nature has a new joke journal, Norilsk, the most polluted place on Earth, and finally: why you must never refuse sex to mTOR man.
Table of Discontent
Science Elites
- Sabatini demands sex – woman sued by mTORman tells how he coerced her
- Born-again crack stripper for Cassava – US stockmarket big player has curious clinical partners
- Max Planck Bullies – how to “dig” in Nicole Boivin affair
- Autism Quackery by Duke – peer-reviewed child abuse business opens new clinic
- Unwelcome inconsistencies – another embarrassing retraction at NCBS Bangalore
COVID-19
- Clofoctol dumped – €5 million from world’s richest man wasn’t enough
- Oleandrin now! – Killer drug passed peer review
- Telomeres and COVID-19 – Italian scientists make a connection, German health minister excited
Science Breakthroughs
- Nature Aging presents – two weird papers other journals didn’t want
- Frontiers in War heroism – evolutionary psychology of war injuries
Environment
Toxic Russia – Norilsk, the most poisonous place on Earth
News in Tweets
Science Elites
Sabatini demands sex
As you may know, David Sabatini, former star of biomedicine, was recently sacked by the Whitehead Institute for sexual harassment and is now suing his employer and his main accuser, a young woman he is said to have groomed already as PhD student and then coerced to sex. This woman now submitted another court brief, please read the long update to this article:
A cartoonish picture emerges of a white American fraternity boy, spoiled and entitled by a privileged upbringing, and unhealthily obsessed with sex and women. On top of constantly treating female subordinates as sex objects, Sabatini’s “jokes” contained casual racism and homophobia.
the mTORman talked constantly about sex, humiliating both female and male lab members, boasting about his sexual “conquests” which he presented as privileges of his power status. He began grooming young women long before they joined his lab, engulfing them first into his academic embrace and then into physical one, strategically creating a total professional dependency to advance his sexual agenda. Sabatini’s tactics was to get female lab members drunk and then remind them of his absolute power over their careers to coerce them into having sex with him. When he heard that one of his female victims complained to Whitehead authorities, Sabatini deployed threats and drummed up his male lab members to find the accuser.
And finally, this:
“In April and May of 2018, Sabatini committed assault and battery on [X] when he coerced her into having sex with him despite her protests. Over time, in light of his authority over her and as defined by relevant policies, Sabatini continued to engage in batteries against [X].”
The files are publicly available from the court online, please read my updated article for the key quotes. Also, as reminder: Sabatini is not just a drooling sexual harasser and vengeful bully. He is also a very bad scientist who published fraudulent research.
Born-again crack stripper for Cassava
Elisabeth Woeckner pointed out to me who Cassava Sciences collaborates with, as per their own online document:
“Below is a list of participating research sites for the ongoing open-label extension study of simufilam, an investigational drug candidate in Alzheimer’s disease. […]
IMIC Research, Inc
18320 Franjo Rd, Palmetto Bay, FL 33157
Office Line: (786) 310-7477
Primary Investigator: Evelyn Lopez-Brignoni, MD
Study Coordinator: Aimee Cabo
aimee@aktamedika.com
Office Line: (786) 310-7477
CEO: Dr. Boris Nikolov
boris@aktamedika.com
Office Line: (786) 310-7477
Nikolov and Cabo are husband and wife, and mad as two hatters (in pointy white hoods). Check their Twitter feeds (here and here) at your own peril. It’s mostly inane Jesus-worshipping memes with heavy white-supremacist undertones like these:
Interspersed with far-right ideology plus rabid antivaxxery and covidiocies. I collected among the recent tweets, but you can search further back if you like:
Now that I convinced you of the clinical and scientific qualifications of these Cassava-collaborating IMIC Research owners, you should know that their principal investigator for the Cassava trial, Evelyn Lopez-Brignoni, was sanctioned by FDA earlier this year. Here is the Warning Letter:
“You failed to ensure that the investigation was conducted according to the investigational plan [21 CFR 312.60].
As a clinical investigator, you are required to ensure that your clinical studies are conducted in accordance with the investigational plan. The investigational plan for Protocols (b)(4) and (b)(4) required subjects to take (b)(4) of study medication (b)(4), administered as a (b)(4), to demonstrate the efficacy (b)(4). You failed to adhere to these requirements.”
How could anyone ever take Cassava Sciences seriously?
