Peer review expert journal accidentally publishes fake AI image with gibberish and giant gonads on a rat

By Jo Nova

This paper shows exactly how good “Peer Review” is

It’s not just that a clever AI image slipped through peer review, it’s that it was garishly fake in a supersize kind of way. Scientifically everything about it was radioactive satire and yet it still got through “peer review”. The words are gibberish. The editors didn’t even run a spell checker on it before publishing it, let alone the gaze of a single trained biologist in the field.

The paper has been retracted thanks to the real peer review which happened on social media. This was a case of X (formerly Twitter) saves the day. Where normal peer review can take up to two years (if you are an unpopular skeptic) it was only three days from the X review to retraction.

The Telegraph sums it up:

A scientific paper purporting to show the signalling pathway of sperm stem cells has met with widespread ridicule after it depicted a rodent with an anatomically eye-watering appendage and four giant testicles.

The creature, labelled “rat”, was also sitting upright in the manner of a squirrel, while the graphic was littered with nonsensical words such as “dissilced”, […]

Skeptics visit the poster-child of severely bleached reefs, and it’s just fine 18 months later…

By Jo Nova

18 months ago the coral on John Brewer Reef was dead according to The Guardian, but Jennifer Marohasy, Peter Ridd and Rowan Dean took the risk of going back to the same dead reef to make a short documentary on it and found the same coral, 80 kilometers offshore and it, and the whole area around it, is flourishing.

According to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park authority, the area was surveyed in April 2022 and the damage was classed as “severe”. According to them, 60-90% of the reef was bleached. It was so bad that when the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about “500 kilometers of severe bleaching” it was John Brewer Reef that they picked for the feature photo.

Just like The Guardian:

The Guardian

Scientists, apparently, were dreading the damage to come (of the reef that recovered):

If the John Brewer reef was sick, most of the Great Barrier Reef was bound to be sick too, said Graham Readfearn:

“This is one of the healthiest reefs off Townsville and one of the best reefs on the whole Great Barrier Reef. So for these corals to be stressed and damaged … well, […]

RFK Jnr: We’re developing bioweapons with 36,000 scientists

By Jo Nova

Maybe the world should talk about bioweapon research?

The way Robert F Kennedy Jnr describes it to Tucker Carlson, it seems Anthony Fauci was not only a “director of health”, he was also a director of bioweapons. And he was the most well paid public servant in the country, thanks to a 68% raise to his salary — which came not from the health department but from the Pentagon. It’s an odd conflict of interest.

Kennedy points out that to deploy an infectious bioweapon you need a pre-prepared successful vaccine so the infectious agent doesn’t make your side sick too. He claims there are something like 36,000 scientists involved in bioweapons research or gain-of-function work in countless labs in the US and overseas. “We have no idea how many there are”.

Kennedy calls it the inverse of medicine, where life scientists are really “death scientists” who make diseases more deadly. In 2014 three bugs escaped from three different labs in high profile breaks, one was smallpox.

“RFK: “Anthony Fauci got all the responsibility for bio-weapons development….[After three bugs escaped] in 2014, 300 scientists wrote to President Obama and said ‘you’ve gotta shut down Anthony Fauci, […]

Artificial meat could make 25 times more CO2 than real beef

By Jo Nova

It turns out that replicating a cow in a laboratory is not as simple as expected. A new study points at some very major and potentially very hard to solve problems with laboratory meat. We can scale up vats of bacteria in factories easily, but animal cells are very different. Muscle cells not only need a sterile complicated broth but they are basically a sitting-duck feast for any bacteria.

Quote of the day:

“USD 2 billion has already been invested in this technology, but we don’t really know if it will be better for the environment,” Risner said.

Think of a cow as being an entire industrial production campus for meat — to deal with chemical toxins it comes with a customized chemical factory (a liver) and two industrial filter systems (kidneys), and a full immune defense force on a 24 hour watch to deal with the constant flood of microbial contaminants. Cows also have nutrient intake systems to break down grass into separate chemical components which are stored, transported and chemically tweaked to suit. All departments are self repairing, and are equipped with their own laboratory testing, messaging and alert service. The sterile […]

A map that might change the way you think about the world

By Jo Nova

Where do people live?

