Most Commented Science Blogs (319)

An asteroid the size of a minibus and called 2023 BU, will zip past the southern tip of South America just after midnight, GMT. It will be approx 2, 200 miles at its closest.

90 year old actor William Shatner of STAR TREK fame took a flight yesterday on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin making it to the edge of space. That officially makes him the oldest person to go to space.
Congrats William...

SciCheck Digest

A viral video features a doctor making dubious claims about COVID-19 vaccines and treatments at a forum hosted by Idaho’s lieutenant governor. Dr. Ryan Cole claims mRNA vaccines cause cancer and autoimmune diseases, but the lead author of the paper on which Cole based that claim told us there is no evidence mRNA vaccines cause those ailments.
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More than 565,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the U.S., but two effective mRNA vaccines are now available. Some treatments for certain patients, such as those hospitalized or receiving oxygen, have also been approved or authorized by federal agencies, and they continue to be studied.

Since the pandemic began, however, politicized social media posts have featured doctors, some looking authoritative in white coats, spreading dubious claims about both vaccines and treatments for COVID-19. The most recent example in this misinformation niche is Dr. Ryan Cole, who owns a medical lab in Idaho.

Cole is featured in a video that has amassed more than a million views. He makes a variety of claims, some of which we’ve addressed before.

The video was recorded while he spoke at a forum on March 4 hosted by Idaho’s lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, a Republican, and it was posted by a Libertarian organization called the Idaho Freedom Foundation.

McGeachin was featured in an October post by that group, posing with a Bible and a gun in a video that advocated against public health measures related to the pandemic and asked viewers to sign a statement saying that “any order issued in the future will be ignored.”

Cole said in an interview with FactCheck.org that he’s “not affiliated with any political party, group or organization.” According to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office, Cole is registered as a Republican.

In the March 4 video, Cole makes claims suggesting that federal agencies have acted nefariously, as well as claims that undermine vaccines and promise miracle treatments.

Two of the COVID-19 vaccines available in the U.S. use messenger RNA, or mRNA, to train recipients’ immune systems to make antibodies that fight the virus that causes COVID-19. (See SciCheck’s articles on those vaccines: “A Guide to Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine“ and “A Guide to Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 Vaccine.”)

These are the first vaccines using mRNA technology authorized in the U.S., but scientists have been developing and testing mRNA vaccines for years, including in people during clinical trials. Still, misinformation exploiting fears of this new technology has been common online.

To those bogus claims, Cole has now added: “mRNA trials in mammals have led to odd cancers. mRNA trials on mammals have led to autoimmune diseases — not right away, six, nine, 12 months later.”

We asked Cole to provide support for those claims, and he referred us to a 2018 paper published in the journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery that reviewed trials and studies of various, earlier mRNA vaccines.

But that paper doesn’t support his statement.

Norbert Pardi, a research assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, was the lead author of the paper. He told us in an email, “No publications demonstrate that mRNA vaccines cause cancer or autoimmune diseases.”

Pardi’s 19-page paper does make one passing reference to autoimmune diseases, which is what Cole highlighted to us.

The paper says: “A possible concern could be that some mRNA-based vaccine platforms induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity. Thus, identification of individuals at an increased risk of autoimmune reactions before mRNA vaccination may allow reasonable precautions to be taken.”

cont in comments

Eager sky watchers are turning to the heavens as Comet NEOWISE, one of the brightest comets in a generation, starts climbing ever higher among the evening stars.

A majority of comets fly through the solar system invisible to humans, usually too small and dim to be seen with the naked eye. The last frozen ice ball that gave us a big show was Hale-Bopp, a comet that was visible for nearly 18 months around its closest approach to Earth in 1997.

Officially designated C/2020 F3, Comet NEOWISE was discovered on March 27 and had until this week been visible only to committed comet viewers willing to wake up in the early pre-dawn hours. But on Monday, NEOWISE tipped into the post-sunset sky and has even been spotted by people living near city centers with all the light pollution.

“It’s the first time in 23 years that this is possible,” said Federica Spoto, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “You can watch it from your backyard and you don’t need a telescope.”

(with apologies to Heisenberg) I am suggesting there exists a Trump uncertainty principle that states Trump's political positions and their destructive velocity can not be predicted, only viewed in retrospect to the resulting chaos. Strangely enough that does not keep Trump from pretending he knows everything about anything.

