Tag: science

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.

Anglerfish sexual parasitism

The anglerfish deleted its immune system to fuse with its mate

There are few animals more bizarre than the anglerfish, a species that has so much trouble finding a mate that when the male and female do connect underwater, males actually fuse their tissue with the females for life. After the merger, the 2 share a single respiratory and digestive system

Cordoba Thunderstorms

From what the team could gather, each of the storms had generated such large, powerful updrafts that they’d eventually merged together and begun to spawn other, smaller updrafts, creating what’s called a “mesoscale convective system” — in short, a giant, organized complex of perhaps 50 or more updrafts, which becomes self-sustaining as it germinates more and more offspring.

2022-02-01:

 The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has established 2 new world records for megaflashes of lightning.

  • The longest single flash that covered a horizontal distance of 768 ± 8 km across parts of the southern United States on 29 April 2020.
  • The greatest duration for a single lightning flash of 17.102 ± 0.002 seconds from the flash that developed continuously through a thunderstorm over Uruguay and northern Argentina on 18 June 2020.

COVID-19 origins

Support for the idea that something resembling SARS-COV-2 might have been circulating in the region before the pandemic began also comes from another intriguing observation, the low incidence of COVID-19 in South-East Asia, particularly in Vietnam.

A great piece on lab vs zoonotic COVID-19 origins

If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years.

Coronaviruses

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.

2020-11-23: Horseshoe bat origin?

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.

Subantarctic life

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.