These marvelous spike maps mark out a 3D representation of the population density on each two-kilometer-square pixel of Earth’s surface. There are no outlines for countries, yet for the most part we can still see where the land meets the sea.

Credit goes to Alistair Rae, formerly a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Sheffield. He used the EU’s population density data with the mapping tool Aerialod to create these glorious 3D maps.

And the map shouts “India”.

UPDATE: Do click to see the larger maps!

Alistair Rae, Stats, Maps n Pix Click to enlarge | CC 2.0

This is the global distribution of 8 billion people. The abundance of South East Asia is undeniable, as is the emptiness of the Sahara and the vacancy of Siberia. Antarctica is an invisible continent.

Australia and New Zealand are barely there. We can see how isolated Perth Australia is (where I live).

Annotated by Jo to show friends in the USA where Perth is.

Hawaii and Auckland likewise, stand apart.

Most maps originally came from Alastair Rae on Twitter in 2020 and later from the Visual Capitalist […]

Zinc tablets associated with 40% less death, half the ICU admission, and a quicker release from hospital

By Jo Nova

Two weeks treatment costs $3.75*

In Tunisia from February to May last year 470 people with Covid were randomly either given 50mg of zinc each day for two weeks or given a placebo. In the zinc group, after 30 days, 6% had died, and 5% had been admitted to intensive care. Meanwhile in the placebo group 9% had died and 11% had gone to the ICU. People taking zinc got out of hospital a few days before the people who didn’t.

Since there were no serious adverse effects in anyone from taking zinc, it’s obvious that good governments were handing out zinc tablets in carparks, schools and shopping malls, thus saving lives, millions of dollars, and keeping hospitals half empty. The rich world looks to healthcare systems like El Salvador. Shame about the other sclerotic swamps and backwaters of crony medicine. Sometimes countries have too much money to get good treatment.

In Australia, the government spent billions on experimental barely-tested vaccines with hidden results and secret contracts. Our TGA told everyone the vaccines were safe and useful but fined someone $8,000 for advertising on their website that ivermectin and zinc lozenges were effective against Covid. But who […]

Despite all that CO2, the world’s corals are doing OK

By Jo Nova

Dr Peter Ridd compiled the statistics on coral reefs around the world, and even though China has installed a million megawatts of coal fired power in the last twenty years, there’s no evidence that corals are suffering significantly.

Statistics on corals barely existed before 1980, and didn’t get semi reasonable until 1998 or so. But with twenty years of data there is no evidence suggesting we need to send in the SWAT teams with floating shade sails, giant fans, breeding teams, or sunscreen for staghorn coral.

We do however need to send in the SWAT team to rescue our universities.

Hard Coral around the world is not suffering a mass die-off due to climate change, GWPF

Bleached is not killed

Academic shaman have implied (tacitly) that bleached coral is like dead coral, but instead bleaching is more like home redecoration and the corals recover surprisingly fast. But amongst all this noise of loss and recovery, and with such short term data it’s been hard to see the big picture.

The uncertainty bars on early coral studies expand like an emergency flare. But notice that there is no significant, distinctive response from corals despite CO2 being […]

Supercomputer prophesy of the Sixth Mass Extinction coming “like an asteroid” is a UN land grab

Art by NoName_13

By Jo Nova

The prophesy of the Sixth Mass extinction has popped up again with hyperbolic modelling to scare us out of our money and just in time for a UN convention. As Steve Milloy says it’s just a giant land and power grab by the UN, which has just finished another meeting for “Biodiversity” — it’s the Baby-IPCC for biology. It was co-hosted by Canada and China. They couldn’t even be bothered thinking up a new acronym so it was called COP15. Rinse, repeat, and press go for spin.

Journalists can cut-n’-paste the formula and adjectives from the IPCC climate press releases: blah etc blah, …close to 200 countries reached “a watershed agreement to stem the loss of nature worldwide” (but not the US). Somehow the “bleary eyed delegates” (who arrived in jets), have waved their magic wands and cast a spell to save the Earth. The solution, apparently, is for the rest of us not to use about a third of our own country, or something like that. The UN bureaucrats can decide what use is OK, and punish us with threats of “endangered listings” if we don’t spend enough on their […]

Blockbuster: Fingerprint genetic evidence strongly suggests Covid was bio-engineered

By Jo Nova

Why-O-Why has this taken so long?

