baja_blast

I really wish more research was funneled into vaccines that target T-cells instead of B cells which produce antibodies. You see viruses mutate quickly and antibodies produced by the b cells can be evaded pretty quickly, but T-cells the white blood cells that actually eat the viruses are far more adaptable.

So the article references the market samples with Raccoon Dog mtDNA with some SARS2 within it. But here is the problem when you look at the samples there is a high abundance of animal viruses such as bamboo rat CoV, canine CoV HeB-G1, rabbit CoV HKU14, and canine CoV SD-F3. But a very low abundance of SARS2 so much so that SARS2 is negatively associated with non human mtDNA.

> Mitochondrial material from most susceptible non-human species sold live at the market is negatively correlated with the presence of SARS-CoV-2: for instance, thirteen of the fourteen samples with at least a fifth of their chordate mitochondrial material from raccoon dogs contain no SARS-CoV-2 reads, and the other sample contains just 1 of ~200,000,000 reads mapping to SARS-CoV-2

https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/9/2/vead050/7249794?logi...

Study on what viruses such as canine CoVs where highly correlated with animals like Raccoon Dog:

https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/10/1/vead089/7504441?log...

I still tip very generously for food delivery and table service but I will never tip a cashier at checkout and in fact I actually avoid stores that use the tip screen checkout system because I hate being guilt tripped when buying gum.

This paper's argues that due to half of the early reported cases being linked to the market and the presence animal DNA showing animals were at the market that this is strong evidence. But this is just circumstantial evidence, there is no evidence that these animals were infected, and still to this day the two closest viruses found in the wild were found thousands of kilometers away and are very distantly related with the last common ancestor being decades ago.

What politics of today in any way fit with a 500 story about a magical Monkey fighting monsters? I just want a compelling game, no one is going to change their politics suddenly after playing a magical monkey game. For politics there is a time and a place, do you think there should be political messaging in Banana bread recipes as well?

To attack a Chinese developer about covid is totally wrong, regardless of what happened they like the rest of us had no control over what happened.

Interesting that we seem to find SARS-CoV-2 circulating in animals from reverse zoonosis(humans to animals), but we can't find any precursor virus circulating in any animals that would explain the zoonotic spillover in the first place. It's as if the virus vanished in whatever intermediate host after infecting the first human like some sort of immaculate infection event!

I just want to point out that anyone who tries and make arguments about the rare earth or the uniqueness of our solar system based off of observed exoplanets and solar systems should note that due to time and technical limitations we almost exclusively focus on M-type red dwarf stars which shouldn't be used to determine what typical solar systems and planets exist around G-type(sun like stars) or even K-type(the second most common star type) which collectively make up about 20% of stars in our galaxy.

But if we had multiple JWST like telescopes and one dedicated towards observing G and K type stars we could get a better understanding.

And what is this consensus based upon outside of what is most beneficial for their field of study? As stated in the article we have not found any infected animals, no antibodies or samples pointing to infected animals, no precursor viruses found circulating in any animals species, no separate spillover events nothing. This is something we find for all spillovers and all of this evidence was uncovered almost immediately for SARS1/MERS. Take a look at the current bird flu situation cropping up, whenever we find a case, we find infected animals at the farm, we find the virus in animals during random sampling, we find the virus in raw milk, we observe many independent outbreaks etc.

How is it that such an infectious virus no longer exists in any animal population? It's as if after the first human got infected the virus simply vanished off the face of the Earth like some sort of immaculate infection. Now how come when humans infected cats/dogs/deer etc. via reverse zoonosis that SARS2 didn't stop circulating in humans?

And here is the alternative perspective https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconvenient-proba...

But you're refactoring an existing codebase so it's not prematurely dry. You know exactly how these classes diverge.

The microtubules were from a pigs brain according the material and methods. These proteins exist in all animal cells. So this probably explains why single cell organisms are so intelligent despite not having a brain

>the many-worlds interpretation is basically the result of saying it doesn't

Few problems with this, the state that a particle can be in after the collapse of the wave function follows a probability distribution, so if all states are equally real then why does it seem like some states are more likely than others? Why would probabilities be such a powerful mathematical tool, and how would it work in a MWI.

If all points of the universe branch out into several universes after each particle interaction, where does all this energy come from? If all branches are equally real why even have the wave function in the first place?

Penrose argues just in terms of classical computers

>interesting uses in cognition or otherwise are in fact extremely rare in biology

How would you know that when we just started studying such effects?

People have said the same thing many times yet we keep discovering extremophiles thriving the some of the most hostile environments. And in 2020 they conducted an experiment on the ISS that exposed Earth bacteria to direct cosmic radiation for 3 years and it turns out they survived https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-dis.... And this was just Earth bacteria that did not evolve under these conditions, any remaining microbes on Mars would have developed adaptions to survive in such conditions.

