The idea that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a laboratory, and then escaped accidentally, always had a certain plausibility. The virus first appeared in Wuhan, China, where there is a laboratory that conducts research on bat coronaviruses — one of only a handful in the world to do so. Yet this possibility was dismissed quite forcefully and from the beginning of the outbreak by prominent virologists.
Speaking of which, Lomborg on Scientific Americans new editorial policy.
Did climate change cause societies to collapse? New research upends the old story.
A report recently published in the journal Nature argues that an obsession with catastrophe has driven much of the research into how societies responded to a shifting climate throughout history. That has resulted in a skewed view of the past that feeds a pessimistic view about our ability to respond to the crisis we face today.
“It would be rare that a society as a whole just kind of collapsed in the face of climate change,” said Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University and the lead author of the paper. The typical stories of environmentally-driven collapse that you might have heard about Easter Island or the Mayan civilization? “All those stories need to be retold, absolutely,” he said.
Virtue signaling hell.
It’s easier than thinking.
Professor Mark Fergusen
So we can identify these people.
Tests should be cheap, plentiful and available everywhere. Grocery stores, pharmacy, Walmart, gas stations, etc. So high risk people can do what they need to do and low risk people can get on with their lives. It’s not that complicated.
Biologists and conservation scientists have long been operating under the assumption that inbreeding should be avoided at all costs, but a new survey — published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution — suggests mating with relatives isn’t always bad.
If it were, researchers contend, animals would be trying a lot harder to avoid inbreeding.
“People assume that animals should avoid mating with a relative when given the chance,” lead study author Raïssa de Boer said in a news release.
“But evolutionary theory has been telling us that animals should tolerate, or even prefer, mating with relatives under a broad range of conditions for more than four decades,” said de Boer, a researcher in zoology at Stockholm University in Sweden.
“We can now say with confidence that our human ancestors were making simple Oldowan stone tools inside the Wonderwerk Cave 1.8 million years ago,” says geologist Ron Shaar from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
“Wonderwerk is unique among ancient Oldowan sites, a tool-type first found 2.6 million years ago in East Africa, precisely because it is a cave and not an open-air occurrence.”
While ancient evidence of wildfires and human fires might get mixed up in open-air sites, that’s not the case in the Wonderwerk Cave. What’s more, other indicators of humans making fires were found: burnt bones and ash, for example, as well as the tools.
From Nature
Data now suggest that the majority of infected individuals develop robust and long-lasting T cell immunity, which has implications for the durability of immunity and future vaccine approaches.
The authors studied T cell responses six months after infection in 100 individuals (median age 41 years) who had relatively mild infections (56 people) or asymptomatic infections (44 people).
You guys can pick out some more nuggets and put them in the comments.
Yeah, about that dosing interval…
Especially doctoral students in the medical field when they weigh in on the subject of supply chain logistics and commercial trucking.
But if data indicates that truck drivers are a significant source of virus importation, it might make sense to have handovers of freight at the border so the drivers themselves don’t cross over, said McLaughlin.
There are likely some SDA readers out there with experience in the trucking industry who can elaborate on the nightmarish scenarios that might unfold should anyone should actually try what Ms. McLaughlin is recommending.
How A Man’s Unborn Twin Fathered His Son
Evidence is mounting that a tiny subatomic particle seems to be disobeying the known laws of physics, scientists announced on Wednesday, a finding that would open a vast and tantalizing hole in our understanding of the universe.
The result, physicists say, suggests that there are forms of matter and energy vital to the nature and evolution of the cosmos that are not yet known to science. The new work, they said, could eventually lead to breakthroughs more dramatic than the heralded discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson, a particle that imbues other particles with mass.
“This is our Mars rover landing moment,” said Chris Polly, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., who has been working toward this finding for most of his career.
The particle célèbre is the muon, which is akin to an electron but far heavier, and is an integral element of the cosmos. Dr. Polly and his colleagues — an international team of 200 physicists from seven countries — found that muons did not behave as predicted when shot through an intense magnetic field at Fermilab.
The aberrant behavior poses a firm challenge to the Standard Model, the suite of equations that enumerates the fundamental particles in the universe (17, at last count) and how they interact.
Yes, just like a “Mars rover landing moment”!
Most physicists believe that a rich trove of new physics waits to be found, if only they could see deeper and further. The additional data from the Fermilab experiment could provide a major boost to scientists eager to build the next generation of expensive particle accelerators.
More muoney, please.
The “food pyramid” will never be the same;
Despite a widespread belief that humans owe their evolution to the dietary flexibility in eating both meat and vegetables, researchers in Israel suggest that early humans were actually apex predators who hunted large animals for two million years before they sought vegetables to supplement their diet.
In a study recently published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, academics from Tel Aviv University in Israel and the University of Minho in Portugal examined modern biology to determine if stone-age humans were specialized carnivores or generalist omnivores.[…]
“We decided to use other methods to reconstruct the diet of Stone-Age humans: to examine the memory preserved in our own bodies, our metabolism, genetics and physical build,” Ben-Dor said.
“Human behaviour changes rapidly, but evolution is slow. The body remembers.”
They discovered 25 lines of evidence from the studied papers on human biology that seem to show that earlier Homo sapiens were apex predators at the top of the food chain.
