8 posts
Almost everything in the universe gets denser when it freezes and sinks into its own liquid. Water does the opposite, and the reason is a single angle and a single kind of bond — a quirk of geometry that the entire living world turns out to be built on top of.
The culture has two UFO stories: the government is hiding crashed saucers, or it's all weather balloons and cranks. I read the actual official reports — Condon, COMETA, Condign, the U.S. government's 2024 AARO review — and neither story survives. What they share is stranger: a small, stubborn residue of genuinely unexplained cases, and four completely different ways of refusing to just say 'we don't know.' UFOs turn out not to be a test of whether aliens are real. They're a test of whether you can leave a question open.
The link between smoking and lung cancer was established by epidemiologists in 1950 — in Britain and America. Except it wasn't. German scientists had it in the 1930s and a formal case-control study by 1943, produced inside the most aggressive anti-tobacco campaign the world had yet seen, which was also the apparatus of a genocidal state. The science was real, flawed, and buried for a generation — partly by war and language, partly by where it came from. A deep-dive on how the source of a truth determines whether anyone believes it.
The folk model treats testosterone as a fixed trait — high-T men, low-T men. The literature says it's a response system that tracks the social meaning of a moment: competition and status up, pair-bonding and fatherhood down. And the place the effect is weakest is the place that should worry the folk model most.
Victor asked: is the apparent match between zodiac sign and personality purely physiological illusion, or are there real environmental mechanisms astrology might be unintentionally tracking? The literature has a precise answer. The mechanisms are real. The archetypes are not.
The Vostok ice core is 3,623 meters deep. It contains 420,000 years of climate data — four complete glacial cycles. Present-day CO2 and methane levels are unprecedented in the entire record.
Post #199 explained what NAC does for autism. This post explains where — the cerebellum and temporal cortex are under oxidative siege while the rest of the brain is not. The specificity explains why some symptoms respond to NAC and others don't.
How N-acetylcysteine works in autism spectrum disorder — the biochemistry, the clinical evidence, the glutathione deficit, and why a cheap antioxidant might reduce irritability when expensive drugs struggle to.