tingilinde

bob wachter and eric topol on the current and future state of the pandemic

Bob hosts the regular UCSF series on Covid and Eric is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. The series is aimed at people who are following things closely.

 

about 75 years of disease research in a minute

Really impressive.

 

plants and changing climates

Plants require some mechanism if they're to migrate. That's a problem with deforestation and population declines in some mammals and birds,

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For decades scientists have been tracking which birds and other animals eat fruits and the seeds they contain, how far those seeds are transported and whether they germinate wherever they are deposited. These are what ecologists call mutualistic interactions. “The animal gets some fruit, and the plant gets to move,” Fricke explains. He says he has spent hours sitting in a hammock, eyes trained on a piece of fruit, to see which local birds stop by for a snack.

From examining specific ecosystems, such as the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, ecologists have concluded that the loss of birds and other animals from deforestation and other pressures has been curtailing trees’ ability to disperse their seeds. “But zooming out to the global scale, there hadn’t been an analysis,” Fricke says. So he and his colleagues “were going in trying to understand how big this problem is.”

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a simple wearable viral air sampler

A small air sampler that can assess exposure to SARS-CoV-2..  It doesn't give realtime warnings to a person, but is useful to see if they've been ni an area where the virus is present. It could be very useful for doing surveys.

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The researchers developed a wearable passive air sampler, known as the Fresh Air Clip, that continually adsorbs virus-laden aerosols on a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) surface. The team tested the air sampler in a rotating drum in which they generated aerosols containing a surrogate virus, a bacteriophage with similar properties to SARS-CoV-2. They detected virus on the PDMS sampler using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), showing that the device could be used to reliably estimate airborne virus concentrations.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

the impact of genocide on dan

A first of its kind study found chemical modifications to the DNA of women and children exposed to genocide.

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In the study published in “Epigenomics,” they found that the terror of genocide was associated with chemically modifications to the DNA of genocide-exposed women and their offspring. Many of these modifications occurred in genes previously implicated in risk for mental disorders such as PTSD and depression. These findings suggest that, unlike gene mutations, these chemical “epigenetic” modifications can have a rapid response to trauma across generations.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

elizabeth ann and helping nature out

A piece in Science on Elizabeth Ann the black-footed ferret.

 

 

flying squid

Jetting into the air for a short glide.

 

behold - the nasal ranger!

A tool for the categorization and measurement of odors.

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The decision not to regulate odor at the federal level dates to the 1970s. In a series of surveys, federal agencies found that half of respondents believed odor was a serious problem. But the Environmental Protection Agency ultimately decided that it would leave it to local governments to create odor nuisance laws, akin to noise ordinances.

Today, around a dozen states regulate odor, and various local governments have set up ordinances. But the system is patchy, and it has left disputes to be dealt with in the courts.

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talking about the weather

At least 2021 was "interesting" in the US.

Not that interesting is good..  and some of it is linked to global warming.

 

getting a handle on what's next for the coronavirus

Of coarse no-one knows with great accuracy, but there are methods to sort out likelihoods.

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Scientists have been able to make these discoveries by revisiting a concept proposed almost a century ago — fitness (or adaptive) landscapes — with modern technologies. They can use fitness landscapes to quantify the relationship between changes to the viral genome and its ability to replicate and infect a new host. The topographic maps representing that relationship can help to reconstruct the virus’s history, and they could also at least potentially predict its future.

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