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.
The Wiley and Illusive “Natural Immunity”
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.
Pfizer to Trudeau
Yeah, about that dosing interval…
Listen to the experts…
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.
The Sound Of Settled Science
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 Sound Of Settled Science
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.
Fluoride?
Trust the Experts
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.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Paging Randall Carlson: Melting ice sheets triggered 60 feet of sea level rise 14,600 years ago
The Sound Of Settled Science
Independent of cholesterol, gene variants raise risk of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure
Fauci’s Flipflops
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?
Remembering the Magic Bullet
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…
They really don’t know.
Social media fact checkers hit hardest.
From the article
“It never struck me that six feet was particularly sensical in the context of mitigation,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “I wish the C.D.C. would just come out and say this is not a major issue.”
The origin of the six-foot distancing recommendation is something of a mystery. “It’s almost like it was pulled out of thin air,” said Linsey Marr, an expert on viral transmission at Virginia Tech University.
“One of the really important data points that has been missing is a direct head-to-head comparison of places that had implemented three feet of distance versus six feet of distance,” said Dr. Elissa Perkins, the director of emergency medicine infectious disease management at Boston University School of Medicine.
It really took the Gray Lady this long to start asking simple questions?
Read the whole thing.
Does It Feel Cold In Here?
They want us all dead.
The science of groupthink
If you are wondering how the lockdown philosophy seems to have gripped conservative political leaders just as thoroughly as liberals, this article offers some great insights into how that happened. The author refers mostly to the British experience, but his observations would apply equally to most political jurisdictions on the planet.
“One of the most striking things about the past year has been the uniform and all but unquestioning embrace of the novel policy of lockdown by Government, opposition parties, and the mainstream media. Even as the number of fatalities, hospitalisations, and cases collapse, the Government remains religiously wedded to the sclerotic pace of its easing strategy and news bulletins continue to duckspeak calls to comply with the most illiberal restrictions ever imposed on British society, refusing to interrogate these restrictions’ costs. Those who question lockdown orthodoxy, be they distinguished scientists, civil liberties campaigners, or journalists beyond the print and televisual oligopolies, are denounced as ‘deniers’ and shut down.”
“Above all, the political class is unfamiliar with the scientific method. They understand ‘the science’ as a term of power they can deploy to shut down debates and win arguments, which has one ‘correct’ answer. They fail to recognise it as a process of investigation, determined by assumptions and inputs, which will often produce outlying results and whose purveyors can unintentionally mislead the uninitiated by the words they use to describe phenomena like percentage correlations.”
The Sound Of Settled Science
A pioneering study led by University of Saskatchewan (USask) veterinary ophthalmologist Dr. Marina Leis (DVM, DACVO) shows that bacterial communities vary on different parts of the eye surface—a finding that significantly alters understanding of the mechanisms of eye disease and can lead to developing new treatments.
“We are excited to share our findings, which provide a paradigm shift within the field,” said veterinary microbiologist Dr. Matheus Costa (DVM, PhD), a member of the Leis research team that published a paper recently (Feb. 19) in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLOS One.[…]
“The way we’ve always understood the ocular surface was that it contained a single bacterial population. Now, we learned different portions of the surface seem to have different bacteria that predominate, which has implications for disease mechanisms of multiple types of ocular surface conditions,” Costa said.
“As ophthalmologists we work under the assumption that the cornea is largely devoid of bacteria, or at least clinically relevant players. What we found puts this view into question,” Leis said.
Fact checking the fact checkers
Not long ago, Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which downplayed many of the worst case scenarios for Covid and projected natural herd immunity by April. This article was widely shared via social media like Facebook, who reacted by unleashing the fact checking commissars. This latest WSJ article looks at how leftist social media outlets are doing their best to ensure that debate gives way to dogma.
“…the progressive health clerisy don’t like his projection because they worry it could lead to fewer virus restrictions. The horror! Health Feedback’s fact checkers disagree with the evidence Dr. Makary cites as well as how he interprets it. Fine. Scientists disagree all the time. Much of conventional health wisdom about red meat, sodium and cardiovascular risk is still fiercely debated.
The same goes for Covid-19. There’s still much we don’t understand about the virus and its transmission and immunity. Yet Facebook’s fact-checkers “cherry-pick,” to borrow their word, studies to support their own opinions, which they present as fact.”
“Scientists often disagree over how to interpret evidence. Debate is how ideas are tested and arguments are refined. But Facebook’s fact checkers are presenting their opinions as fact and seeking to silence other scientists whose views challenge their own.”
Ya Think?
Maybe its just me, but it would seem that it should be much bigger news that 15,000+ peer-reviewed climate research papers published since 2000 are based on a non-existent phenomena & thus are now discredited … https://t.co/CFOFMwzh31
— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) March 5, 2021
The Sound Of Settled Science
Research risks ruining a treasured leftist slur;
Neanderthals possessed the capacity to hear, process and produce human speech, according to a new survey combining CT scans and computer models.
For the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers used computed tomography scans to build 3D models of the ear structures in Neanderthals, Homo sapiens and Neanderthal relatives unearthed at Atapuerca, an archaeological site in Spain.
My friends, it’s time to talk reparations.
Covid Modelling vs Reality
So how’d they do?
Side-note: Back in November when everyone was masked up and following “official” protocols I remember a CBC reporter tweeting about how it was the general public’s fault that the real world numbers weren’t lining up with the “models”. Which is the completely backwards way of looking at it.