Getting To The Heart Of The Coronavirus Pandemic
By W. Glen Pyle
The Virus That Turns Physicists Into Crackpots
Formaldehyde: The Carcinogen That Wasn’t
Drugs For Different Bodies: The Female Side...
Antibiotic resistance is a serious problem. Nature constantly evolves new ways... Read >
The deadly Russian heat wave of 2010 was due to a natural atmospheric phenomenon... Read >
Dolutegravir, the HIV wonder drug and current first-line treatment, is less... Read >
A new paper finds that widely available retinal imaging techniques may help... Read >
In the United States, meat substitutes like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods... Read >
In the not so distant future, checkbooks will take their
rightful place in... Read >
What Is A LHC Signal More Cool Than The Higgs? Two Higgses
That's right - I finally hit the ground with my creativity, and my jokes are starting to use old material for my post titles. Yet producing a pair of Higgs bosons in a proton-proton collision is seriously cool indeed. The Higgs boson in fact is one of the few particles that does a trick called ...
Lunar Occultations, And Why They Are Fun
Have you ever looked at the moon through a telescope, or even a pair of binoculars? Our satellite is really beautiful to look at - it is full of detail you can get lost in: craters, mountain ridges, canyons, plateaus. And there's no clouds to obscure the view (if you are a planetary observer and ...
Is A Z' Signal Hiding In ATLAS TtH Data?
I was blissfully unaware until today of a slightly anomalous effect, which was found by the ATLAS Collaboration when performing a search for top pairs plus Higgs bosons in their Run 2 data. The anomaly I am talking about is an apparent excess of events which could be explained, as ATLAS did in ...
New Paper Claims Your Living Room Causes Diabetes
In the modern world of chemistry, where we can detect parts per billion, trillion, and even quadrillion, we can detect anything we want in anything else. In the modern world of epidemiology, we can also link anything to anything we want, as Harvard School of Public Health does often with its claims ...
The Dinosaurs Of Ireland
Most of Ireland’s rocks are the wrong age for dinosaur fossils, either too old or too young. That doesn't mean dinosaurs weren't there, it means fossilization is a true anomaly and finding fossils makes it even more challenging to have hard evidence.That has now been achieved. Two fossil bones ...
Cooking With Wood Increases Pollution: Real Pollution, Not The PM2.5 Virtual Kind
In 2013, the U.S. government told the World Bank they would not help fund centralized energy in developing nations unless it used their pet projects, wind and solar. Which developing nations could not use much less afford.We set back sanitation and hygiene in places that need it most and forced ...
The Naturalistic Fallacy That Holds Back Some In The West From Progress Keeps India From Lowering Emissions Too
A billion people still use wood for cooking and heating - and western countries are to blame. In the last decade, centralized energy production for developing countries was derailed unless they used solar or wind - neither of which are viable on their own.That leave families cutting and burning ...
More Plant Diversity Means Less Pesticides - But Lower Yields
Everyone recognizes that less less food means fewer pests but when you have to grow food to keep billions from starving, yields matter. Farming has gotten more efficient, thanks to big data tools leading to targeted pesticide use and modern pesticides that are less toxic to the environment while ...
COVID-19: The Immune Systems Of The Overwhelming Majority Do Quite Well
Early in the pandemic, many researchers feared people who contracted COVID could be reinfected very quickly. This was because several early studies showed antibodies seemed to wane after the first few months post-infection.It was also partly because normal human coronaviruses, which are one cause ...
COVID-19: What Do Viral Shedding And Reinfection Mean? What's The Difference?
Over recent weeks and months, we’ve heard of several COVID cases in which people have tested positive after previously clearing the virus.Scientists are hopeful being infected with COVID-19 confers immunity for a length of time. But some of these instances have raised concerns about reinfection ...
Feeding The World For Thanksgiving 2050: New Wheat And Barley Genomes
The 10+ Wheat Genomes Project, led by University of Saskatchewan Professor Curtis Pozniak, and the International Barley Pan Genome Sequencing Consortium, led by Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research Professor Nils Stein, have sequenced a suite of genomes of wheat and barley ...
SARS-CoV-2 Mutations Have Not Been Evolving To Increase Transmissibility
After originating in Wuhan, China in late 2019, the latest form of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and its third pandemic of the last 17 years, has spread COVID-19 across the globe. Some countries claim fewer cases, like China, while some can't know figures, like Brazil, but one thing is clear; the half ...
