Month: August 2020

Hybrid Fish

Sturddlefish go shockingly far beyond classic crossbreeds like mules and ligers, whose parent species sit close together on the tree of life. Sturddlefish result from the merger of different taxonomic families. It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby. Then he quickly corrected himself, because the lineages of those 2 ruminants split only 40 ma ago. The evolutionary paths of paddlefish and sturgeons diverged 184 ma ago. For those fish to breed is more like if a human came out of a platypus egg.

Quantifying Hangry

So I nicked a sensor from a friend and monitored my blood sugar levels continuously for the last 2 weeks. This is the spring-loaded spike that stayed in me for the 2-week period, feeding data to a cell phone app. I ran some experiments, like eating Stevia packets on an empty stomach, and looked for patterns (graphs below). Here is what I learned

1) Liquid sugar is the worst. I have heard the same conclusion from everyone I know who has monitored themselves. High-end fresh-pressed juice and Chic-Fil-A’s frosted lemonade spiked my blood sugar like nothing else… super fast and super high relative to any food.

i wish more people did these kinds of experiments, we’d learn so much so quickly about our metabolisms. i did the same for 2 weeks as part of a viome study, but they were lame and only shared the data as pdf, not raw.

The Power of Vaccines

The immune response generated against a virus during natural infection is, to some degree, at the mercy of the virus itself. Not so with vaccines.

Since many viruses evade the innate immune system, natural infections sometimes do not result in robust or long-lasting immunity. The human papillomavirus is one of them, which is why it can cause chronic infections. The papillomavirus vaccine triggers a far better antibody response to its viral antigen than does a natural HPV infection: It is almost 100% effective in preventing HPV infection and disease.

RelMOND

Their theory, dubbed RelMOND, adds to the equations of general relativity an omnipresent field that behaves differently in different arenas. On the grandest scales, where the universe noticeably stretches as it expands, the field acts like invisible matter. In this mode, which Złosnik refers to as “dark dust,” the field could have shaped the visible universe just as dark matter would. The model faithfully reproduces the temperature of the CMB — the result that the duo published in their preprint — and Złosnik says it can also match the polarization spectrum and the matter distribution, although they have not yet published these plots.

In place of dark matter, they substitute a subtly modified force of gravity.

COVID-19 & humidity

Folks, this is huge because it shows that a simple remedy (indoor humidification in temperate areas in winter months) can cut COVID-19 mortality by almost an order of magnitude.

Humidity from masks may lessen severity of COVID-19:

High levels of humidity can limit the spread of a virus to the lungs by promoting mucociliary clearance (MCC), a defense mechanism that removes mucus − and potentially harmful particles within the mucus − from the lungs. High levels of humidity can also bolster the immune system by producing interferons, a process known as the interferon response. Low levels of humidity have been shown to impair both MCC and the interferon response, which may be 1 reason why people are likelier to get respiratory infections in cold weather.