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Sanfilippo Syndrome: Childhood Dementia May Be Detectable In The Eyes

Sanfilippo Syndrome: Childhood Dementia May Be Detectable In The Eyes

Dec 01 2020 | comment(s)

A new paper finds that widely available retinal imaging techniques may help reveal more about brain disease and monitor treatment efficacy, including a currently untreatable form of childhood-onset dementia, Sanfilippo syndrome.

Sanfilippo syndrome is one of a group of about 70 inherited conditions which collectively affect 1 in 2800 children in Australia, and is more common than cystic fibrosis and better known diseases. Around the world 700,000 children and young people are living with childhood dementia. The researchers studied Sanfilippo syndrome in mouse models, discovering for the first time that advancement of retinal disease parallels that occurring in the brain. 
COVID-19: The Immune Systems Of The Overwhelming Majority Do Quite Well

COVID-19: The Immune Systems Of The Overwhelming Majority Do Quite Well

Dec 01 2020 | comment(s)

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 of common colds and are cousins of SARS-CoV-2, do not generate long-lasting immunity, so we can get reinfected with them after 12 months.

COVID-19: What Do Viral Shedding And Reinfection Mean? What's The Difference?

COVID-19: What Do Viral Shedding And Reinfection Mean? What's The Difference?

Nov 30 2020 | comment(s)

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. Although rare, it seems to be possible.

The other thing which could be at play in many of these cases is “prolonged viral shedding”.

AI May Help Predict Real Risk For Breast Cancer

AI May Help Predict Real Risk For Breast Cancer

Nov 30 2020 | comment(s)

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 can statistically link any common food or product to cancer.
What Is A LHC Signal More Cool Than The Higgs? Two Higgses

What Is A LHC Signal More Cool Than The Higgs? Two Higgses

Nov 30 2020 | comment(s)

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 "self-coupling": in a sort of ermaphroditic act it is capable of giving birth to a pair of objects identical to itself. 
Quick Positive Results For RNA-Based Pfizer And BioNTech CoVID-19 Vaccine Doesn't Mean It Was Rushed

Quick Positive Results For RNA-Based Pfizer And BioNTech CoVID-19 Vaccine Doesn't Mean It Was Rushed

Nov 27 2020 | comment(s)

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 is no peer-reviewed publication on this yet.

Feeding The World For Thanksgiving 2050: New Wheat And Barley Genomes

Feeding The World For Thanksgiving 2050: New Wheat And Barley Genomes

Nov 26 2020 | comment(s)

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, opening up genetic variations for both.
Understanding The Appeal Of Alternative Medicine Can Help Protect The Endangered Species It Puts At Risk

Understanding The Appeal Of Alternative Medicine Can Help Protect The Endangered Species It Puts At Risk

Nov 25 2020 | comment(s)

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 of endangered species in traditional Chinese medicine threatens species' survival. Noting inefficacy and providing various forms of scientific evidence are not influencing decisions and behaviors. Especially because environmentalists often use the same anti-corporate tropes that convince deniers of vaccines that science is a conspiracy.

The Dinosaurs Of Ireland

The Dinosaurs Of Ireland

Nov 25 2020 | comment(s)

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 found by the late citizen scientist Roger Byrne, and donated along with many other fossils to Ulster Museum, have been confirmed as early Jurassic rocks found in Islandmagee, on the east coast of County Antrim.
Cooking With Wood Increases Pollution: Real Pollution, Not The PM2.5 Virtual Kind

Cooking With Wood Increases Pollution: Real Pollution, Not The PM2.5 Virtual Kind

Nov 25 2020 | comment(s)

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 them to continue doing what they had been doing; burning wood and dung for energy, including in home for cooking. Billions of people still do that because they lack centralized energy and the environmental costs are enormous. Even if those people had been allowed to switch to coal, emissions would plummet and they would be healthier.
SARS-CoV-2 Mutations Have Not Been Evolving To Increase Transmissibility

SARS-CoV-2 Mutations Have Not Been Evolving To Increase Transmissibility

Nov 25 2020 | comment(s)

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 the world that interacts with China even indirectly has it, and it has mutated along the way. The California version which came from Asia is different than the New York version that came from Europe.