Finally we have a preprint paper assessing SARS2 as if it might have been an engineered product from a laboratory. We now know it was very likely a lab product and we can probably even name the tools that were used to tweak it.

The virus appears to be too clean, lacking in the noise that all its wild type cousins have. Random evolution in bats and pangolins just doesn’t work like this. SARS2 has the unmistakable fingerprint pattern of a virus that not-so-coincidentally is perfectly suited to being manipulated with two of the most common laboratory enzymes available available at a biolab near you for $150. (Shop here, here, or here).

The authors stress that even though their results strongly suggest this virus was a “synthetic” virus, that doesn’t tell us whether it was intended to harm, or was released deliberately. But their results do cast a very different light on the rush to declare the wet markets were to blame, and the too-fast calls, based on no evidence, that anyone who said otherwise was a conspiracy theorist. This kind of analysis could have been done in Feb-March 2020 and […]

Just like that: European Fertilizer production down 70%

The vainglorious shunning of gas production in Europe in quest for weather salvation will hurt the world’s poor the most. As Europe scrambles to replace the astonishing loss of 70% of their own fertilizer production they will be competing to import fertilizer from stretched markets around the world.

The price rises in gas, fertilizer and next year in food, will hurt the poorest of the poor far more than the theoretical temperature rise ever could. Thank the EU. Thank the Greens.

Click to enlarge: It’s a wipeout

Higher gas prices deepen Europe’s fertiliser crunch, threaten food crisis

Europe’s fertilizer crunch is deepening with more than two-thirds of production capacity halted by soaring gas costs, threatening farmers and consumers far beyond the region’s borders.

As Europe becomes a net importer of fertilizer, the fallout from the supply crunch will spread. The region will start competing for scarce supplies with poorer nations, especially in Africa, where food insecurity is exacerbated by persistent droughts and conflict.

These prices cause third degree burns:

Fertiliser shortage threatens farming, food security in Europe

According to the CRU Group, a business intelligence firm specialising in commodities, fertiliser producers in the EU […]

Climate change causes spread of brain-eating amoeba

by Jo Nova

And you thought I was being satirical, but no, it’s just today’s installment of two-star climate porn from The Guardian.

What the journalist didn’t mention was that one degree of warming will save 166,000 lives a year, but maybe kill one more person per annum from amebic meningoencephalitis.

Let’s spend a trillion dollars:

How the climate crisis is fueling the spread of a brain-eating amoeba

Naegleria fowleri grows in warm fresh water, making it well-suited to proliferate as temperatures rise in the US

Katherine Gammon, The Guardian

Naegleria grows best in warm waters – temperatures above 30C, and can tolerate temperatures of up to 46C, says Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona. That makes it well-suited to spread in a warming climate.

“It likes warm surface waters during the summer in the northern latitudes,” he says.

The amoeba causes an illness called primary amebic meningoencephalitis, and while getting sick is rare – between 2012 to 2021, only 31 cases were reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control – it’s incredibly lethal. According to the CDC, only four […]

It’s almost like corals have been doing this for millions of years. 90% bleached but recovered in just two years?

It’s like a team of obsessive compulsive scientists turned up to capture a magic show in slow-mo

They descended on Palmyra Atoll in 2009 and kept going for ten years, taking 1,500 photos across eighty plots of corals. They looked at all the living things on the ocean floor, and not just the hard corals, but the algae, the microalgae, and the turf. They followed plots where waves crashed and plots that were calm. Then they went through the photos with detailed digital-tracing and image analysis and tracked them — not just through one, but two full bleaching cycles and what they found was recovery. Stability!

In May this year their 10-year study of Palmyra Atoll was finally published

Palmyra is an isolated atoll, 1,300 km south west of Hawaii, with a tiny population. It’s about as pristine as anything can get, unaffected by human pollution, except of course, for CO2 — that fertilizer from the sky which is everywhere. If it was a problem, this was a good place to find out.