Here a long analysis by Quintessential Capital Management (QCM) from November 2021, which reveals a lot about Cassava and IMIC:
“Cassava’s prominent clinical research site (whose CEO is coauthor of critical research on Simufilam), IMIC Inc., is co-owned by a former escort, stripper and crack addict with a criminal record for consumption and possession of cocaine.”
But Aimee Cabo is a born again Christian, so there. Oh, and here is a bizarre story about her in Miami New Times, referenced by QCM.
Cabo and her Bulgarian husband were both bankrupt, but now became rich thanks to Cassava money. QCM even sent undercover investigators posing as trial condidates to IMIC and learned: “When asked whether [Nikolov] held any stock, he became uncomfortable and ultimately did not answer.”
And as for Cassava (named after its owner Rene Barbier’s home address):
“Until 2019 the company used to be called “Pain Therapeutics”. Its only asset then was Remoxy, a pain killer that ultimately failed to gain FDA approval. Both Mr. Barbier and Mr. Friedman were sued for securities fraud5 for their misleading statements about Remoxy’s prospects.”
Max Planck bullies
Max Planck Society is trying to sack the director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), Nicole Boivin, for bullying. She now achieved a legal victory by having her reinstalled by Berlin court for the duration of the investigation, as Science reports.
The case may be not straightforward, second-hand information reached me that Boivin may have been victim of the intrigues by her male colleagues. I tried to reach the first-hand source directly, but the source didn’t want to talk to me, just passed on the instruction to “dig into what was going on before the accusations of bullying“.
This is how people often imagine an investigative journalist works. You take a shovel, and dig a hole somewhere. At the bottom you will find a treasure chest with the information inside. Clues? Sources even? Nah, they can’t be expected to share anything to you. Keep digging.
Thing is, even Science knows something is off:
“But several staffers at MPI-SHH say it’s Boivin who has been treated unfairly. They argue that the yearslong investigation that led to her demotion was opaque and secretive. In an email obtained by Science, Beate Kerpen, MPI-SHH’s scientific staff representative, told staff at the institute that in her view the investigation “lack[ed] transparency and communication” and failed “to follow very basic legal principles ensuring fairness to all sides.”
The case has put MPG, one of the largest and best-funded basic science research institutions in the world, under an uncomfortable spotlight: Of the society’s 304 directors, only 54 are women. And in the past few years, several women have been removed from their director positions whereas only one man has been publicly demoted.
In a letter to MPG’s senate in November, more than 145 female scientists pointed out that recent demotions at MPG have disproportionately impacted women; the letter noted Boivin’s case but did not address its merits.”
Maybe Boivin is a bully after all, this trait is quite conductive for a career at the Max Planck Society. Maybe male bullies much worse than herself bullied her out. In academia, exaggerated or even trumped-up misconduct charges are a standard tool to get at your enemies, while the real misconduct committed by these same accusers gets a pass.
I am not “digging” though. I think Max Planck directors are well-connected and rich enough to solve their problems, and obviously Boivin succeeded there already. And anyway: if you want information to be found, find a way to put it where I can see it.
Autism Quackery by Duke
VICE reported in October about new plans by the Duke University and a “stem cell” company they partner with to sell autism quack cures.
Normally, the idea of injecting autistic children with umbilical cord blood would be dismissed as insane, dangerous and irresponsible quackery, nothing but child abuse which no serious university would ever consider for a second.
But in USA everything which is can be turned into a money-bringing business is a good thing, and this is why the private and very elite Duke University has the full support from FDA and most of national media to do these clinical studies on as many children as they wish to. Having teamed up with the cord blood bank Cryo-Cell, Duke is openly selling “stem cell” injections for $15k a pop, with full approval of peer-reviewed journals eager to host another Duke paper. Only a few scientists dare to protest. And because Duke is such an elite university, quacks all over the world started to do their own “stem cell” therapies for autism, again applauded by their national media.
VICE writes:
“Now, a for-profit company called Cryo-Cell International with ties to Duke researchers has indicated that it plans to open clinics promoting these treatments, under a licensing agreement with the renowned North Carolina university. […]
The university and Cryo-Cell have told investors that they’re planning to open a series of “infusion centers.” At these clinics, Cryo-Cell will use Duke’s technology and methods to offer cord blood treatments for $15,000 per infusion.