Fortunately, none of the mutations have increased transmissibility, according to a new paper which looked at virus genomes from over 46,000 people with COVID-19 from 99 countries.
5G Wireless Networks Are Just Going Up And 6G Are In Development: The 4 Benefits It Will Have

5G Wireless Networks Are Just Going Up And 6G Are In Development: The 4 Benefits It Will Have

Nov 25 2020 | comment(s)

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 level, and security - all over the world.

For that, they will need 6G air interface and transmission technologies and novel network architecture, such as waveform design, multiple access, channel coding schemes, multi-antenna technologies, network slicing, cell-free architecture, and cloud/fog/edge computing. 

No - MRNA Vaccines Do Not Rewrite Your DNA Or RNA

No - MRNA Vaccines Do Not Rewrite Your DNA Or RNA

Nov 24 2020 | comment(s)

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 body then fights off the spike and then the mRNA and the spike are gone and all that is left is the memory of how to fight the disease.

The spikes can't harm you as they can't infect by themselves, they need the virus attached to them- they don't have instructions needed to tell a cell to make more spikes. So once the original mRNA is gone and the spikes are gone there is nothing left except the memory of how to fight them.

Why Dolphins Don't Get

Why Dolphins Don't Get "The Bends"?

Nov 24 2020 | comment(s)

In humans, if we spend time beneath the ocean and then travel to the surface, we can suffer decompression sickness, known as "the bends" - when the nitrogen in compressed air that dissolved into our blood during a dive does not have time to clear and forms bubbles in tissues. 
Vaccination Opponents Drive An Epidemic Of COVID-19 Misinformation

Vaccination Opponents Drive An Epidemic Of COVID-19 Misinformation

Nov 23 2020 | comment(s)

There is a saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

So, it should come as no surprise that vaccine skeptics worldwide are sounding the alarm about the flu shot as a real danger in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Confused? Well, it turns out the anti-vaccine activists are too.

In the Beginning, There was Misunderstanding: The Genesis of a Myth

The Next Plague: VEEV?

The Next Plague: VEEV?

Nov 23 2020 | comment(s)

While the world recovers from the third coronavirus pandemic of the last 17 years, it's important to be mindful that nature is always evolving new ways to kill. It's why scientists need to create a new influenza vaccine each year.
Tab Survived 'Artificial Sweetener' Scaremongering, But Couldn't Survive Consumer Changes

Tab Survived 'Artificial Sweetener' Scaremongering, But Couldn't Survive Consumer Changes

Nov 23 2020 | comment(s)

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 their last can of nostalgia.

From the beginning, Tab’s story has been one of perseverance. The brand survived initial low sales, the artificial sweetener scares of the 1960s and 1970s, lukewarm enthusiasm for the product at the corporate level and intermittent consumer availability to become – for a brief period – the most popular diet soda in America. Then, of course, Diet Coke came along.

After Arecibo? A Lunar Crater Telescope.

After Arecibo? A Lunar Crater Telescope.

Nov 22 2020 | comment(s)

Arecibo while no longer unique in design since China built a similar and larger telescope was special. What should replace it is something that will exceed what it is able to do. There is already a well formed plan for such a radio telescope using a properly chosen lunar crater. Taking an existing landform and using it for the dish reduces the work that needs to be done. Locating this hypothetical observatory on the Moon’s far side would shield it from most all man made radio noise. Combining data from a Moon based radio telescope with that from Earth based radio telescopes could result in data of a detail that we may not match for another century. This is doable with current technology.
Lunar Occultations, And Why They Are Fun

Lunar Occultations, And Why They Are Fun

Nov 22 2020 | comment(s)

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 you put an eye on Mars a couple of years ago you know what I mean - a dust storm that went on for weeks completely hid the surface from outside observers).
Does Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) Vaccine Provide Protection Against COVID-19?

Does Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) Vaccine Provide Protection Against COVID-19?

Nov 20 2020 | comment(s)

Mumps IgG titers, levels of IgG antibody, have been correlated to lowered severity in recovered COVID-19 patients who had the Merck MMR II vaccine, and that has led a group to speculate that the MMR vaccine may protect against COVID-19.