In 2015 a savage pool of warm water arrived that bleached not just ten or twenty percent of the corals but blitzed right through ninety percent. It […]

Tetanus vaccines work so well we may not need the ten year boosters, only a 30 year one…

Who knew? A study came out way back in 2016 showing that most people still had antibodies against tetanus, or “Lockjaw” even 60 years after their last vaccination. It’s a reminder of what successful vaccination can look like. It also shows the extraordinary ability of the human immune system to acquire lifelong protection — that doesn’t happen with all diseases, but it does with things like influenza, polio, measles, and mumps, and possibly tetanus and diphtheria.

The study tested the blood of 546 people. Given the striking results the authors suggest that the need for a ten year booster should be reassessed, but six years after the study came out the CDC and the Australian government are still saying we need “ten year boosters”. Is anyone even looking at this data?

Notably, shifting to a 30 year schedule could save the US government US$280 million each year. But Big-Pharma won’t be too happy about that. It may also prevent “80–160 cases of brachial plexus neuritis” — a rare side effect.

New Study Suggests We Don’t Actually Need a Tetanus Booster Every 10 Years

by Fiona Macdonald, April 2016

We’ve all grown up knowing that we need […]

RCT study shows parachutes make no difference when jumping from aircraft

Sometimes Randomized Controlled Trials are not the golden trophies of science that some say they are. (Like yesterday’s Ivermectin study). While some say that nothing less than an RCT will do, actually, sometimes it’s just silly to do one. And all RCT’s will wallow on the rocks of confirmation bias if they try to study something people already know the answer to.

For a long time there were no RCT studies showing benefits from parachutes — yet people continued to use them. It wasn’t until 2018 that a paper was finally published, surprisingly showing that there was no statistical difference in jumping with or without one from an average altitude of 4,000m.

This satirical paper makes real points about the flaws of the hallowed RCT’s:

It’s easy to design an RCT to show the opposite of the truth. Reading the abstract of a paper is rarely enough. Reading a news headline, even less so. Details are everything. RCT’s are not random if the test subjects have opinions and can self-select themselves out of the experiment.

These authors are black-belt professionals at medico-lingo. Those that appreciate the wit will want to read the whole thing rather than just the snippets below […]

Surreal: Fake Russian claims of bioweapons labs, not so fake

Russia says the US has bioweapon research labs in Ukraine, an outrageous claim that was instantly fact-checked to oblivion until Senator Marco Rubio stopped the show by asking a US official under oath: Does Ukraine have chemical and biological weapons?

Victoria Nuland, US Under Secretary of State, could have said “No” but instead she said:

Ukraine has Biological research facilities… which in fact we are quite concerned about — that Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of. So we are working with Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into Russian hands should they approach…

So not only is there some kind of research going on, but it’s so safe and fine that the US is worried the Russians might get it. And despite the Russians queuing for days in tanks at the border, no one thought to secure or destroy it?

Then the US official who hid secret labs and worries about what the Russians will do tells everyone that

“It’s classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they are planning to do themselves…”



I’m not sure whether to hope the US secures […]

Hm? A tiny part of the Covid spike is the same as something Moderna patented in 2016

Just another day in a cold Biotech War?

“The international team of researchers suggest the virus may have mutated to have a furin cleavage site during experiments on human cells in a lab.”

Image: Scientific Animations

To put this in perspective the whole virus is essentially a code with 29,000 bases in a row, and this story is about a sequence of 19.

The code is in the same four letter “alphabet”, more or less, as all life on Earth — A, T*, C and G. But in this new discovery there are 19 particular bases (or nucleotides) in a row. These are the bases that were so useful that Moderna patented the sequence in 2016. Oddly, no other coronavirus has that sequence. Indeed, nothing else in a virus or animal cell does either.

The reason these 19 bases are so interesting is that they make up the critical point called the “Furin Cleavage Site”. Furin is an enzyme inside our cells that acts like a specialist scissor, cutting only certain proteins in an exact way. A number of nasty germs sneak in and use our Furin snippy tools too — like HIV and Ebola, and […]

mRNA vaccines produce huge amounts of Spike protein and for two months!

