Free Republic

A scholarly paper written by 5 people, four of them from MIT, one from Wellesley College, takes a skeptical look at skeptics of the mask mandates, and has a hard time condemning them as much as the authors clearly want to. Nevertheless, in their conclusion, they write of “horrifying ends” achieved by people using scientific inquiry by the book. Pixy Misa at Ace of Spades HQ sums it up:Researchers at MIT are horrified to find that mask mandate skeptics are doing rigorous research and not blaming everything on white supremacy. I am not making this up.A Twitter poster called commie...

Flu scientists are hoping to vaccinate themselves against another outbreak of a crippling controversy. In a letter published this week by Nature and Science (see p. 612), 22 researchers make their case for launching potentially risky experiments with the H7N9 avian influenza virus, which emerged earlier this year in China and which some scientists fear could spark a deadly human pandemic. The scientists, who mostly work in U.S.-funded labs, also detail the safety and security precautions that they would take to prevent the possibly dangerous viruses they create from escaping from the lab—or falling into the hands of terrorists. In...

A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. As The Washington Post reports, BioMed Central - a well-known publication of peer-reviewed journals - shows a partial list of the retracted articles suggests most of them were written by scholars at universities in China. The Committee on Publication Ethics stated, it "has become aware of systematic, inappropriate attempts to manipulate the peer review processes of several journals... that need to be retracted."Peer review is the vetting process...

Non-Random Equidistant Letter Sequence Extensions in the Hebrew BibleBy Richard E. Sherman, FCAS, MAAA, and Nathan Jacobi, Ph.D. Summary Bible codes are equidistant letter sequences (ELSs) that appear in the Hebrew Bible. Extended Bible codes are found by first locating a single word ELS with a given skip and then by searching for extensions in good Hebrew on both sides, continuing at the same skip. The longer an extended ELS is, the more improbable it is. A Markov chain model was developed for estimating the probability of chance occurrence of extended ELSs of a variety of different lengths. Monte Carlo...