Obviously, no amount of evidence, data, trends, facts, studies, or science will ever convince most 'public health officials' that masks aren't doing squat to stop the spread of COVID-19. Cases and deaths continue to spike (yes, many of these are super-sensitive PCR test-driven numbers, but still) despite the fact that well over 90% of the country are complying with their absurd mandates. Yet, predictably, the virus keeps going right on virusing, as highly contagious respiratory viruses, unfortunately, tend to do, especially once cold weather hits.

Nevertheless, those of us who are mask skeptics have a difficult chore in front of us. Given that most of the country is under a mask mandate of some form or another, we can point to spikes all day AFTER these mandates were put in place only to have our opponents simply say, "Look how bad it would have been WITHOUT masks!"

It's a tough argument to counter given the fact that our overlords have sold masking as a low-cost, easy "solution" that's totally worth it even if they "save one life," or something (nevermind the health risks - let's censor docs who talk about those!). So, how DO we prove that things wouldn't have been worse without masks? One way is to look at data from the few free states remaining.

In Florida, for example, most counties have so far bravely refused to implement mask mandates while others, usually in high population centers, have done so. Justin Hart and the team at Rational Ground (follow them on Twitter here - it's worth it) just released a comprehensive data analysis of masked vs non-masked counties in the state. A total of 22 of 67 counties in the state have implemented a mask order at some point during the period of May 1 through December 15. It may not sound like many, but these include almost all of Florida's largest metro areas. To be more than fair, if an area added a mask order at some point during the outbreak, the study's authors gave a 14 day period to allow time for cases to begin subsiding. "Cases were summed for both mandate and non-mandate jurisdictions and adjusted per 100,000 people for days the mandates were or were not in effect," wrote the authors, describing the methodology used.

While water blasting at a wall of frozen mud in Yukon, Canada, a gold miner made an extraordinary discovery: a perfectly preserved wolf pup that had been locked in permafrost for 57,000 years. The remarkable condition of the pup, named Zhùr by the local Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in people, gave researchers a wealth of insights about her age, lifestyle, and relationship to modern wolves. The findings appear December 21 in the journal Current Biology.

"She's the most complete wolf mummy that's ever been found. She's basically 100% intact — all that's missing are her eyes," says first author Julie Meachen, an associate professor of anatomy at Des Moines University. "And the fact that she's so complete allowed us to do so many lines of inquiry on her to basically reconstruct her life."

About four decades ago, reindeer in the high alpine Nordfjella region of Norway began to engage in a bizarre, new behavior: They would eat each other's antlers.

Termed osteophagia, the act actually isn't all that rare amongst hoofed mammals. Animals have been known to gnaw on shed antlers to make up for mineral deficiencies in their diets. However, in this case, reindeer were eating antlers straight off their herdmates' heads!

In 1984, surveys suggested that about 8% of Nordfjella reindeer showed signs of having their antlers gnawed. In 2009, that rate climbed to 72 percent. In a new survey published Thursday to the journal Scientific Reports, researchers from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research found that 97 percent of reindeer had had their antlers eaten. And that's for both males and females - reindeer and Caribou are the only two members of the Cervidae (deer) family in which both sexes grow significant antlers.

Adding to the mystery of this rampant antler cannibalization is the fact that all of the roughly 2,000 reindeer in the region are now dead, culled between August 10, 2017 and May 1, 2018 because the herd had become infected by Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a contagious, lethal disease caused by a misfolded form of a normal protein called a prion.

With no dissolved oxygen to sustain animals or plants, ocean anoxic zones are areas where only microbes suited to the environment can live.

"You don't get big fish," said UC Santa Barbara biogeochemist Morgan Raven. "You don't even get charismatic zooplankton." But although anoxic oceans may seem alien to organisms like ourselves that breathe oxygen, they're full of life, she said.

These strange ecosystems are expanding, thanks to climate change — a development that is of concern for fisheries and anyone who relies on oxygen-rich oceans. But what piques Raven's interest is the changing chemistry of the oceans — the Earth's largest carbon sink — and how it could move carbon from the atmosphere to long-term reservoirs like rocks.

To explain what sets human apart from their ape relatives, researchers have long hypothesized that it is not so much the DNA sequence, but rather the regulation of the genes (i.e. when, where and how strongly the gene is expressed), that plays the key role. However, precisely pinpointing the regulatory elements which act as 'gene dimmers' and are positively selected is a challenging task that has thus far defeated researchers.

Positive selection: a hint of the functional relevance of a mutation

Most random genetic mutations neither benefit nor harm an organism: they accumulate at a steady rate that reflects the amount of time that has passed since two living species had a common ancestor. In contrast, an acceleration in that rate in a particular part of the genome can reflect a positive selection for a mutation that helps an organism to survive and reproduce, which makes the mutation more likely to be passed on to future generations. Gene regulatory elements are often only a few nucleotides long, which makes estimating their acceleration rate particularly difficult from a statistical point of view.