In an exuberant presentation for investors, Cryo-Cell said it estimates an annual revenue of $24 million per clinic; it hasn’t disclosed how many clinics it plans to open. At least one will reportedly open in Durham, North Carolina.
The move follows a June 2020 announcement that Cryo-Cell had entered into an exclusive patent-option agreement with Duke, allowing it to manufacture and sell products based on patents from Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg.
Thus far, though, Duke’s trials have not shown any promising results for cord blood products as autism treatments, granting that the research is still far from over. The university told Motherboard, “Duke’s institutional position is that additional research is required and to encourage further study to provide definitive results.”
It’s capitalism, honey. In America, healthcare is a business and most definitely not a public service, and if children are to be abused with quack cures, so be it, as long as there is a market. I predict that FDA will approve this new infusion centre.
Unwelcome Inconsistencies
Two high-ranking Indian scholars retracted a paper, Jayant Udgaonkar and M.K. Mathew, both senior professors at the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore (the latter has recently retired). You might recall this institute from the Arati Ramesh bullying and fraud case.
Here is the retracted paper, flagged on PubPeer in July 2021:
Ambadi Thody Sabareesan , Jogender Singh , Samrat Roy , Jayant B. Udgaonkar , M.K. Mathew The Pathogenic A116V Mutation Enhances Ion-Selective Channel Formation by Prion Protein in Membranes Biophysical Journal (2016) doi: 10.1016/j.bpj.2016.03.017
Mathew commented in August 2021 on PubPeer :
“On review it appears that sloppiness crept in over the course of multiple iterations of putting together the figures. He has access to the original data and will construct the proper figure to send to the journal as correction.“
Mathew didn’t say who that “He” was, and then added:
“We have revised the Figures and requested the Journal to publish them as errata. The Biophysical Journal has agreed to do so and the revised Figures should appear on the Journal web site shortly.“
Instead, a retraction was published, because there was even more fake data in the supplementary figures:
The retraction notice went:
“Concerns were raised to the Editor-in-Chief regarding Figure S5. Following a thorough examination of the data, evidence of manipulation via duplication, mirroring, and rescaling of identical data was found. The four histograms for the four conditions had all been generated from the same data. Concerns have been raised about multiple other figures as well. […] The authors maintain that the results obtained support the conclusions drawn from Figure S5[…]. The authors further note that the principal results of the paper […] are not affected by the figures in question. […] Nevertheless, the authors have decided to retract the manuscript in view of the concerns that have been raised. All authors apologize for the errors and any inconvenience caused.”
Here relevant reporting (in Bengali, hattip Paul Jones), we learn that
“The NCBS has referred the matter to the Academic Ethics Committee of Mumbai for investigation by the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR Mumbai). The chair of the 9-member ethics committee is mathematician Professor Benktraman and co-chair is physicist Amal Dighe.”
But of course NCBS doesn’t see anything serious there:
“Satyajit [Mayor], the head of NCBS in Bangalore, also admitted that the incident was not desirable at all. “It simply came to our notice then. Not at all desirable. The matter has been referred to the TIFR’s Academic Ethics Committee for investigation. However, the researchers have identified inconsistencies in the research paper. This is not to say that such things do not happen in scientific research. However, the issue is unwelcome.”
“Inconsistencies”. Which just “happen” inadvertently. Data forgery is simply part of scientific research, says Professor Mayor. Getting caught is “unwelcome”, retractions even more so.
Now I have a surprise for you. Mathew was the original investigator of the Arati Ramesh affair at NCBS, which led to another retraction of a fraudulent paper. That first investigation lauded Ramesh as a brave victim of an evil student who was accused of destroying and stealing evidence, and fleeing overnight (all lies). You may have noticed that also Mathew was blaming an unnamed student on PubPeer.
Ramesh was later found to have been merely careless but otherwise not guilty of research misconduct, and asked to not to bully people anymore.
I wrote to Mathew about his role in the Ramesh investigation and own retraction, but NCBS blacklisted my address due to the Ramesh leaks, so all my emails to anyone at @ncbs.res.in are automatically blocked and rejected.
COVID-19
Clofoctol dumped
Tragic news for France and the world. The secret COVID-19 drug by Institut Pasteur Lille (IPL), for which world’s richest man Bernard Arnoult paid €5 million, the suppository clofoctol, is going down the toilet.
