Even when constructing the famous water-box, probably the most delicate and fragile instrument ever made by human hands, de Selby is known to have smashed three heavy coal-hammers and was involved in undignified legal proceedings with his landlord arising from an allegation of strained floor-joists and damage to a ceiling

Despite De Selby's promising results with the Water-box, later researchers could not replicate his use of heavy coal-hammers to separate D₂O (heavy water) from ordinary plain-pack own-brand H₂O. Thus we are left with repeated cycles of low-temperature vacuum rectification as the most practical approach to deuterium enrichment.

Alternative title: Lite Water, We're sailing at the edges of time
Lite Water, We're drifting at the waterline

Cast your minds back four years to the "Deuterium-enriched foodstuffs for health" story (with its footnotes to Everett Lafayette Storey's invention CellFood or Open-All, variously produced by NuScience / Deutrel / DeutroCell, the Deuterated Sulphuric Acid that conditions soil and unblocks drains and invigorates the system when drunk as a tonic). Here at the Riddled Research Laboratory and Ammo-Phos Archive we are embarrassed that it took us until now to see the secondary opportunities inherent in consuming heavy-water-harvested foods to reduce free radicals... That is, can you also advertise health benefits from the deuterium-depleted light water that is an inevitable by-product of operating a heavy-water distillery at non-trivial expense? (assuming that your moral framework has been qualm-depleted by multiple cycles of fractional rectification).

This is of course a rhetorical question. For the rhetorical answer, consider the Litewater Company and its convincing diagrams of how D₂O molecules cause old age by buggering up the exquisite mechanisms of mitochondrial ATP-Synthase.

Not some new design of espresso machine

Litewater is not cheap, and it must dominate your diet for months, cooking with it and brewing with it and growing your own food with Litewater irrigation (it's got no electrolytes! Plants love it!). Once every D₂O molecule in your body has made way for a H₂O replacement, the ATP synthase molecular mills in your mitochondria will finally function properly as Evolution intended, for the first time in 4 billion years. Huzzah!

This entertaining and enterprising grift features in a recent unpublished paper from Marco Ruggiero - an old friend of Riddled and an embodiment of the "10/90" rule ("10% of mad scientists end up demanding 90% of attention from the Mad Scientist Anti-Defamation League").

Ruggiero's current academic affiliation is with the National Coalition of Independent Scholars, for he has retired or resigned from CEO of Silver Spring Sagl, Swiss-based dealers in medicinal yoghurt and magical chondroitin emulsions. Thus the preprint does not advertise those products in any direct way. However, paper-shaped advertisements swarm and pullulate in the References section, where 31 of 78 references are self-citations.* They range from 1989 to 2020 in a career-spanning greatest-hits compilation, a self-curated retrospective exhibition.

I choose to believe that the NCIS has regular get-togethers where Independent Scholars practice their maniacal laughter and You-Fools-I'll-Show-You-All diatribes, and hold workshops on dealing with angry mobs of flaming-torch- and pitchfork-wielding villagers, and upgrade their Igors for newer models.

The pre-print belongs to the Hormesis tradition of radioactivity-is-good-for-you apologetics, and I can only surmise that Prof. Ruggiero has bought large tracts of Arizona desert which he hopes to lease out as a nuclear waste dump. It is also mandible-serpentine-hautboy word salad. Cyanobacteria were grown in uranium- and radium-rich mineral water with two levels of natural radioactivity, and in Litewater as a negative control... perhaps Marco was under the impression that Deuterium is radioactive, thereby ruling out plain old distilled water or tapwater as controls due to their non-zero content of that isotope.

Radiation, yes indeed! You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-boxed do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have 'em too. When they canceled the project it almost did me in. One day my mind was literally a-burst. The next day nothing. Swept away... But I'll show them. I had a lobotomy in the end.

The vanishingly-small photon flux in that slightly glowy water [because Cherenkov radiation] contained enough visible-band energy to induce photosynthesis in the cyanobacteria... photosynthesis that facilitated the horizontal transfer of DNA information from them to the magic-yoghurt-related microbes being co-cultured with the cyanobacteria, because quantum entanglement. The radioprotection from these genes then becomes available to consumers of the yoghurt.



The recipe for culturing this ecosystem involved hemp, and equal amounts of sugar and Equisetum arvense horsetail, because that plant's evolutionary antiquity and the fractal distribution of silica within its stem will further facilitate the quantum entanglement and the genetic radioprotective transfer. There were angry scenes at the Old Entomologist when I read out this section of the pre-print, and baseless accusations of "spying" and "industrial espionage", as it turns out that Greenish Hugh had intended to use very similar ingredients for brewing this year's Xmas Ale.

As is canonical in this literature, the preprint refers as well to Mothersill et al (2018), who invoked quantum entanglement in the important research area of radiation-induced telepathy in trout, to explain how the effects of radiation propagate the wrong way along the time axis and turn trout telepathic even before it is administered. Things reached Peak Condamine Fishsticks in this next passage, where Ref [67] is a gauntlet thrown down before Betteridge's Law. It is finest military-grade wibble and connoisseurs of bafflegab will be pleased to see the whole paragraph repeated in Paccini & Ruggiero (2019), albeit with a different protein quantally entangling with DNA (because toroidal helices).