> This was not true of the Martian soil; on Mars, the second and third nutrient injections did not produce any further release of labeled gas

But that's probably because martian microbes are less tolerant of high temperatures when compared to Earth microbes. But, yes I am aware there are other non life factors that could have resulted in a positive detection. But my point is why would we never follow up with further experiments to test for possible chemical reactions?

Yeah I never liked the panspermia as a solution to how life started so quickly on Earth because it just kicks the can down the road. But hey it has been speculated that DNA may be almost 10 billion years old https://phys.org/news/2013-04-law-life-began-earth.html. But this is just a thought experiment, I am unsure if we know how long it takes for DNA to double, nor do we know if the rate would be constant over time. For example if proof reading mechanisms evolved later thus slowing down the rate of change. But it's fun to think about. Too bad Google search is so useless I used to be able to go down these Rabbit holes finding all sorts of information but now it's almost impossible, Google just gives superficial AI answers these days

Given how long it took for Earth to develop multicellular life, Mars was probably pretty dead before it could take off(although it's very likely microbes still exist on Mars). But who knows, maybe Earth was late to the multicellular party, but I doubt it. If Mars did somehow evolve to multicellular life before Earth it's very likely that the multicellular would have been seeded to Earth via asteroids with something akin to a martian tardigrade

One thing that has annoyed me is in the 1970s the Viking landers did experiments to check for the presence of life on Mars known as the Labeled Release experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_lander_biological_exper... which dropped a nutrient solution with radioactive Carbon-14 to detect if there was any off gassing to detect if anything metabolized the soil. And both experiments showed positive results but it has been dismissed since chemical reactions could not be ruled out. But here is the thing, the experiments then did a sterilization control where they heated up the soil to 320 F for 3 hours and attempted the experiment again and no gasses were detected which is something you'd expect to see if the gasses were produced by microbes and not chemical processes.

Now is this a positive detection of life? No because other possible factors can not be ruled out. But what puzzles me is why we have never followed up with any further experiments to try and detect life? After the Viking missions we never conducted any further experiments that could rule out any other possible chemical reactions to get closer to confirming the presence of microbial life.

So I would say with the Labeled Release experiments coupled with the seasonal Methane detections strongly imply that there is still microbial extremophiles on Mars.

Biggest issue in my eyes was authorities denying that covid was airborne until it was scientifically verified. It should have been treated as such in the beginning until proven otherwise, it's better to be safe than sorry and it should have been obvious by how fast the virus spread that it was not via contact.

But he did

It's expensive in terms of opportunity costs.

I kind of like that it flows with how real conversations go. But I can also see how it's annoying if you're hoping for in-depth discussions.

It really is if you consider that only considering zoonotic origin helps prevent any meaningful regulations on dangerous research.

> every of your former friends hates you

Ah yes, people hate it when people call out corruption that results in the planes they fly to kill people!

>your family isn't super supportive either for what you caused to the rest of the family (in reputation, attention, possibly financially)

Again, I agree their neighbors and friends must have been super pissed when he called out Boeing for building dangerous planes that can kill people! Nothing makes regular people more upset when you put integrity over the profits of some corporation!

And I am sure the family were super pissed when pursuing a civil lawsuit that would benefit them. I am sure they were so upset about the negative repercussions to Boeing!

I guess we can all agree that he killed himself for the benefit of friends and family something that you always hear when a father kills himself! /s

And not to mention a potential criminal trail from the DOJ. He would be a key witness against individuals for a criminal case that bubbles up to the top brass.

Sure he may have already aired out what Boeing was doing, but he was only talking about general actions. But given that DOJ is looking into a criminal investigation that means he can name names, and testify against individuals which would bubble up the chain since lower level management just follows upper management’s direction. Also there could have been key information unsurfaced that he may not even know the importance of that the legal team would have spotted.

I mean why would someone who has given up everything to blow the whistle and devoted the past 7 years trying to get something done about it all a sudden kill himself in the middle of a trail and before a potential DOJ criminal investigation?

The man had a mission, why would he do Boeing a favor and kill himself so that he could not testify at a criminal hearing?

Imagine this in a criminal trail he would testify against his direct managers who would then just say “hey, I was told by my boss to tell him to do x” and then it bubbles up the chain to the executives.

I was about to come in and say this. I feel we greatly over estimate the intelligence of Chimps and underestimate crows and parrots.

>Maybe he would have done it anyway at this point in his life.

You'd think after he was done with hearings, something he was been advocating and trying to have happen since 2017. Why would he do Boeing a favor and kill himself before he could inflict further damage to the company?