So I try to introduce tidbits of other things into each lecture. Here, I relate how my grieving is lessened by the dear hearts of the young ladies in the busy beaver front row of the class. Very busy beaver. The loss, over just one month, of both of two wonderful kitties, weighs heavily on this otherwise hardened racist/sexist/multiphoboc Vierk heart. Miss Angel, huntress extraordinaire Maine coon cat, still presenting the women next door with all sorts of prey---voles, moles, mice and yes, the odd chipmunk as well---even during her frail last days. And huge calico Miss Lilly, who left us just yesterday, community greeter suprema, who on her last days, nearly blind, and barely still able to walk, sat on the front lawn in the warm mid spring sun, allowing passers by to scratch her on the favorite spot, under the chin. Purring right to the very end.
And how about these young budding pubic health students, now numbering almost 20, in their loose blouses and short skirts, all with the flashy red FM heels a going, informing me of their great sacrifice to help with the C-19 pander demic. It brought tears to these old eyes to hear that each and every one of these civic minded angels, is forgoing the use of undies, while sitting up front with your epididimis prof, just so that the fabrics can be better used for masks in the war against the great enemy, the deadly virus, as now called by our dear leader, Mr. Trump. With youth such as this, all I can say is,--- what a country! Chases away the kitty loss blues.But enough digression.
Now then, just how does evidence emerge from Epid? Again there are several levels of validity of such evidence, corresponding to the designs of the respective study approaches. At the most basic level, as with our cousin scientists, the demographers, descriptions of populations of individuals, some quite sophisticated, can yield very useful information. From predicting the clinical/hospital needs of a community, as in Health services Epid, to generating novel hypotheses, for analytical investigators, this research is vital. With these data, the more analytically minded crowd can employ various study designs, to explore the relationships between health/disease in these populations, and various factors of interest. And here's the kicker. In the more natural sciences, one can compare groups of lab animals, both control and groups exposed to the factors under study, PROSPECTIVELY, and see where the cards fall. But in Epid, methods exist to perform such investigations using historical data, as well as going forward.
The scope of these designs are beyond this course level, but your teacher would be happy to explain all of them, in his office, after class, but only to students, sequentially, one hour each, as individuals. Here, these approaches however will be named, so google away. Again, from most basic, to sophisticated, these include: ecological (correlations only) designs; cross sectional (lacking time dimensionality) investigations; case control studies-enabling the investigation of historical relationships, if only for one illness at a time; cohort designs, both forward and backward looking, by analogy with research with lab animals. And sometimes, these approaches can be combined, as in nested case control within cohort studies, say of defined worker populations.
Now the so called gold standards of these investigations are the various types of clinical trials, which strictly speaking, takes us into the field of clinical Epid. Often described as multi arm, randomised, blinded, power driven, etc., investigations,-- these are used to study the efficacy of medical interventions, such as new drugs, and diagnostic and surgical technologies. And taking all of this now to the realm of public health, we see the community clinical trials, which often are useful for policy decisions. Next time, this leads into the topics of epidemics.
By the way, my lovely beavers, the perfumes are great. class over.

....sadly, stopped long ago in several ways for me, and for little big Vierk, who can't even complain about things. We see this term used by media pundits and others, often inappropriately. But it's a simple concept, easily caught by all, except perhaps by the odd, VERY odd, hottie red kneed nurse, cheapo lower class wench with an expensive car name, and certain ueber angry, virtue signaling, failed guitarists. But I digress. Basically, the phrase comes from simple mathematics, basic algebra really, and refers to the little letter/number above and right to another such 'base' number/letter. Used in many branches of the physical sciences, the concept is often very helpful in biological research, with reference to changes in population size. Nuff said for now, as with too many more big words and concepts, the above identified bimbos will quip, "I refuse (couldn't follow) to read what you wrote, but I hate it all anyway." Two factors underlie the concept---size of a population, and measures of time, although more refined statistical approaches exist. Anyone who has worked in microbiological or insect science will be quite familiar. Well, our favorite virus provides us with a cautionary tale of exponential growth. Your stalward director of the Vierk Institute hasn't personally verified the data, but it seems that it may have taken almost two months time, from case number one, for the population size of humans afflicted with Covid 19 to reach 100,000 souls. The next 100K took 11 days, and the next, merely FOUR DAYS, peebles! Epidemiologically writing, this indicates we are still on the frightening 'up swing', and does big little Mr. Vierk ever hate to hear that term. But public health measures, widely adhered to, will make things start to 'shrink' once again. OK. OK, little feller, I'll try not to use such words either.

Friday night was cold in South Florida. A front passed through in the morning with cold rain and high winds. Temperatures dropped to the 40's (Fahrenheit) and Saturday was clear skies, cold and windy. Sunday morning was also into the 40's.
We tried to get through Friday night without heat and the room temperature was around 68, much too cold for sleeping with 4 blankets. I said, the heater goes on and Saturday night with the thermostat set at 73. It was nice.
What I did notice (different than air conditioning) is the bedrooms were warmer than the living room. It was probably a difference of 4 degrees with the thermostat in the hall in the middle of the apartment. I have the louvers on the vents half way open for the bedrooms and all the way open for the living room.
This is the same adjustment all year round, but the air conditioning in the summer months has the bedrooms comfortable and the living room gets really cold. It's cold enough to have a fan blowing the cold air back toward the hallway to stabilize the overall temperature.

I'm puzzled why there is such a difference between the efficiency between heat and cool...

There was a lot of chatter about the solstice and the 'Great Conjunction' of the near alignment of Jupiter and Saturn happened this evening.

Oh, you missed it? I read it will happen again in 800 years!

While it's considered a phenomenon, I'm a bit disappointed and I was expecting it to have more brilliance.

South Florida had 63F degrees and not a cloud in the sky.

My best view was standing in the open section of a golf course, where it was visible in the southwest less than 20 degrees above the horizon.

"That's it!"
"No, it can't be."
"It's gotta be it... nothing else in sky."



She said "Enough, let's go home!"
"Yeah... Okay."



A few news stories called it the Christmas Star and compared it to the biblical Three Wise Men guided by a star.
Let's talk facts:
It's 2 planets (not a star) and lasts less than an hour. Those guys had traveled a while.

I'm sure everyone has heard the name Doppler. Yeah... but what is it? The Doppler effect (or Doppler shift) is most noted in sound waves when a train approaching has a different sound after it passes you. It's a pressure shift as the sound waves coming are different than going.
Austrian mathematician and physicist Christian Andreas Doppler is the guy celebrated for his principle known as the Doppler effect.

Here's a short video explaining the Doppler effect: