The United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The launch was delayed by an hour due to a ground hydraulics issue.
The public viewing area was closed to the public due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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This article follows on from several others on this theme that I wrote some time ago, for details of which see footnote.
The idea of the earth as a superorganism re-emerged in modern times with the work of the independent scientist James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. This was developed further by the spiritually oriented writer Peter Russell in The Awakening Earth.
Continue reading “The Earth as a Superorganism — Further Thoughts” »
An interesting opinion:
The US Government Comparative Toxicogenomics database shows that Fluoride can inhibit Human immunity to viruses and pneumonia. Angiotensin I-Converting Enzyme (ACE), 2’-5’-Oligoadenylate Synthetase 1 (OAS1) and Intercellular Adhesion Molecule 1 (ICAM1) are included as susceptible epigenetic targets of the poison.
Read 3 answers by scientists with 1 recommendation from their colleagues to the question asked by Geoff Pain on Feb 4, 2020.
O„,.o yeah what about unauthorized clones o„,.o.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg never leaves a trace of herself anywhere. An artist and activist, Hagborg wants people to understand the hidden secrets in the DNA they leave behind everywhere they go — and what people can do with them. She developed a spray that can mask your DNA wherever it’s left. Hagborg understands that her spray could be used by criminals too, but she’s convinced that as technology develops, it will be an essential tool to preserving our safety and privacy.
O,.,o.
A team of scientists at North Carolina State University have developed a technique that could allow bricks and other common building materials to act as “cameras” that can reveal the location and distribution of radioactive materials that were once in their vicinity. Using optically stimulated luminescence, the team was able to retrieve a historical snapshot thanks to how radioactive elements like weapons-grade plutonium affected certain minerals in the materials.
On Christmas Day, 1972, the BBC aired a ghost story called The Stone Tape, which postulated that ghosts were the result of the stones in a room acting as a recording medium of past events – a stone tape, as it were. It was regarded as not only one of the best horror stories produced for television, it also popularized the hypothesis in paranormal circles known as residual hauntings or the Stone Tape theory.
Continue reading “Scientists turn bricks into gamma-ray cameras” »
Claims that the cure is worse than the disease rely on a false tradeoff between human needs and the economy.
Strange, very strange.
Military teams that monitor foreign missile and warplane threats to the United States are isolated at a number of military sites, including Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.
In less than a week, many companies have scrambled to create remote-work practices and help their employees set up shop in their dining rooms and living rooms and bedrooms.
As someone who worked from my home office pre-COVID-19 and who is part of a league of professionals who shout about the benefits of remote work from every rooftop I can find, it’s been interesting following this shift.
While much of the news today is scary, I’ve found a silver thread of hope in this pandemic: What if this is our chance to prove remote work, well, works?
There are endless viruses in our midst, made either of RNA or DNA viruses, which exist in much greater abundance around the planet, are capable of causing systemic diseases that are endemic, latent, and persistent—like the herpes viruses (which includes chicken pox), hepatitis B, and the papilloma viruses that cause cancer. “DNA viruses are the ones that live with us and stay with us,” Denison said. “They’re lifelong.” Retroviruses, like H.I.V., have RNA in their genomes but behave like DNA viruses in the host. RNA viruses, on the other hand, have simpler structures and mutate rapidly. “Viruses mutate quickly, and they can retain advantageous traits,” Epstein told me. “A virus that’s more promiscuous, more generalist, that can inhabit and propagate in lots of other hosts ultimately has a better chance of surviving.” They also tend to cause epidemics—such as measles, Ebola, Zika, and a raft of respiratory infections, including influenza and coronaviruses. Paul Turner, a Rachel Carson professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, told me, “They’re the ones that surprise us the most and do the most damage.”
Scientists discovered the coronavirus family in the nineteen-fifties, while peering through early electron microscopes at samples taken from chickens suffering from infectious bronchitis. The coronavirus’s RNA, its genetic code, is swathed in three different kinds of proteins, one of which decorates the virus’s surface with mushroom-like spikes, giving the virus the eponymous appearance of a crown. Scientists found other coronaviruses that caused disease in pigs and cows, and then, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, two more that caused a common cold in people. (Later, widespread screening identified two more human coronaviruses, responsible for colds.) These four common-cold viruses might have come, long ago, from animals, but they are now entirely human viruses, responsible for fifteen to thirty per cent of the seasonal colds in a given year. We are their natural reservoir, just as bats are the natural reservoir for hundreds of other coronaviruses. But, since they did not seem to cause severe disease, they were mostly ignored. In 2003, a conference for nidovirales (the taxonomic order under which coronaviruses fall) was nearly cancelled, due to lack of interest. Then SARS emerged, leaping from bats to civets to people. The conference sold out.
SARS is closely related to the new virus we currently face. Whereas common-cold coronaviruses tend to infect only the upper respiratory tract (mainly the nose and throat), making them highly contagious, SARS primarily infects the lower respiratory system (the lungs), and therefore causes a much more lethal disease, with a fatality rate of approximately ten per cent. (MERS, which emerged in Saudi Arabia, in 2012, and was transmitted from bats to camels to people, also caused severe disease in the lower respiratory system, with a thirty-seven per cent fatality rate.) SARS-CoV-2 behaves like a monstrous mutant hybrid of all the human coronaviruses that came before it. It can infect and replicate throughout our airways. “That’s why it is so bad,” Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology and immunology who has been studying coronaviruses for more than three decades, told me. “It has the lower-respiratory severity of SARS and MERS coronaviruses, and the transmissibility of cold coronaviruses.”
