As every other aspect of human life, science communication has suffered a significant setback due to the ongoing Covid-19-induced pandemic. While regular meetings of scientific teams can be effectively held online, through zoom or skype, it is the big conferences that are suffering the biggest blow. And this is not good, for several reasons.
When you think of shrimp, lobster, or crabs, you don't think of the hottest place on Earth, but a new freshwater Crustacea has been discovered during an expedition of the desert Lut, which is the record-holder for temperature on land. The Lut desert, Dasht-e Lut in Farsi, is the second largest desert in Iran.
Almost deprived of vegetation, the Lut desert harbors a diverse animal life, but no permanent aquatic biotops, such as ponds. Instead, after rain falls, non-permanent astatic water bodies are filled including the Rud-e-Shur river from north-western Lut. And that is when these new creatures can be more readily found.
The compound melittin, found in honeybee venom, rapidly destroyed triple-negative breast cancer and HER2-enriched breast cancer cells
in a recent study. In the 1950s, bee venom was found to reduce the growth of tumors in plants and in the last two decades interest grew into the effects of honeybee venom on different cancers.
For the study, 312 honeybees and bumblebees in Perth Western Australia, Ireland and England, were used to test the effect of the venom on the clinical subtypes of breast cancer, including triple-negative breast cancer, which has limited treatment options.
Findings based on a SIR (Susceptible, Infectious or Recovered) Model of Infection Dynamics, commonly used to determine infection scenarios, including COVID-19, and
presented at the Artificial Intelligence and the Coronavirus workshop at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, say that New York and California may have reached herd immunity.
Two studies of people who had completed personality assessments as undergraduates or MBA students at three universities, and were surveyed again over a decade later and ranked by co-workers about their workplace behavior, found that those with selfish, deceitful, and aggressive personality traits were not more likely to have attained power than those who were generous, trustworthy, and generally nice.
Plenty of jerks were in positions of power, but it wasn't because they manipulated their way into it.
Bill Gates doesn't make vaccines. There are now 176 vaccines from many different countries, thirty four of those already in clinical trials and eight in phase 3. Some may be approved soon, and none are made by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does provide funding for some vaccines. In particular they are amongst the funders for the vaccine alliances GAVI and COVAX, the vaccine pillar of the “Access to COVID19 Tools” ACT accelerator.
In late March of 2020, the Food and Drug Administration gave Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. The drug is already used off-label for diseases like arthritis and given how it behaves with human biology, it is plausible it might work on some with COVID-19. A peer-reviewed study found just that - but it was only epidemiology, and that is not how drug approval ever happens, any more than epidemiology alone should be how regulations happen at EPA or any policy-making group.
The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor,
has been found to have a nearly invisible halo of diffuse plasma that extends about halfway to our Milky Way.
That's 1.3 million light-years, and it may go 2 million light-years in some parts, which means Andromeda's halo is already touching our own. The halo has a layered structure, with two main nested and distinct shells of gas. These reservoirs of gas contain fuel for future star formation within the galaxy, as well as outflows from events such as supernovae.
With racial tension erupting again, parents may be wondering the appropriate age to discuss what kids see in news accounts or in protests at sporting events.
Psychologists believe that some infants are aware of race and children are capable of thinking about all sorts of complex topics at a very young age. They must, because they see older, bigger people doing things that may seem almost magical, and it becomes important to make sense of their world and so they will come up with their own ideas about how things work. But if they only see news on television, with two sides rioting and committing violence in the name of opposing the others' fascism, the ideas kids come up with may be inaccurate or even detrimental.
The false vacuum collapse is about a remote possibility, not just billions of years in the future, so far in the future that all the stars in the night sky have run out of fuel, long before.
There is no realistic possibility at present, or for billions of years, and it is of no concern.
Text: Can’t be here (instability)
Can’t realistically tunnel for billions of years even without new physics (meta-stability)
May be here Could still be absolutely stable with present physics (Absolute stability)
Many ways we may be here (lots of physics still to understand) (Absolute stability)