Toroidal structures of DNA and proteins such as ORF252 become entangled because of their spatial geometry; this phenomenon is not dissimilar from the quantum entanglement at the level of the protein tubulin in neuron microtubules, a phenomenon that is thought to be at the basis of human consciousness (66). It is also consistent with a recent paper entitled “Is the Fabric of Reality Guided by a Semi-Harmonic, Toroidal Background Field?” (67). It is interesting to note that DNA itself is endowed with an intrinsic degree of consciousness (68) that obviously does not rely upon quantum entanglement at the level of tubulin. It is also interesting to note that ancient viruses may have been responsible for the onset of consciousness in humans (69) and, therefore, it is plausible that the intrinsic consciousness of the DNA of viruses and humans may have become entangled at different levels.

Symbiosis Online

I could stop now, but this post has turned into a Ruggiero Update, and readers always want more of that. When last we looked in on Marco, on 19 February he was convincing a suitably reverential Alt-Medder that his profitable placebo 'Imuno' would surely cure COVID-19 if only because it cures everything else.

Dr. Ruggiero says, “I take the liberty to write that I am 99% (100% would be unrealistic) confident that imuno will help with the coronavirus for two reasons. The first and most obvious is its general effect on the immune system as described in all the papers where it has been mentioned.”

Quite how the Alt-Medder came to be Marco's mouthpiece was not immediately obvious. All becomes clearer when we find that Mimi Castellanos' qualifications not only include "Minister of Light"; "Medical Intuitive"; "Health Coach"; "Hand Writing Analyst"; "Mother, wife"; "Bravo Co-op Founder" and "Your friend", but as "Healthy Energetics" she is also franchised to distribute Imuno and Bravo. We can skip the Florida-Woman middleman, anyway, and go directly to the organ-grinder.

While the Alt-Med world makes COVID-ade in this time of plague, they have collectively observed social-distance best practice, with virtual meetings and Webinars rather than face-to-face encounters, not allowing their possession of sovereign cures and preventatives for COVID-19 to weaken their vigilance, so well done them. I think in particular of a Ruggiero webinar with the triumphant title "We Found the Coronavirus Vulnerability: Learn to Exploit it". Hosted by the Sophia Health Institute, which is to say by broad-spectrum Nu-age grifters Dietrich Klinghardt and Christine Schaffner - I am not sure which of them is Hocus and which is Pocus. A transcript of the Ruggieration is here, and the PPT slides are here.

The presentation is padded out to twice its length by Ruggiero's ironic ambivalence as he regurges conspiracy theories, then denies personal investment in each theory because 'belief' and 'commitment' are for callow unsophisticates, not for a Deconstructionist disciple of Deleuze; then reminds the audience that the theory has so many followers that it can't be just dismissed or ignored as absurd. Ruggiero is an old hand at this plausibly-deniable Tergiversation Tango, having perfected it with his just-asking-questions Antivax AIDS denial-cake, both eating and fucking it. The presentation is further padded with boilerplate slides about the author's scientific eminence and his close encounters with Nobelity. Take all that away and you are left with

1. HIV-1 and COVID-19 are almost the same virus.
2. Any antiviral that blocks HIV-1 will also block COVID.
3. Preparations of chondroitin (especially those concocted and marketed by M. Ruggiero) are theoretically certain to block HIV-1.

Ruggiero's subsequent failure to publish this geometrical, irrefutable chain of reasoning in the Am.J.Immunol. or the Madridge J. Immunol or some other Journal of Ruggiero Studies is a source of perplexity and befuddlement. Perhaps he harbours higher ambitions for a target journal with wider acceptance. At any rate, in the hope of smuggling the central conceit into publication, it has been concealed within the Trojan Horse of a preprint (not yet accepted for publication) nominally on the anodyne topic of "Significance of hydrophobic and charged sequence similarities in sodium-bile acid cotransporter and vitamin D-binding protein macrophage activating factor". Quite possibly no reviewer will wonder why SARS-CoV-19 spike proteins and their potential interactions with "low-molecular-weight chondroitin sulfate" were included in a gene comparison ostensibly devoted to sodium-bile acid cotransporter.

Alternative title #2: And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hilarity ensued with him

In other Ruggiero- and GcMAF-related news, the extradition of his erstwhile colleague David Noakes to France (to face medfraud chargers there) seems to have gone ahead without mishap or further absconding, or further mention in official UK dispatches. Noakes' friends in the 'Natural Health Federation' are not well-pleased with this wholly-expected turn of events. If they want to show their support in the most Noakesian way, that would be to plead for donations from readers for Noakes' French legal expenses and then keep them.





* I include "A novel approach to Klotho aimed at delaying and reversing aging" (2017) in the count, even though the journal-shaped garbage scow Bio Accent Open Journal HIV has recently evaporated from the Interlattice, depriving us of the only parasitical Hyderabad publisher named after a laundry-powder additive. I can only speculate that the pair of skeezy wee scunners running BioAccent begrudged the fees they should have paid for domain and website registration, so their entire publishing scampire is now "Account Suspended".