Quick Positive Results For RNA-Based Pfizer And BioNTech CoVID-19 Vaccine Doesn't Mean It Was Rushed
Recently, Pfizer and BioNTech released promising
preliminary results of their clinical Phase III trials with 40,000 participants
for their RNA vaccine candidate. This report suggests 90% efficacy for
protection against SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes the CoVID-19 disease. However,
there ...
No - MRNA Vaccines Do Not Rewrite Your DNA Or RNA
The WHO and the CDC are using the exact same safety protocol for mRNA as for any vaccine - they have speeded development up by risking money not lives.
The mRNA vaccines are very clean vaccines. They don't do anything to the cell DNA. They are instructions to make the spike of the protein, your ...
Thanks Science: New Cancer Drugs Led To A Reduction In Mortality Of 24% In The US Since 2000
The COVID-19 pandemic has sent both political parties rushing to wrap themselves in the flag of science - even those voters who were historically more inclined to oppose vaccines and medicine and purchase organic food.They should have been on Team Science all along, and a new analysis shows why ...
Death Rates For Hospitalized COVID–19 Patients Fall 18%
Two large recent studies show that people hospitalized for COVID-19 in March were more than three times as likely to die as people hospitalized for COVID–19 in August.The first study used data from three hospitals in New York City. The chance of death for someone hospitalized for the coronavirus ...
Understanding The Appeal Of Alternative Medicine Can Help Protect The Endangered Species It Puts At Risk
Alternative Chinese medicine harms endangered species like pangolins, tigers and rhinos, but deniers of evidence-based medicine are often part of the same political tribe as professional conservationists. That confirmation bias about alternative medicine has limited conservation gains.
The use ...
10 Tips To Manage Your Election Aftermath Stress
Well-meaning advice for people freaking out about current events often includes encouragement to be patient, stay calm and keep the faith… but how on Earth are you supposed to do that amid the insanity of 2020?As a practicing clinical psychologist and professor who studies how to manage anxiety ...
Activists Hope The Biden Administration Will Eliminate A Science Requirement For Endangered Species Act Rulings
In its 47 year history, the Endangered Species Act went from an essential law to protect actual endangered species to a hammer with which to pummel companies and landowners. What started with an American bald eagle became holding housing development projects hostage by getting an obscure endangered ...
Grades, And Artificial Intelligence
Dear students,
If you ask about your grade, I’ll gladly tell you that you’re doing well in the course, or that you really need to do better, as the case may be. More specifically than that I will not say.
The main reason for this is that if I were a hiring manager at a company ...
AI May Help Predict Real Risk For Breast Cancer
Modern science can tell us so much about the hazards of the world that it has become difficult for most people to understand absolute and relative risk. Environmentalists claim they need money to pay lawyers to ban chemicals, even if they are a drop in 160 Olympic-sized swimming pools while epidemiologists ...
5G Wireless Networks Are Just Going Up And 6G Are In Development: The 4 Benefits It Will Have
Fifth generation (5G) wireless communication networks are being deployed worldwide and promise mass connectivity, ultra-reliability, and guaranteed low latency. It sounds great for 2020 but people of 2030 are likely to want that, plus enhanced spectral/energy/cost efficiency, better intelligence ...
Tab Survived 'Artificial Sweetener' Scaremongering, But Couldn't Survive Consumer Changes
Tab, the Coca-Cola company’s original diet soda brand, is headed to the soda graveyard, joining retired brands such as Like, Leed and Limette.Coca-Cola has announced that it is discontinuing Tab after 57 years on the market, and fans of the drink will have until the end of December to purchase ...
World Will NOT 'End' Days Before Christmas 2020 - NOT Mayan Calendar - More Baloney From Perennial False Prophet
This is yet another baloney false prophecy from Paul Begley. This is scaring people I help to the point of being suicidal and having serious impacts on their lives. If any of you are journalists for the Sun or the Daily Express or the other papers who are running this story - you know that it ...
Arecibo while no longer unique in design since China built a similar and larger telescope was special... more »
In 1996 (or thereabouts) the new Meteorology building was opened at the University of Reading.... more »
The Fossil Birds of the Jehol Biota have caused an international stir amongst palaeontologists... more »
It is not a secret that I love chess, and that whenever I have the chance to play some online blitz... more »
Hello! Years and years have gone by without a blog. For reasons I do not understand, I appear to... more »
