It’s Tylenol?

RFK jr claimed over a month ago that this month they were going to find and announce the cause of autism. We all knew he was full of shit — he’s permanently full to the eyebrows with shit — and that this was a political game they were playing, because autism is a multifactorial syndrome with multiple enabling factors, and you’re not going to find a ‘magic bullet’ for it. Well, yesterday the gang of frauds and liars in the White House announced that there was a central link, and that it was acetaminophen, or Tylenol. This is like announcing that the cause is consuming bread — something with a widespread, long-term use that a huge number of pregnant women had eaten. Mothers with autistic children will now think that using a common, well-tested pain reliever is the cause, and blame themselves.

Trump gathered his crack team of worthless quacks to make this announcement.

Speaking from the Oval Office alongside US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, US National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump did not keep his remarks to Tylenol during pregnancy. (I don’t know who the woman is, I guess no one thinks she’s important enough to name)

Of course Trump tried to take credit for this “discovery”.

It’s too much liquid, too many different things are going into that baby, Trump said, without providing further evidence.

Extensive research has shown that there’s no link between vaccines and autism.

Trump thanked Kennedy for bringing autism to the forefront of American politics, along with me. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has promoted discredited theories that vaccines cause autism.

We understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it, Trump said.

Oh god. All the gullible people who believed him about ivermectin are now going to be telling pregnant women that they just have to suffer through headaches and fevers, all because a group of elected and appointed clowns say so. They presented no evidence for a link between autism and Tylenol, but just blithely charged in and invented one. The studies have been done to show that Tylenol is not a significant factor! Here’s one that looked at 2,480,797 children and found no connection.

Study reveals no causal link between neurodevelopmental disorders and acetaminophen exposure before birth
NIH-funded research in siblings finds previously reported connection is likely due to other underlying factors.

Acetaminophen exposure during pregnancy is not linked to the risk of developing autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability, according to a new study of data from more than 2 million children in Sweden. The collaborative research effort by Swedish and American investigators, which appears in JAMA, is the largest of its kind and was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Scientists compared siblings — who share genetics and other variables such as parental health, environmental exposures, and socioeconomic factors — and were able to limit the influence of other potential risk factors. This allowed them to focus specifically on, and eliminate, the risk associated with acetaminophen. The study design was unique due to the size of the population captured in the Swedish Medical Birth Register and the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register. Before siblings were considered, there appeared to be a small increase in risk for neurodevelopmental disorders in children exposed to acetaminophen, which was noted in previous studies.

Acetaminophen is commonly used as a pain reliever and fever reducer and is found in a variety of medicines available over the counter and via prescription. It is often taken during pregnancy instead of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, known as NSAIDs, which can cause low levels of amniotic fluid, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The reasons pregnant people might take acetaminophen, including fever, or conditions such as chronic migraine, could be, and in some cases are, associated with an increased risk for later neurodevelopmental disorders following pregnancy.

One limitation of this study is that it relies on data from prescribed acetaminophen and from self-reporting from pregnant people during prenatal care. It may not capture all use or dosage in all people, particularly over-the-counter medicines. However, the number of patients included in the study sample and the ability to control for many other confounding factors support the conclusion that acetaminophen is not directly linked to an increase link of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability.

To inform best preventative strategies, additional research is required to fully understand the genetic and non-genetic factors that increase the risk of autism, ADHD, and intellectual disability.

The effect is simply not there! Because Trump has surrounded himself with incompetent frauds, this claim is going to resonate through society and have multiple deleterious effects on American health. Makary, Bhattacharya, Oz, and RFK jr belong on a list of infamous quacks alongside disgraced “doctor” Andrew Wakefield.

Don’t panic if I’m not posting tomorrow

It won’t be because Charlie Kirk zealots showed up at my door and wreaked their misplaced vengeance on me — it’s much more likely that I will have been raptured.

On June 17, 2025, a South African pastor shared his vision of the Rapture on the “I’ve Been Through The Most” Podcast. In the viral YouTube video of the podcast, Pastor Joshua Mhlakela made claims that he saw Jesus returning to Earth on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sundown on Monday, Sept 22 this year.

“The rapture is upon us, whether you are ready or not,” Mhlakela said. “I saw Jesus sitting on his throne, and I could hear him very loud and clear saying, ‘I am coming soon.’”