French media reports:
“It’s by internal mail from the general management of the Institut Pasteur de Lillethat the information is out. “We made the decision to stop recruiting in order to reconfigure the project to adapt to the evolution of the pandemic ».
« It’s not really a stop but rather a change of strategy. We were going straight into the wall …“, Would like to clarify this Thursday Xavier Nassif, director of the IPL, who saw budgets melt with each opening of a center.
To find 346 volunteers over 50 years old, unvaccinated and positive, for less than three days totest a drug against Covid-19… all from the Antilles, where the situation is more than complicated, faced an insurmountable challenge. […]
The clinical trial to test the properties of Clofoctol against Covid-19 has virtually stalled in recent months with 11 patients included so far. “Numerous procedures have delayed the possible start of the clinical trial to assess the effectiveness of Clofoctol in Covid-19. The delays in obtaining authorizations are the source of the great difficulties we encounter in recruiting volunteers, resulting in an increase in costs beyond our financial capacities …» [..]
“We wanted to measure the effectiveness of this drug very precisely. See if the viral loads decrease at three and five days … If, above all, hospitalization can be avoided», indicated Benoît Deprez, scientific director in our columns. The results of this clinical trial were expected in March 2022 […]
We are not giving up but looking for another strategy. Avenues are being explored. we give ourselves a few weeks …“
I suggest publishing the results with those 11 clofoctol patients in MDPI or Frontiers, a 100% survival rate will sure impress the peer reviewers there.
Oleandrin Now
Science has spoken what the real cure for COVID-19 is, and it’s OLEANDRIN. Truth is, the miracle drug was denied to you by Soros-paid libtards because they hate President Donald Trump.
And here is a peer reviewed science from earlier this year:
Kenneth S. Plante , Varun Dwivedi , Jessica A. Plante , Diana Fernandez , Divya Mirchandani , Nathen Bopp , Patricia V. Aguilar , Jun-Gyu Park , Paula Pino Tamayo , Jennifer Delgado , Vinay Shivanna , Jordi B. Torrelles , Luis Martinez-Sobrido , Rick Matos , Scott C. Weaver , K. Jagannadha Sastry , Robert A. Newman Antiviral activity of oleandrin and a defined extract of Nerium oleander against SARS-CoV-2 Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy (2021) doi: 10.1016/j.biopha.2021.111457
This study by scholars from University of Texas and MD Anderson in USA was published by an Elsevier Open Access journal with impact factor of 6.5 and an elite publishing fee of $2660 plus VAT, so this must buy the finest peer review possible. Especially since the results were so convincing they were peer reviewed in one day, [correction: in one month] (“Received 24 January 2021, Revised 25 February 2021, Accepted 27 February 2021“). The other bit of good news is that you can buy oleandrin now straight from the paper’s authors, and protect yourself against COVID-19, no need for vaccination:
“RAN is Chief Science Officer of Phoenix Biotechnology Inc. KJS is a paid consultant with Phoenix Biotechnology Inc. RM is a Director of Phoenix Biotechnology, Inc.”
The San Antonio-based company sells “a supercritical CO2 extraction of Nerium oleander into a new botanical drug – PBI-05204“, which is oleandrin.
The pharmacological pathway of this COVID-19 protection is that you kill yourself with oleandrin, swiftly and very painfully, and while you are dead, the coronavirus cannot get you. A 100% efficiency, something even ivermectin does not provide!
Now, I won’t have you criticise the journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, because it even has an Ethics Editor. It also publishes the very finest science from Chinese paper mills, so I am convinced.
Hengchun Zhang , Zhiguo Sun , Yan Li , Dong Fan , Hao Jiang MicroRNA-200c binding to FN1 suppresses the proliferation, migration and invasion of gastric cancer cells Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy (2017) doi: 10.1016/j.biopha.2017.01.023
Telomeres and COVID-19
Germany now has a new government and a new health minister. It’s not like anyone will miss the previous one, Jens Spahn. The newly appointed Karl Lauterbach is professor for health economics at University of Cologne, on leave since 2005 because he was elected MP to the Bundestag. Lauterbach became very popular during this pandemic as a pro-science voice.
