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.

The downside to political mandates and subsidies for alternative energy is they place consumers in peril; and when a power grid does go down adjuvant energy sources like solar and wind can't "blackstart" without short circuits and faults.

With conventional energy, grid failures are not only far less a concern, they are readily recoverable. The normal step-by-step recovery process takes time but is all relatively easy to control. Start up the turbines, use them to spin generators and watch the electrons flow steadily and predictably to re-energize a grid and withstand short circuits and other faults.

Increasing

Local news outlets across the U.S. are struggling to bring in advertising and subscription revenue, which pays for the reporting, editing and production of their articles. It’s not a new problem, but with fewer and fewer journalism jobs as a result, a growing number of local newsrooms have found a potential solution: college journalism students.

Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, can produce toxins and deplete lakes of oxygen when they die.  It can be dangerous for both pets and people. In August 2014, nearly half a million people in the Toledo area were without tap water for nearly three days due to contaminated drinking water. A type of blue-green algae, Microcystis, had produced particularly high levels of the liver toxin microcystin (MC) in Lake Erie.

Since the nutrient phosphorus is an important nutrient for these algae, and environmentalists and the politicians they influence don't understand biological systems thinking, they have made efforts to reduce phosphorus levels and inhibit the growth of cyanobacteria.

I was happy to meet Giorgio Bellettini at the Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors this week, and I thought I would write here a note about him. At 89 years of age Giorgio still has all his wits around him, and he is still as compelling and unstoppable as anybody who has met him will recall. It is a real pleasure to see that he still attends all sessions, always curious to hear the latest developments in detector design and performance. 

Since the Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded to biochemist Jennifer Doudna and microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2020, for developing the gene-editing technique known as Crispr-Cas9, Crispr has enjoyed a lot of attention and interest from scientists. The technique has been touted as a possible source of new treatments for diseases caused by genetic mutations, such as muscular dystrophy, and congenital blindness.

"All The President's Men" inspired young people to rush to journalism while "Mad Men" caused enrollment in advertising courses to surge and "Top Gun led to more Navy recruits.

Film and television shapes young minds and marketers know it. A whole generation of people will believe a show like "The Offer" is a history of "The Godfather" film the same way some believe "Food Inc" is science; because it is on a screen. Yet trends have changed as fashions have. 'Stewardess' is out of the lexicon while 'Congressman' is still in.