“He said to me on the 23rd and 24th of September 2025, ‘I will come back to the Earth.’”

As we all know, the random rantings of an obscure pastor who claims to have witnessed Jesus always come true. I’m not sure what timezone he’s talking about, so I’m just going to take off all my clothes and hang out on the deck until I soar up into the heavens, leaving all the bad people behind.

I’m sorry if you don’t get selected and I’m abandoning you all to the ravening mobs of angry, deluded Christians (who will not be raptured, obviously.)

I guess I’m in hiding

I’ve gotten a few calls from the university today — I was worried that something important had happened to my lab, but no, administrators were just concerned because of this event happening this evening.

Yeah, those a-holes are speaking at my university, led by Knowles, one of the negligible intellects at the Daily Wire who has been on the anti-trans bandwagon for a while now, and with little else to say. I imagine he’ll be on the stage at the Twin Cities campus trying to stir up a little hate this evening, and in an over-abundance of caution, the administration is asking to temporarily suppress my information on the university web site, with my consent.

I agreed. I can’t run away very fast nowadays, so better safe than sorry.

They should have called this the “American Go Away Tour.”

A totally predictable AI delusion

Mark Zuckerberg has sunk billions into AI, and a whole slew of grifters have been doing likewise, so I really appreciate a good pratfall. He set up an elaborate demo of his Meta AI, stood on a stage, brought up a chef, and asked the AI to provide instructions…to make a steak sauce. Cool. Easy. I could open a cookbook or google a recipe and get it done in minutes, but apparently the attempt here was to do it faster, easier, better with a few vocal requests.

On a stage contrived to make Zuckerberg look so small

Except it didn’t work.

“You can make a Korean-inspired steak sauce using soy sauce, sesame oil…” begins Meta AI, before Mancuso interrupts to stop the voice listing everything that happens to be there. “What do I do first?” he demands. Meta AI, clearly unimpressed by being cut off, falls silent. “What do I do first?” Mancuso asks again, fear entering his voice. And then the magic happens.

“You’ve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate a pear to add to the sauce.”

Mancuso looks like a rabbit looking into the lights of an oncoming juggernaut. He now only has panic. There’s nothing else for it, there’s only one option left. He repeats his line from the script for the third time.

“What do I do first?”

There’s then audience laughter.

“You’ve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate the pear and gently combine it with the base sauce.”

Poor Mark, publicly embarrassed in a demo that was all designed to make a trivial, rigged display, and it flopped.

What’s so joyous about this particular incident isn’t just that it happened live on stage with one of the world’s richest men made to look a complete fool in front of the mocking laughter of the most non-hostile audience imaginable…Oh wait, it largely is that. That’s very joyous. But it’s also that it was so ludicrously over-prepared, faked to such a degree to try to eliminate all possibilities for error, and even so it still went so spectacularly badly.

From Zuckerberg pretending to make up, “Oh, I dunno, picking from every possible foodstuff in the entire universe, what about a…ooh! Korean-inspired steak sauce!” for a man standing in front of the base ingredients of a Korean-inspired steak sauce, to the hilarious fake labels with their bold Arial font facing the camera, it was all clearly intended to force things to go as smoothly as possible. We were all supposed to be wowed that this AI could recognize the ingredients (it imagined a pear) and combine them into the exact sauce they wanted! But it couldn’t. And if it had, it wouldn’t have known the correct proportions, because it would have scanned dozens and dozens of recipes designed to make different volumes of sauce, with contradictory ingredients (the lack of both gochujang and rice wine vinegar, presumably to try to make it even simpler, seems likely to not have helped), and just approximated based on averages. Plagiarism on this scale leads to a soupy slop.

What else would you expect? They’re building machines that are only good for regurgitating rearranged nonsense, and sometimes they only vomit up garbage.

False idol

Republicans are insane.

Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced legislation this week that would require every public university in the state to construct “a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza”, with a statue of the assassinated Republican activist and a sign calling him a “modern civil rights leader”, or pay monthly fines.

The proposed legislation comes as conservatives pay tribute to the murdered activist and podcaster, whose life will be commemorated by the president at a service in Arizona on Sunday, by comparing him to martyred political and spiritual leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr and Saint Paul.

