Tag: science

Stay Home for the Holidays

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After big Thanksgiving dinners, plan small Christmas funerals or better yet choose an alternative plan, like:

  • focus on freedoms that are strong enough to withstand masks,
  • listen to pandemic experts when deciding how to react to a pandemic, and
  • avoid having dinner inside with people who live in different houses.

And seriously, if this is about your "freedom" then you need to learn what that word means. You are free to act until you are hurting others. Covidiots are clearly hurting others.

It’s possible that all of your relatives have really strong constitutions. But consider that Herman Cain beat the odds (30%) after he was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, that spread to his liver. He beat cancer, but Covid-19 killed him in 40 days. Maybe your Grandma’s stronger than that, but … probably not.

Science is real. The virus is real. It’s ten times more deadly than the flu, and we’re only starting to learn about "blood thickening" and other bizarre side effects, at least some of which appear to be long-lasting.

Please, Stay Home for the Holidays

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Covid before China?

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The President of the United States is fond of spitting out the word "China" when he talks of Covid-19, but there are now signs that the virus was in Italy for months before it was in China.

The Zika virus was first reported in some Pacific island countries, but is believed to have originated in Uganda. And the 1918 flu pandemic, which was first reported by the Spanish government and labelled the Spanish flu, had its earliest recorded outbreak in a military base in the US state of Kansas.

A variety of questions remain. Could Sars-CoV-2 have developed from similar viruses in Italy, and could that explain why early cases in Italy seemed less prevalent? How was it transferred to Wuhan?

Ultimately, it helps us all to understand this virus more, including its origins. We can also hope that the evolving discoveries undercut some of the anti-Chinese racism that has stemmed from the US President and others.

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More active cases than ever in the US

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Just a quick reminder that even if you’re "bored" with Covid, dealing with reality means accepting that there are more active cases of Covid-19 in the United States today than on any other day ever. And again, that’s active cases … discounting all of the people who have recovered or died, there are more active infections today than ever before … just like almost every day since we allowed this thing to run uncontrolled throughout the country.

If you think that what we’ve done is working … that we’re "rounding the corner" … you’re just plain wrong.

And if you’re now thinking "herd immunity", we still have a ways to go before 3% of the population has been infected, and most estimates for herd immunity require that we get well into the 40% to 80% range — so it has to get 10 to 20 times as bad, and we’ve already killed the equivalent of 75 September 11th attacks.

And you know what else, even if we never got a vaccine, masks alone might be enough to beat this thing. Or maybe not, but while masks alone might not end up being the single silver-bullet, they absolutely help … without starving you of oxygen or whatever other ridiculous ideas people are bandying about these days.

Anti-mask isn’t freedom, it’s free-dumb. Anti-maskers are 75 times worse (so far) than those 19 terrorists were. It’s truly one of the most selfish and sadistic movements ever.

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Dark Matter as Black Holes redux

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Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine

Stephen Hawking and Bernard Carr hypothesized that conditions close to the Big Bang would have produced primodial black holes, including some that were smaller than can be formed by collapsing stars, and some that are bigger than is easily explained by stellar collapse black holes combining over time.

And at some point, there was a school of thought that the unexplained "missing" mass in the universe might actually be caught up in black holes that we are not able to detect. This idea lost popularity, in the scientific community, as people explored ideas like Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) but after decades without seeing signs of the required fundamental particles, some are investigating the idea again. Some recent evidence from gravitational limits the possibilities, but some researchers remain hopeful that the explanation for the universe’s "missing" mass is tied to black holes rather than exotic particles.

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Gesundheit II

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February 2018 photo of The Gesundheit II machine (University of Maryland School of Public Health via AP)

Just how does the virus that causes COVID-19 spread from one person to another? To help find out, people infected with the new coronavirus take turns sitting in a chair and putting their faces into the big end of a large cone that sucks up everything that comes out of their mouths and noses for analysis.

Scientists disagree about whether aerosols are contributing to the spread of the disease, but even those who warn about aerosols say current recommendations make sense.

Wearing a mask is still important, and make sure it fits snugly. Keep washing those hands diligently. And again, staying farther apart is better than being closer together. Avoid crowds, especially indoors.

Additional recommendations align with previous guidance, but suggest greater ventilation. Spread is less likely outdoors than indoors, for example.

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Covid-19 often spreads through aerosols

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The 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), portrayed in an illustration created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ALISSA ECKERT, MS; DAN HIGGINS, MAM

Covid-19 often spreads through aerosols. This continues the pattern in which what we know about the virus has continued to get scarier even while much of the country chooses behavior that explicitly aids our enemy.

For months, scientists and public health experts have warned of mounting evidence that the novel coronavirus is airborne, transmitted through tiny droplets called aerosols that linger in the air much longer than the larger globs that come from coughing or sneezing.

For what it’s worth, I’m still taking precautions against transmission through contact. We have spray bottles of 70% to 99% isopropyl alcohol at various points around the house and a mini alcohol bottle filling station set up in the downstairs bathroom. It’s low effort, and might help, so … I keep doing it. However, I also continue to use KN95 masks pretty universally when anywhere near humans … or more recently smoky air.

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Life on Venus?

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The images used to create this view of Venus were acquired by the Mariner 10 craft on Feb. 7 and 8, 1974

This is kind of a big deal. It could mean just mean that there’s a smelly deadly gas out there, that can be created in ways that we don’t understand much. Yawn, right?

Of course, the excitement is that it could also mean that the gas came to be on Venus through means that we already understand … from life.

As Carl Sagan, who also hypothesized about ways for life to exist on Venus, said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". To be clear, humans have not discovered life on Venus … yet. But, this is evidence that might indicate that there’s life on Venus. Following up on that evidence will be a huge challenge, and we might well find life, or proof of past life, on Mars first.

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World’s oldest sperm

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Ostracods mating

It seems that a post-coital female ostracod became trapped in tree resin about 100 million years ago, and was recently discovered by scientists. The sperm within her body is likely twice as old as the next oldest known animal sperm specimen, but it is also nearly five times the size of the male ostracod that produced it! according to a co-author of the study:

"This is equivalent to about 7.30 metres in a 1.70-metre human, so it requires a lot of energy to produce them"

While the article suggests that the next oldest sperm sample is a mere 17 million years, an article in The Independent highlights a 50 million year old find.

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On the verge of animal domestication

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A view of excavations in the Nachcharini Cave taken at end of the season in the summer of 1974

What was the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural settlements like? Among other things, it seems that humans got more specialized in their hunting, and adapted their approach, using temporary encampments as outposts while hunting in support of more substantial villages elsewhere in the region.

“We are not saying that hunters at Nachcharini were engaged in early stages of this domestication,” [Stephen Rhodes] said. “But the evidence of a local tradition makes this area a possible center of sheep domestication later on.”

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