Eventually I think we will categorize all the recent betacoronavirus outbreaks (Sars-1, Sars-2, MERS) as part of this broader process, and require a vaccination strategy that can be quickly deployed against new recombinations from this original ancestral betacoronavirus as they randomly emerge from the primordial stew across many animal species, including ours. The evidence thus far points to recombinations resulting in the emergence of a distinct dangerous variant with some regularity.
2 lab freezers in Asia have yielded surprising discoveries. Researchers have found a coronavirus that is closely related to SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the pandemic, in horseshoe bats stored in a freezer in Cambodia. A team reported the discovery of another closely related coronavirus — also found in frozen bat droppings.
The viruses are the first known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 to be found outside China, which supports the World Health Organization’s search across Asia for the pandemic’s animal origin. Strong evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 originated in horseshoe bats, but whether it passed directly from bats to people, or through an intermediate host, remains a mystery.
stations were re-designed to include open-air waiting areas so MTA customers can head underground only when they know a train with capacity is arriving.
John Priscu’s search for life that thrives under ice took him to subglacial lakes at the South Pole. Now he has his eye on Mars and Europa.
And there are sessile animals under the ice:
The researchers think it’s likely that the drift of this marine snow has been flipped on its side, so that the food source is moving horizontally instead of vertically. The researchers determined that there are productive regions 630-1500 km away. It may not be much, but it’s possible that enough organic material is riding these currents to feed these creatures. That’s an extraordinary distance, given that in the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep near Guam, marine snow produced at the surface has to fall 11 km down to reach the seafloor. To reach the animals on this Antarctic rock, food would have to travel as much as 133x that distance—and it would have to do so by floating sideways.
Harvard’s star CS professor built a distance-learning empire. We only need a handful of gifted teachers to sweep away all the mediocrity. there’s real returns to scale if you use the technology correctly.
With time to burn during ye olde pandemic, practitioners of a musical genre called bardcore have been taking pop songs and medieval-izing their lyrics and tunes.
This information theory of individuality offers a very general way to think about biological units. They hope it will inspire algorithms that could allow you to extract figure from ground, organism from environment. Such algorithms could be applied to streams of data collected over time to pinpoint correlations of information that signify the emergence of individuals.
Within this theory, individuals can be cells, tissues, organisms, colonies, companies, political institutions, online groups, artificial intelligence or cities — even ideas or theories. What we’re trying to do is discover a whole zoo of life forms that extend far beyond what we have conventionally called living,
Annually, the city gets about the same amount of rain as it has over the last few decades, but it comes in deluges, instead of steady, moderate downfalls
2022-01-30: It’s interesting to visualize the amount of sun in Europe and the US:
To help households estimate and manage risk, I’ve made the following table, listing risks for 19 activities, all relative to the first: accepting delivery of and eating a pizza, paid for online.
The huge subsidy of free parking in NYC needs to stop. article is nicely visual to make the point how the city could look like instead. 2021-11-12: Curbed as a very nice breakdown of various topics like garbage, delivery, safety etc.
we tried to imagine what a comprehensive transformation would produce on a generic Manhattan block, to the extent that one exists. We chose Third Avenue between East 33rd and 34th Streets because of its concentration of terriblenesses and virtues. It is congested, dense, torn up, noisy, and lively. Lined by towers and tenements, plied by trucks and fed by tunnels, it’s a short walk from offices, hospitals, and trains. Yet we also embraced its frenzy. Our goal was not to impose the serenity of a provincial Dutch city or to streamline the block into anodyne efficiency. New York without friction wouldn’t be New York.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 