For example, the academics explained that humans have a high acidity in their stomachs when compared to omnivores or even other predators, which is important for consuming animal products. […]
In addition to the evidence they collected by studying human biology, the researchers said archeological evidence from the Pleistocene period supports their theory.
There’s a debate going on between doctors on the BMJ website about the new covid vaccines. Here is the original article that kicked it off.
We have a duty to protect patients
Vageesh Jain, public health specialty registrar, University College London, says, “As it stands, legally, you don’t have to have a covid vaccine. But ethically, clinically, epidemiologically—whichever way you slice it—I would argue you do.“The ethical case is grounded in the professional duty healthcare workers have to protect their patients: do no harm. Although everyone has the right to decide whether to take a vaccine or not, patients (often elderly or unwell, and therefore vulnerable to covid-19) also have fundamental rights to be protected from avoidable harm. When these principles come into conflict, actions that safeguard the best interests of patients must be favoured.
Responses to the article can be found here.
One in particular stands out.
I have had more vaccines in my life than most people and come from a place of significant personal and professional experience in relation to this pandemic, having managed a service during the first 2 waves and all the contingencies that go with that.
Nevertheless, what I am currently struggling with is the failure to report the reality of the morbidity caused by our current vaccination program within the health service and staff population. The levels of sickness after vaccination is unprecedented and staff are getting very sick and some with neurological symptoms which is having a huge impact on the health service function. Even the young and healthy are off for days, some for weeks, and some requiring medical treatment. Whole teams are being taken out as they went to get vaccinated together.
Mandatory vaccination in this instance is stupid, unethical and irresponsible when it comes to protecting our staff and public health. We are in the voluntary phase of vaccination, and encouraging staff to take an unlicensed product that is impacting on their immediate health, and I have direct experience of staff contracting Covid AFTER vaccination and probably transmitting it. In fact, it is clearly stated that these vaccine products do not offer immunity or stop transmission. In which case why are we doing it? There is no longitudinal safety data (a couple of months of trial data at best) available and these products are only under emergency licensing. What is to say that there are no longitudinal adverse effects that we may face that may put the entire health sector at risk?
But do go through them all it’s interesting reading. It also highlights why we need freedom of speech instead of just the blue pill consensus garbage they keep feeding us.
Paging Randall Carlson: Melting ice sheets triggered 60 feet of sea level rise 14,600 years ago
The Campaign to Thwart Paleogenetic Research Into North America’s Indigenous Peoples
In a 2017 article published in Science, Ann Gibbons wrote about the power of DNA analysis to “bust” the myths associated with Europeans’ origins: “Despite their tales of origin, most people are the mixed descendants of many migrations… As techniques for probing ethnic origins spread, nearly every week brings a new paper testing and then falsifying lore about one ancient culture after another.” Gibbons properly describes this as a positive development. But if this principle is true for the so-called old world, why is it untrue in regard to Indigenous peoples?
The only way one might consider Duggan’s research to be offensive or controversial is to such extent as one might wish to preserve the idea of Indigenous peoples as staking out an unbroken genetic (and therefore moral) claim to this or that part of North America. Certainly, I can think of no other basis on which Duggan might be required to secure the permission of modern First Nations (as they are known in Canada) to conduct scientific research on populations that haven’t existed for thousands of years.
Because…
In many cases, paleogenetics is revealing that even those “true” homelands were not as ancient as once believed.
Grab a coffee.
h/t Me No Dhimmi
Independent of cholesterol, gene variants raise risk of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure
All the cool kids are wearing them.
Fauci has a bad habit of seizing onto a small kernel of scientific data, drawing sweeping inferences upon it through unfounded speculation, and then presenting his own exaggerated spin to the public as if it is a matter of scientific fact.
On March 28, 2020 – just shy of a year before his recent tangle with Senator Paul – Fauci aggressively contested the likelihood of reinfection in an interview with the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah. “It’s never 100%,” he explained, “but I’d be willing to bet anything that people who recover are really protected against re-infection.”
The NIH administrator’s many credulous enthusiasts in the news media will likely respond to such contradictory assertions by claiming that Fauci is simply updating his assessment in light of new evidence. Yet his track record over the past year suggests a very different story. Far from incorporating the latest scientific findings, Fauci appears to selectively invoke or downplay the specter of reinfection based on whether or not it serves his political objectives of the moment.
The “public health experts” told us that lockdowns were the key to our salvation. When that didn’t work, they did the same thing with masks, curfews, physical distancing, and the like. They had it all figured out, until they didn’t, and destroyed tens of millions of lives in their attempts to resolve a virus problem. So how could these highly-touted “experts” get everything so catastrophically wrong?
And what exactly is a public health expert anyway?
It’s so simple! We’ll all be saved! You rubes just need to listen to THE SCIENCE!
At long last, we have made a truly game-changing scientific breakthrough in preventing the spread of COVID-19. The impact of this breakthrough seems almost too good to be true.
We have found a disease control tool that, when used properly, can dramatically reduce the person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Studies have shown that this tool could reduce transmission by somewhere between 50% and 85%. The tool is cheap and remarkably low-tech. You can even make one at home. It has no significant side effects. And with each passing day, the scientific research showing the tool’s effectiveness gets stronger and stronger.
Free at last, free at last, free at last…