The Oklahoma bill, sponsored by state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto, specifies that the memorial site must be in “a prominent area” on the main campus of every institution of higher education in the state system, and must include “a statue of Charlie Kirk sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk and his wife holding their children. Designs for the statue must be approved by the legislature.

A rendering, created with artificial intelligence, of what the Charlie Kirk statue at New College of Florida could look like (yeah, Florida is considering the same thing)

Each plaza must also include “permanent signage commemorating Charlie Kirk’s courage and faith and explaining the significance of Charlie Kirk as a voice of a generation, modern civil rights leader, vocal Christian, martyr for truth and faith, and free speech advocate”.

I hope they make provisions for an adjacent vomitorium, because I’d need to use it.

The only truth is that proposed signage is that he was a vocal Christian. I think he was the perfect representative of the modern Christian. If only they could look into the mirror.

A very Chesley Bonestell future

Walt Disney and Werner von Braun teamed up to tell us how we were going to get to the moon…in 1955. There’s a certain familiar esthetic to the exercise — shiny, long pointy spaceships with fins, a huge multilevel rotating wheel a 50-man (literally, there are no women) space station, swarms of robotic-looking construction suits. They ditch the fins for their lunar vehicle, since you don’t need them in space…but they do keep the sleek pointy shape.

Every bit of it is wrong, in hindsight. I’m impressed with the elaborate models and the chiseled, handsome men who are floating about in the excessively roomy cabin, but von Braun’s vision of the future was all hype and glitz and was as ridiculous as anything Elon Musk proposes.

De novo genes in the news

I recently posted — and made a video about — a story about how de novo genes are made. I guess I was more timely than I expected, because The Scientist just posted on article on the same topic. It’s specifically about the work of Li Zhao, who is interested in the birth of new genes with novel functions, and is building on some other work done at UC Davis.

But around the same time Zhao began her research, new evidence challenged this longstanding view [that new genes don’t appear very often] with an alternative path. Population geneticist David Begun at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) identified several de novo genes—genes originating from scratch, or non-coding DNA—in Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly. Of the five genes, four occurred on the X chromosome and predominantly expressed in the testes, possibly under sexual selection pressures.

One other thing I should mention: my previous article focused on de novo genes in humans, who are terrible experimental subjects. Li Zhao is working on Drosophila, and there’s a reason flies are a premier model system for this kind of work — you can get multiple generations fast, you can do all kinds of genetic manipulations on them, and you can compare different lineages to evaluate the effects of the presence or absence of a specific gene. Or hundreds of genes, as she is finding.

By characterizing the transcriptomes of six previously sequenced D. melanogaster strains in the testes, Zhao and her colleagues uncovered potential de novo candidates. Of these, they identified 142 polymorphic (which segregated and evolved under selection) and 106 fixed (which remained consistent since the split from a common ancestor) de novo genes. Most of these candidates were regulated by cis elements, with expression driven by regulatory sequences just upstream of the new transcripts. The vast majority contained open reading frames (ORFs)—sections that could potentially produce proteins, marked by start and stop codons—of at least 150 base pairs. When comparing these sequences to ancestral genomes and non-expressing Drosophila strains, the same ORFs appeared, suggesting that the gene expression was driven primarily by regulatory changes.

Zhao and her colleagues proposed that these de novo genes may have undergone natural selection, as highly expressed genes were generally longer and more complex than those expressed at lower levels. However, whether these sequences were translated into proteins or served other functions remained unclear at the time. “Biology is more complex than what we imagine,” said Zhao.

Cool. But I’m going to don my skeptical hat, and suggest that I’m not seeing evidence that these novel genes are significant. The mechanisms for generating them are so easy that we shouldn’t be surprised that new genes are bubbling up out of the mostly chaotic junk in the genome, but when you don’t know what role those genes are playing in the organism, it’s a reach to suggest that they are important. I’m also unconvinced by observations of tissue-specific regulation during development — it’s also not difficult for regulatory sequences to be attached to a gene. Is it significant that so many of these novel genes are expressed in the testes? Male patters of gene expression in the gonads is a special case, and spurious expression could persist there because it has specific effects on sperm maturation that aren’t reflected in adult survival.

It’s still interesting stuff. I like the idea that entirely new genes trickle into populations and could contribute to variation in surprising ways.