Scientia Press

Concerned over shortages of face masks, especially N-95 respirators for medical personnel caring for COVID-19 patients, U.S. medical authorities have discouraged the use of face masks by the public.  But a good deal of evidence (Jefferson T 2007) shows that face masks reduced the risk of infection by 68% in SARS, an analogue of COVID-19.  This suggests that wearing face masks can go far toward slowing the spread of the pandemic.  Therefore, we need to find a way to provide enough of them not just to protect medical personnel but also to protect the public.  Reusing them seems a very attractive strategy. Continue reading »

The medical establishment has been overlooking three simple steps to stop the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue reading »

Contrary to media reports, there are existing effective methods of treating respiratory and disseminated infections that resemble the one caused by the COVID-19 virus.  Continue reading »

Sekhmet (“The Mighty One”), the lion-headed goddess of ancient Egypt, was dreaded for her bloody rampages.  Yet she became the protector of kings and a favorite personal goddess of millions of Egyptians.

Why did Egyptians have a goddess who required such assiduous and even obsessive propitiation?  Why did other Egyptian goddesses play roles similar to Sekhmet’s?  What explains Sekhmet’s dual nature as destroyer and protector?  Why was she called the Eye of Ra?  Why was she originally depicted with an oval disk on her head?

We now have good answers to these questions.  But in order to understand them, we need to see why we should think that Sekhmet was Planet Venus.  And that requires us to investigate a major case of scientific rejectionism. Continue reading »

Students have long struggled, often in vain, with the rules of Latin grammar. The structure of sentences in Latin seems strange to the mind of an Indo-European native speaker. Also, Latin’s heavy use of gerundive and absolute constructions: all those verbal nouns entail a very different pattern of thinking than goes on in modern Indo-European languages. Continue reading »

There are two sides to every story. Judges rightly admonish juries to check out both sides before coming to a conclusion. Our entire system of adversarial justice is built on this principle. But under surveillance by FBI in the 2001 anthrax mailings case, U.S. Army scientist Bruce Ivins committed suicide. So only one side got to tell its version of the story.

Upon closing the case on February 19, 2010, FBI issued an Amerithrax Investigative Summary that concludes that Ivins was the anthrax mailer. The Summary contains serious errors as well as minor ones. It also omits crucial information. So, to ensure a fair outcome, we need to look at it through the eyes of a defense attorney, to make sure that the American people can check out both sides of the story before coming to a conclusion. Continue reading »

On October 12, 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered on the canal towpath in Georgetown1. A divorced artist from a prominent family, Meyer was known by insiders to have been President John F. Kennedy’s senior female consort during his White House years, though the story never leaked to the public.

Her murder and the ensuing trial of Raymond Crump, Jr., a black laborer found by the police in the vicinity of the murder, drew a good deal of attention at the time. Crump had been identified by a gas station attendant helping start a car on a road overlooking the canal. Hearing cries of “Somebody help me. Somebody help me” and two shots, the attendant ran to look. Continue reading »