But I think at least as health minister he should finally stop tweeting random research papers before consulting actual experts. It confuses the public with bullshit. Like this recently, COVID-19 accelerates ageing:
This is the paper from the lab of Carlo Gaetano at the Istituti Clinici Scientici Maugeri di Pavia in Italy, and dear Prof Dr Lauterbach, there is a scientific reason why it ended up in MDPI, but I suspect you won’t guess it:
Alessia Mongelli , Veronica Barbi , Michela Gottardi Zamperla , Sandra Atlante , Luana Forleo , Marialisa Nesta , Massimo Massetti , Alfredo Pontecorvi , Simona Nanni , Antonella Farsetti , Oronzo Catalano , Maurizio Bussotti , Laura Adelaide Dalla Vecchia , Tiziana Bachetti , Fabio Martelli , Maria Teresa La Rovere , Carlo Gaetano Evidence for Biological Age Acceleration and Telomere Shortening in COVID-19 Survivors International Journal of Molecular Sciences (2021) doi: 10.3390/ijms22116151
COVID-19 shortens your telomeres and makes you age!
“In this study, a cohort of 117 COVID-19 survivors (post-COVID-19) and 144 non-infected volunteers (COVID-19-free) was analyzed using pyrosequencing of defined CpG islands previously identified as suitable for biological age determination. The results show a consistent biological age increase in the post-COVID-19 population, determining a DeltaAge acceleration of 10.45 ± 7.29 years (+5.25 years above the range of normality) compared with 3.68 ± 8.17 years for the COVID-19-free population (p < 0.0001). A significant telomere shortening parallels this finding in the post-COVID-19 cohort compared with COVID-19-free subjects (p < 0.0001).”
But of course. Everything is connected to telomere shortening, why not the coronavirus infection, that being the biggest research grant source these days.
Also, I am pretty sure Prof Dr Lauterbach never heard of PubPeer.
Claudia Colussi , Chiara Mozzetta , Aymone Gurtner , Barbara Illi , Jessica Rosati , Stefania Straino , Gianluca Ragone , Mario Pescatori , Germana Zaccagnini , Annalisa Antonini , Giulia Minetti , Fabio Martelli , Giulia Piaggio , Paola Gallinari , Christian Steinkuhler , Christian Steinkulher , Emilio Clementi 
, Carmela Dell’Aversana , Lucia Altucci , Antonello Mai , Maurizio C Capogrossi, Pier Lorenzo Puri, Carlo Gaetano HDAC2 blockade by nitric oxide and histone deacetylase inhibitors reveals a common target in Duchenne muscular dystrophy treatment Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2008) doi: 10.1073/pnas.0805514105
Maybe Lauterbach was impressed by the fact that Gaetano used to be professor and department head at the University of Frankfurt in Germany before he moved to Pavia, near Milan. Here another paper with Gaetano:
Germana Zaccagnini , Carlo Gaetano , Linda Della Pietra , Simona Nanni , Annalisa Grasselli , Antonella Mangoni , Roberta Benvenuto , Manuela Fabrizi , Silvia Truffa , Antonia Germani , Fabiola Moretti , Alfredo Pontecorvi , Ada Sacchi , Silvia Bacchetti , Maurizio C. Capogrossi , Antonella Farsetti Telomerase mediates vascular endothelial growth factor-dependent responsiveness in a rat model of hind limb ischemia Journal of Biological Chemistry (2005) doi: 10.1074/jbc.m414644200
Call me an anti-science troll, but I don’t trust scientists who publish manipulated figures like those and do nothing about it.
And it’s not like Gaetano is the only one to make that weird telomeres-ageing-COVID-19 connection, also my former PI (during my postdoc in Milan, Italy) Fabrizio d’Adda di Fagagna just announced that it’s the short telomeres which are the real COVID-19 risk:
Sara Sepe , Francesca Rossiello , Valeria Cancila , Fabio Iannelli , Valentina Matti , Giada Cicio , Matteo Cabrini , Eugenia Marinelli , Busola R Alabi , Alessia Di Lillo , Arianna Di Napoli , Jerry W Shay, Claudio Tripodo , Fabrizio D’Adda Di Fagagna DNA damage response at telomeres boosts the transcription of SARS‐CoV‐2 receptor ACE2 during aging EMBO reports (2021) doi: 10.15252/embr.202153658
“Ace2 promoter activity is DNA damage response (DDR)-dependent. […] We propose that during aging telomere dysfunction due to telomeric shortening or damage triggers DDR activation and this causes the upregulation of ACE2, the SARS-CoV-2 cell receptor, thus contributing to make the elderly more susceptible to the infection.”
