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Author Topic: Science  (Read 11130 times)

josh

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Re: Science
« Reply #15 on: September 27, 2019, 01:55:23 AM »

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The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury." ~Lindsey Graham

barton

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Re: Science
« Reply #16 on: October 12, 2019, 05:58:53 PM »

What3Words divides the entire surface of the earth into a grid of 57 trillion 3m squares, each of which can be uniquely referenced by an arbitrary string of three words drawn from a dictionary of around 40,000 words.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-49319760

What3Words has quickly become the go-to tool for emergency services who need to locate people lost in remote or inaccessible areas who phone them up and ask for help. They are asked to download the app and use it to find the three word index for their current GPS location.

The What3Words system has recently been adopted as the official location finding system of the Mongolian postal service because a significant portion of the population are transhumant nomads with no fixed address.

Users of the What3Words have noted with interest that the string
///fake.news.trump
corresponds to a real location, a 3m x 3m grid square in Zhe Jiang province in mainland China.
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josh

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Re: Science
« Reply #17 on: November 14, 2019, 10:10:27 PM »

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The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury." ~Lindsey Graham

josh

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Re: Science
« Reply #18 on: December 03, 2019, 10:52:17 PM »

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The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury." ~Lindsey Graham

oilcan

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josh

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The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury." ~Lindsey Graham

josh

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The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury." ~Lindsey Graham

barton

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Re: Science
« Reply #22 on: March 05, 2020, 09:52:05 AM »

An attempt to shed a bit of light on the flu outbreak.....

https://apnews.com/580923fa5e2200f98c0a42b5c0d7b236


Quote
Ropeik said the coronavirus triggers thinking about years of warnings about lethal pandemics. “This idea of the new disease being a major killer is an idea that has been burned into our recent fear memory,” he said.

Vincent Covello, director of the Center for Risk Communication, based in New York, provided a list of 17 psychological factors that he said can influence how individuals gauge the risks of coronavirus. For example, he said, people are often more concerned about events if they don’t trust the authorities or institutions in charge. They’re more concerned about involuntary things, like exposure to an infected person, than voluntary ones, like smoking or sunbathing. And they’re often more concerned about risks that have delayed effects, like the lag time between infection and symptoms, than those with an immediate effect, like poisoning.

So how can people minimize the risk of overreaction in themselves and others? Don’t spread the word about every little development, including minor missteps by government authorities, Ropeik says. And “don’t just share the scary parts,” but also include things like infection usually causing only mild to moderate symptoms.

Finally, “don’t be a 24/7 information victim,” he said. “Log off, put your phone down, pick up a book ... Shut down your risk radar screen for a while.... You’re probably just as much at risk or safe tomorrow as you are now, whether you stay online all the time or not.”


Number of flu-caused deaths in a flu season in USA, average, per CDC: 56,000
Number of deaths from coronavirus in USA: 11

Average global flu deaths: 291,000 to 646,000
Global coronavirus deaths: 3000

This is not to say that covid-19 could not prove to bring an especially harsh flu season,  but it's very likely (from all the data I've seen) that most deaths will be comorbidity deaths,  where an older person with other systemic illness is felled by pneumonia (as is the case with the flu figures cited above).   Non-comorbidity deaths,  from covid-19, are a little higher than average flu,  but much lower than SARS.   

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josh

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Re: Science
« Reply #23 on: March 05, 2020, 04:28:38 PM »

An attempt to shed a bit of light on the flu outbreak.....

https://apnews.com/580923fa5e2200f98c0a42b5c0d7b236


Quote
Ropeik said the coronavirus triggers thinking about years of warnings about lethal pandemics. “This idea of the new disease being a major killer is an idea that has been burned into our recent fear memory,” he said.

Vincent Covello, director of the Center for Risk Communication, based in New York, provided a list of 17 psychological factors that he said can influence how individuals gauge the risks of coronavirus. For example, he said, people are often more concerned about events if they don’t trust the authorities or institutions in charge. They’re more concerned about involuntary things, like exposure to an infected person, than voluntary ones, like smoking or sunbathing. And they’re often more concerned about risks that have delayed effects, like the lag time between infection and symptoms, than those with an immediate effect, like poisoning.

So how can people minimize the risk of overreaction in themselves and others? Don’t spread the word about every little development, including minor missteps by government authorities, Ropeik says. And “don’t just share the scary parts,” but also include things like infection usually causing only mild to moderate symptoms.

Finally, “don’t be a 24/7 information victim,” he said. “Log off, put your phone down, pick up a book ... Shut down your risk radar screen for a while.... You’re probably just as much at risk or safe tomorrow as you are now, whether you stay online all the time or not.”


