your science briefing for 04.23.2025

Why getting a routine full body scan is a terrible idea, the Plandemic grift is back and even more transparent, Gen Zs are joining Silicon Valley's cult of AGI, and more...

CT scans are immensely useful and popular, with as many as 375 million being done across the world every year. It blasts your body with a dose of radiation and creates an image based on how the X-rays travel through you. Some people even brag about getting a full body scan done on a regular basis to catch any trace of cancer early to get the upper hand. But since a CT scan uses radiation, it actually contributes to your cancer risk, so much so that these scans could be behind as many at 100,000 cases per year, making excess scans the fourth leading cause of preventable cancers, right after excessive alcohol consumption… (ICR)

Remember the notoriously over the top conspiracy documentary Plandemic, a briefly viral hodgepodge of anti-vaccination propaganda lazily repackaged to cast COVID as a bioweapon from China by a health influencer? Well, he’s back to now claim that the measles outbreak being exacerbated by our Secretary of Plagues as he’s on a mission to dismantle modern public health, is actually a… you’ll never believe it, a bioweapon. Which is a little disappointing because you’d think that when you no longer care about reality, you could just let your imagination roam and come up with an actually creative conspiracy theory. But I guess I’m asking too much here… (Wired)

Typhoid is a disease which seems like a villain from a bygone era, one in which there was little sanitation and drinking water was frequently contaminated. As we got much better infrastructure and water treatment became standard, we only have to worry if a major disaster strikes and knocks out our plumbing. Except that’s not the whole story. In underdeveloped parts of the world, outbreaks still happen on a regular basis which is now really worrying scientists as new, antibiotic resistant strains are starting to very rapid develop resistance to pretty much every antibiotic used to treat it. This means a return to regular typhoid vaccinations and an urgent search for new antibiotic classes, which is going to be very difficult in today’s political environment… (ScienceAlert)

Microplastics are everywhere with serious side-effects to our health while the plastics industry keeps pretending they care about fixing the rapidly escalating problem. In the meanwhile, a typical plastic water bottle breaks down into almost a quarter of a million tiny shards and is now being detected in rainwater, snow, rocks, and now, even clouds around the world. Even the coldest, most remote, oldest glaciers on the planet are not immune, with shards of plastic in their icepacks. Which is a major problem since they speed up glacier melt by absorbing heat, potentially thawing out ancient bacteria and viruses while oozing nanoplastic particles in the process… (Nautilus)

Look, AI can do great things when used correctly, but ultimately, it’s just a tool which needs to be deployed with care and a good understanding of the problem you want to solve with its help. The idea that these tools are conscious and think about things you tell them is just cargo cult computer science advanced by merchants of technobabble who want a handy and difficult to scrutinize excuse to do as they please. And yet, in a recent survey, a quarter of Gen Z users think AI is conscious, and 52% think it will be soon enough. Maybe because Gen Z largely grew up thinking of their computers and phones as magical black boxes, they’re highly susceptible to AI hype… (Futurism)