Others are already earning money with telomere extension as COVID-19 therapy:
Science Breakthroughs
Nature Aging presents
Two new papers in the new Nature family Open Access journal Nature Aging.
One revives Klotho, that retched young-blood-rejuvenation magic factor of which Smut Clyde reminds that even Marco Ruggiero (the most toxic and ruthless quack of them all) deployed to enrich himself.
Here the University of Pittsburg press release, and if you are sceptical about young blood research, it also has the buzzword exosomes in it:
“Published today in Nature Aging, the study demonstrates that circulating shuttles called extracellular vesicles, or EVs, deliver genetic instructions for the longevity protein known as Klotho to muscle cells. Loss of muscle function and impaired muscle repair in old mice may be driven by aged EVs, which carry fewer copies of these instructions than those in young animals.
The findings are an important advance in understanding why the capacity for muscles to regenerate dwindles with age.
“We’re really excited about this research for a couple of reasons,” said senior author Fabrisia Ambrosio, Ph.D., director of rehabilitation for UPMC International and associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Pitt.”
This is the paper:
Sahu, A., Clemens, Z.J., Shinde, S.N. et al. Regulation of aged skeletal muscle regeneration by circulating extracellular vesicles. Nat Aging (2021). doi: 10.1038/s43587-021-00143-2
Hahaha, what a perfect name Dr Ambrosio has. Remember Jesse Karmazin’s scam enterprise Ambrosia? Which charged thousands of dollars from rich gits to inject them with blood from young people, and in USA that was approved by FDA as a clinical trial? The Guardian was of course very impressed.
The other paper in Nature Aging determined that Viagra may be the prevention and the cure for Alzheimer’s.
Fang, J., Zhang, P., Zhou, Y. et al. Endophenotype-based in silico network medicine discovery combined with insurance record data mining identifies sildenafil as a candidate drug for Alzheimer’s disease. Nat Aging (2021). doi: 10.1038/s43587-021-00138-z
If anything, the paper has a giant joke potential. Of course The Guardian was convinced:
“Using a large gene-mapping network, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic integrated genetic and other data to determine which of more than 1,600 Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs could be an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. They gave higher scores to drugs that target both amyloid and tau – two hallmarks of Alzheimer’s – compared with drugs that targeted just one or the other.
“Sildenafil, which has been shown to significantly improve cognition and memory in preclinical models, presented as the best drug candidate,” said Dr Feixiong Cheng, the study lead. Viagra is the brand name of sildenafil.
Researchers then used a database of claims from more than 7 million people in the US to examine the relationship between sildenafil and Alzheimer’s disease outcomes by comparing sildenafil users to non-users.
They found sildenafil users were 69% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than non-sildenafil users after six years of follow-up.”
Dementia is not a reason to skip an erection!
Frontiers in War Heroism
A reader sent me this study by Canadian scholars, published in Frontiers:
Farid Pazhoohi, Francesca Capozzi and Alan Kingstone Physical Disability Affects Women’s but Not Men’s Perception of Opposite-Sex Attractiveness Front. Psychol., (2021) doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.788287
They recruited some volunteers from Amazon Mechanical Turk, tested them on the Holy Big Five personality traits of psychology, and then showed them pictures of physically disabled people off the internet. Male participants were shown female images, and vice versa, while asked: “How attractive do you find this person?”. Participants’ sexual orientation was not assessed. Conclusion:
“In conclusion, our study showed women rate men with physical disabilities as higher on attractiveness than nondisabled men, which is also influenced by their social desirability bias.”
Dr Pazhoohi and colleagues decreed that while women may think they find disabled men sexy, they would never actually marry them because evolutionary psychology:
“Additionally, women’s attractiveness ratings of physically disabled men do not necessarily indicate they would actually want to date these men, a point that is reinforced by the social desirability data. Therefore, future research could investigate women’s level of interest in a short-term relationship as well as a long-term relationship with disabled men. It might be the case that women judge men with a disability hindered in their ability to secure and provide resources – a quality important in mate selection for women – thereby potentially reducing their interest in a long-term relationship with disabled men.”
