A new study correlates SARS-CoV-2 specific T cells to lung function and those who suffer from long-term COVID symptoms, which impacts an unclear number of people.
The study found that patients suffering from long COVID symptoms had virus-specific T cell levels more than 100 times higher than those who recovered from the disease.
When I explain to the public (in this blog, or at public conferences or schools) how the Large Hadron Collider operates, I have to gloss over a lot of detail that is unnecessary to grasp the important concepts, which enable other discussions on interesting subnuclear physics. This is good practice, and it also saves me from having to study details I have forgotten along the way - they say that what you are left with when you forget everything is culture, and I tend to agree. I have a good culture in particle physics and that's all I need to do some science popularization ;-)
About 94 percent of the universe is not detectable matter and the universe is expanding. Those two facts alone are how scientists recognize that gravity as we know it does not work at the very large scale.
It also does not work at the very small. Various bits of speculation, hypothesis, and science-fiction have tried to account for macro effects and they get lumped under generic blanket terms like 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' but experimental physics leads the charge in turning science from fantasy into reality. A new paper has made a step closer to understanding the quantum excitation known as the axial Higgs mode, which unlike the Higgs Boson has a magnetic moment. There is no end to theoretical claims about an axial Higgs mode but reality has been more elusive.
One thing electric car owners who have lost the mystique tell you is that you live your life around them. Some report going to a store like Costco to charge their cars, they need new service panels at their house, and one owner famously blew up his Tesla with dynamite rather than pay $22,000 to replace the batteries when they wore out. An article in the Wall Street Journal was by someone excited to rent an electric car for a trip, only to find they spent more time charging it than sleeping.
As the twentythree regular readers of this blog know [(c) A.Manzoni], in recent times I have moved the main focus of my research to advanced applications of deep learning to fundamental science. That does not mean that I am not continuing to participate in the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider - that remains the main focus of my research; but it does mean that what remains of my brain functionalities is mostly invested in thinking about future applications of today's and tomorrow's computer science innovations.
The birth and ultimate fate of the 13.7 billion year old universe is a subject that has intrigued scientists since the dawn of civilization.
There is some produce advice coming from the activist camp yet again, but what they are selling is rotten.
A recent paper senior authored by famed organic industry proponent Dr. Michael N. Antoniou raised an alarm about insecticide
and herbicide residues found in the fecal microbiome of 65 twins in the United
Kingdom. The big problem with it is that it preys on modern science journalists not knowing that dose matters. Any detection of any chemical that can kill a rat at high doses is correlated to pathology in humans, despite that being nothing close to reality.
Smoking is a legitimate class 1 carcinogen, determined by the International Agency for Research on Cancer before they were hijacked by activist epidemiologists out to scare people about the modern world.
Yet it is not a magic bullet. Only 10 percent of smokers will get lung cancer, which does not sound like a lot, but it is actually a high amount - greater than alcohol or obesity. Yet it is so obviously toxic it seems like the cancer rates should be much higher.
The general public sees terms like 'endangered', 'rare', and even 'extinct' used so interchangeably it's easy to believe there is little science involved. There isn't. While most of the science community has used a percentage of its range lost for being endangered, more activist academics placed on committees during political allied administrations - 70 percent of all endangered species listings were done by just two presidents - have now declared species should be endangered if a computer simulation says their habitat may become impacted during the next century.
Antivirals, such as Merck’s molnupiravir and Pfizer’s nirmatrelvir, are given to people infected with COVID-19 when prescribed by a doctor or as part of a clinical trial. Yet entire websites exist that sell it without prescription anyway.
COVID-19 caused numerous parts of culture to flip. In the United States, the left abandoned their historical anti-vaccine camp while the right took up the old 'needs more testing' position of their opposition. The poor began to feel like the rich were given early access to treatments and even that some treatments were being casually dismissed by epidemiologists without being tested enough. That has led to a black market. In England, a website for molnupiravir offers patients generic versions online without medical supervision.