They told us the mRNA in the injections wouldn’t last long, barely a few days, and the protein spikes made from the vaccines would only stick around for “a few weeks”. But now, after 60% of the worlds population has been vaccinated, now we find out that the CCP bioweapon spikes are still there in lymph nodes two months after the last injection, and so is some of the mRNA. And we don’t know how much longer those spikes keep churning out, because no one has done that study.

Pause for a moment to wonder how it is that we could inject four billion people “for health reasons” yet no one knew the most basic things about how it worked, like, how long the vaccine mRNA might survive, and keep producing spikes for, or how many spikes it might keep making.

Now comes the bad news that mRNA-vaccinated people may be making more spikes than severely ill Covid patients, and that the mRNA survives much longer than anyone expected.

A Health Public Policy Nightmare

Robert Malone

The hidden highlight (lede) buried in this peer reviewed paper is that protein production of spike in people vaccinated with […]

Natural immunity, still strong and durable 20 months later (no boosters needed)

. Scientific Animations

Handy!: A group at Johns Hopkins checked 295 people who had caught Covid before (and tested positive). Amazingly, all but two of them still had antibodies and there was “no indication” that the antibodies were declining.

Natural immunity doesn’t always work this well. There are plenty of diseases where protection wanes after six months, like RSV, or Norovirus, and many common cold coronaviruses.

Natural Immunity to COVID-19 Detected at 20 Months After Infection: Study

Zachary Stieber, Epoch Times

Protection against the virus that causes COVID-19 among the recovered was detected by researchers at 20 months post-infection, adding to the body of evidence that such protection, known as natural immunity, is long-lasting.

Researchers found antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) in 99 percent of study participants who tested positive for COVID-19, with some having had the illness as long as 20 months prior.

“The major takeaway is that natural immunity … is strong and durable,” [Dr Dorry] Segev told The Epoch Times in an email.

Dr. Dorry Segev, the director of the Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation at Johns Hopkins University.

[…]

Game-changer: US Military Data shows much higher rate of vaccination injuries

A Bomb: Last week a lawyer for military personnel spoke about the extraordinary rise in medical conditions that occurred after vaccination against Covid. This is one of the largest and best kept medical datasets in the world, the people in it are mostly young and healthy, and the whistleblowers have signed legal declarations.

The military data suggests most national vaccination databases suffer from gross underreporting of adverse events.

In the World-We-Thought-We-Lived-In, this would have been Frontpage news the next day. Calls should be coming in from all around to pause vaccinations immediately until it can be reviewed.

The three whistleblowers noticed strange patterns in the patients they were treating. They trawled through data on medical billing from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED).

Aside from the [300%] spike in miscarriage diagnoses, there was an almost 300% increase in cancer diagnoses (from a five-year average of 38,700 per year to 114,645 in the first 11 months of 2021). There was also a 1,000% increase in neurological issues, which increased from a baseline average of 82,000 to 863,000.

—CovidWorld

The event was a five hour hearing held by US Senator Ron Johnson. Lawyer Thomas Renz has […]

Good News! Many Vax Mandates end in England, Ireland, Bolivia, Czech Republic, Denmark

It’s a miracle. Common sense. For the first time in two years government rules are shrinking.

A lot of this is thanks to Omicron, the gift from Africa.

In terms of infections the UK is past the peak, but most of Europe is a viral Firestorm. France just recorded a half a million new Covid cases in a single day, and with a test positivity of 31% awesome percent. Something like 1 – 3% of the entire French nation caught Covid yesterday.

All the past awful waves shrink before Omicron. | Source OWID

Despite the bonfire of cases, the deaths are lower than any wave:

A glorious contrast in graphs:

Deaths per million in Europe | OWID ..

With the disaster averted in the hospitals, suddenly political leaders are changing tune. We might think this is all just thanks to the magic of Omicronic nicety, but cases are still rising in places like Denmark and France and yet the Governments are already pulling back. That’s surely thanks to the pressure of mass protests. Without that pain and anger, political leaders wouldn’t be acting so early.

Though it helps that millions of people are catching Omicron and […]