Number of flu-caused deaths in a flu season in USA, average, per CDC: 56,000
Number of deaths from coronavirus in USA: 11

Average global flu deaths: 291,000 to 646,000
Global coronavirus deaths: 3000

This is not to say that covid-19 could not prove to bring an especially harsh flu season,  but it's very likely (from all the data I've seen) that most deaths will be comorbidity deaths,  where an older person with other systemic illness is felled by pneumonia (as is the case with the flu figures cited above).   Non-comorbidity deaths,  from covid-19, are a little higher than average flu,  but much lower than SARS.

Excluding co-morbidity, the rate of death from the flu ran about 1/10th of a percent (0.1%) in the US. The rate of death from COVID-19 in Wuhan seems to be about 3.4%. I'd call that more than a little higher!

In the US, the rate is over 6%, based on the 11 deaths and 160 cases we know of.

Yes, this is not where SARS or MERS were. Those both died out before we got a vaccine for them. Its shorter incubation period and seeming less infectious nature means that there have already been more Covid-19 deaths than SARS. "Before it was contained, 8,000 people had contracted SARS; more than 700 people died."

And just as well that this seems less fatal, given how quickly it spreads!
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The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury." ~Lindsey Graham

barton

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Re: Science
« Reply #24 on: March 05, 2020, 06:49:54 PM »

Josh,

Quote
Excluding co-morbidity, the rate of death from the flu ran about 1/10th of a percent (0.1%) in the US. The rate of death from COVID-19 in Wuhan seems to be about 3.4%. I'd call that more than a little higher! 

Is that Wuhan rate also excluding comorbidity?  I know there's a variant form that's more aggressive, but haven't seen figures separating out comorbidity in China?   I can probably find them,  but it's hard to tell with China how complete their shared data is.   

On the whole I'd say we need to be vigilant due to the ease with which coronaviruses mutate and spin off more aggressive variants.   There's a branch of evolutionary biology called macroevolution that deals among other things with species that somehow manage to evolve mechanisms for rapid mutation which they take maximum advantage of.   Biologists like SJ Gould and Niles Eldridge wrote quite a bit about macroevolution. 
Though a mutagen rich environment (like Earth ATM) can generate lots of lethal mutations,  species like c-viruses seem able to thrive and benefit from the more adaptive mutations.   
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josh

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Re: Science
« Reply #25 on: April 21, 2020, 04:41:11 PM »

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The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury." ~Lindsey Graham

barton

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Re: Science
« Reply #26 on: April 30, 2020, 11:58:35 AM »

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barton

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Re: Science
« Reply #27 on: May 24, 2020, 09:32:07 AM »

EIDD-2801 looking like it might be a contender.  It can be administered in pill form,  unlike remdesivir which has to be IV.    And being a replication inhibitor,  it may be more broad spectrum.

https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-development/emerging-antiviral-takes-aim-COVID-19/98/web/2020/05

Quote
    Although doctors and scientists are testing a vast arsenal of existing drugs and drug candidates in the fight against the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, EIDD-2801 stands out. It attacks the same viral enzyme, the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, as Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir, which the US Food and Drug Administration recently granted emergency use authorization, allowing it to be used by doctors in the pandemic. But unlike remdesivir, which has to be given intravenously, EIDD-2801 can be taken orally as a pill.

This means if EIDD-2801 is shown to be safe and effective, people could take it at home rather than in a hospital. That would allow EIDD-2801 to be taken earlier in the course of the disease, killing off the virus before it wreaks havoc on the body.

EIDD-2801’s other intriguing feature is that it appears to have a high barrier to resistance. Drugs can force viruses to quickly develop mutants that aren’t affected by the drug, which then makes the drug obsolete. But EIDD-2801 hasn’t prompted that sort of resistance in lab tests despite efforts to coerce such mutants to arise... 
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josh

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Re: Science
« Reply #28 on: May 30, 2020, 04:13:52 PM »

The launch of the Falcon 9 and the Dragon today was exciting.

I remember Challenger too well and no launch of people will fail to make me anxious until this becomes as basic as flight or cars.

But watching the first stage land, tail down, the way space ships are supposed to land made me laugh.
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The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury." ~Lindsey Graham

barton

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Re: Science
« Reply #29 on: May 31, 2020, 06:33:15 PM »

The Nova episode that aired 5/13, on the coronavirus.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/decoding-covid-19/

Puts a lot of information together pretty well,  in 53 minutes.   

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