Men secure and provide resources, women sit at home cooking, cleaning and taking care of the children. Simple science, really. Also, war is altruistic:
“For example, pairing photos of a man’s disability with a story to explain the origin of the disability, either a story of an altruistic act (e.g., through military or police service) or a story about a reckless accident (e. g., car crash from driving drunk) might result in different attractiveness perception. For instance, in light of the fact that women find war heroes sexually attractive (Rusch et al., 2015), women may infer a disability resulting from an altruistic act as attractive.”
What can you expect from Frontiers.
Environment
Toxic Russia
Undark has a long read about Norilsk, the industrial city behind the Arctic circle which was built by Stalin’s slave labourers to mine nickel and other precious metals. It became one of the most polluted places on the planet, if not the worst one.
“The company’s pollution has carved a barren landscape of dead and dying trees out of the taiga, or boreal forest, one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. Its wastewater has turned glacial rivers red. The acrid smoke that pours from its stacks is the worst sulfur dioxide pollution in the world. And last year, when melting permafrost beneath its giant complex gave way, a corroded holding tank burst and released 6.5 million gallons of diesel fuel into waters that flow to the Kara Sea. It was the largest oil spill in Arctic history. Although Norilsk Nickel maintains that no diesel fuel made it to the Arctic Ocean, the Russian government’s fisheries science agency told Inside Climate News that its testing showed that the contamination in fact had reached that far.”
“By law, sulfur dioxide is strictly limited in Russia — the nation’s air quality standard allows only a quarter of the pollution permitted under the standards of the United States or the European Union. In practice, sulfur dioxide has poured virtually uncontrolled out of Norilsk Nickel’s smokestacks for decades.”
The oligarch owners promised Putin to make Norilsk plant carbon neutral, clean up the environment and save the planet by having their nickel and palladium mines supply all the world with resources for green energy revolution.
News in Tweets
- As Tampa Bay Times reports, the leadership of University of Florida went quite far in their anticipatory obedience to the state’s far-right covidiot governor Ron DeSantis: “The report discusses several “challenges” faced by UF researchers who were working on COVID-19 with an unidentified state entity. It describes “external pressure to destroy” data as well as “barriers” to accessing, analyzing and publishing the numbers. Taken together, the report said, those problems “inhibited the ability of faculty to contribute scientific findings during a world-wide pandemic.” The report further states that UF employees were told “not to criticize the Governor of Florida or UF policies related to COVID-19 in media interactions.””
- US Right to Know finally obtained some emails from the University of Texas Medical Branch by virologist James Le Duc: “Though the February 2020 email indicated he downplayed the possibility of a lab leak, only two months later, Le Duc wrote in a separate correspondence to Phillip Russell, former president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, that it was “certainly possible a lab accident was the source of the epidemic and I also agree that we can’t trust the Chinese government.” Le Duc was no stranger to the Wuhan institute; he had sponsored and trained WIV scientists at the Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory he ran in Galveston, and records show he made multiple trips to Wuhan to train virologists there since 1986.““
- Elisabeth Bik reminds PLOS One of the many papers the journal has not retracted or corrected so far. Thing is, retractions are a very time- and work-intensive thing to do, some authors successfully sue, which is why most scholarly publishers simply never retract anything unless the authors ask for it themselves. PLOS One is currently the only one still trying to act on research fraud, after Journal of Biological Chemistry succumbed to Elsevier.
- China’s Ministry announces: “In order to intensify the investigation and punishment of false papers, the Ministry of Science and Technology has also established an active discovery mechanism and developed intelligent tools to monitor and analyze academic papers published in recent years, promptly discover clues of academic misconduct in the papers, and submit them to relevant authorities which investigate and handle in accordance with regulations.” The advanced tools currently being reading PubPeer and Smut Clyde’s articles on For Better Science.
- Nothing too silly for computational engineering papermills. They even generate bullshit biomedical papers, clinical trials even, to publish the abysmally bad forgeries in engineering journals. All this trolling duly passes peer review.
For Better Science 
`in one day (“Received 24 January 2021, Revised 25 February 2021, Accepted 27 February 2021“)’
That’s one month and one day, though.
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Indeed. See, the paper is reliable after all!
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https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tedxroubaix_tedxroubaix-roubaix-activity-6873263491189481472-a8mE
I guess he will talk more about IPL’s ground breaking discovery and his company APTEEUS
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