Think about great movies, novels, and plays. They probe the physical world of flesh and blood and, at the same time, draw us into things spiritual and immaterial: the sublime and the ridiculous; love, heroism, envy and prejudice; good and evil.

But a strain of modern thought says that those immaterial things aren't real. Darwinian materialism holds that all species evolved from the first tiny cell in a process without guidance or design. And the human mind is no exception. Harvard evolutionist E. O. Wilson describes it as just a byproduct of the physical brain, and the brain as "the product of genetic evolution by natural selection."

On this view, if fiction reaches toward a higher plane, then it reaches toward an illusion, since matter and energy are the only fundamental reality. Free will, good and evil, love and heroism, all are a mirage.

As for our favorite movies, novels, and plays, along with our favorite songs and paintings, all of these artistic creations, according to Wilson, have "been produced by the genetic evolution of our nervous and sensory tissues."

He's serious. "To treat them as other than objects of biological inquiry," he says, "is simply to aim too low."¹

Enigmatic booming sounds called the "Seneca Guns" have reverberated off parts of coastal North Carolina for more than 150 years, with some powerful enough to rattle windows and vibrate buildings.

Now, scientists are using seismic data to pinpoint where the explosions come from and what causes them.

They presented their findings on Dec. 7 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), held virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But spoiler alert: They haven't quite solved the mystery yet.

The name Seneca Guns comes not from North Carolina, but from Lake Seneca in upstate New York where a similar phenomenon occurred. The lake's ominous booming sounds, described in 1850 by the writer James Fenimore Cooper in his short story "The Lake Gun," had at the time been heard for centuries.

A wealth of new research in glacier and sea ice extent show modern Iceland is 2-4°C colder than all of the last 8000 years except for a slightly colder late 19th century. Even the 1700s were warmer with less ice than today in and around Iceland.

A new study (Geirsdóttir et al., 2020) now affirms peak Holocene warmth at least "∼3-4 °C above modern in Iceland" prevailed throughout much of the last 8000 years. Data from tree growth, glacier-induced soil erosion, algae productivity, sea ice biomarker proxies (IP25), and other climate indices affirm these conclusions.

Harning et al., 2020 report an overall 7°C Holocene cooling trend In Iceland's surrounding sea surface temperatures (SST).

"In terms of foraminifera-reconstructed SST there is an overall trend of cooling throughout the last 8 ka from ~10 °C to ~3 °C."

A viable quantum internet — a network in which information stored in qubits is shared over long distances through entanglement — would transform the fields of data storage, precision sensing and computing, ushering in a new era of communication.

This month, scientists at Fermilab, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory, and their partners took a significant step in the direction of realizing a quantum internet.

In a paper published in PRX Quantum, the team presents for the first time a demonstration of a sustained, long-distance (44 kilometers of fiber) teleportation of qubits of photons (quanta of light) with fidelity greater than 90%. The qubits were teleported over a fiber-optic network using state-of-the-art single-photon detectors and off-the-shelf equipment.

"We're thrilled by these results," said Fermilab scientist Panagiotis Spentzouris, head of the Fermilab quantum science program and one of the paper's co-authors. "This is a key achievement on the way to building a technology that will redefine how we conduct global communication."

In a new paper published in Stem Cell Reports, Bhanu Telugu and co-inventor Chi-Hun Park of the University of Maryland (UMD) Department of Animal and Avian Sciences show for the first time that newly established stem cells from pigs, when injected into embryos, contributed to the development of only the organ of interest (the embryonic gut and liver), laying the groundwork for stem cell therapeutics and organ transplantation. Telugu's start-up company, Renovate Biosciences Inc. (RBI), was founded with the goal of leveraging the potential of stem cells to treat terminal diseases that would otherwise require organ transplants, either by avoiding the need for transplants altogether or creating a new pipeline for growing transplantable human organs. With the number of people who suffer from organ failures and the 20 deaths per day in the U.S. alone purely from a lack of available organs for transplant, finding a new way to provide organs and therapeutic options to transplant patients is a critical need. In this paper, Telugu and his team are sharing their first steps towards growing fully transplantable human organs in a pig host.

"This paper is really about using the stem cells from pigs for the first time and showing that they actually can be injected into embryos and only go to the endodermal target organs like the liver, which is very important for delivering safe therapeutic solutions going forward," says Telugu. "This is an important milestone. It's a pipe dream in a way because a lot of things need to work out between here and full organ transplantation, but this paper sets the stage for all our future research. We can't really just go and start working with humans in work like this, so we started with pig-to-pig transfer in this paper, working with the stem cells and putting them back into other pigs to track the process to make sure it is safe for liver production as proof-of-concept."

Telugu and his team pitched this work at UMD Bioscience Day on behalf of his company, RBI, and received the Inventor Pitch Award and the UMD Invention of the Year Award in 2018. In order to protect the intellectual property, Telugu worked with the UMD Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) to secure patents and open the work up for additional fundraising to carry this technology through the preclinical and clinical stages. The Maryland Stem Cell Foundation provided some funding to advance this work, and Telugu is thankful that Maryland funds technologies in the human stem cell space.