tingilinde

a sweet jwst result

Detection of the ring system of tiny Chariklo

More a proof of concept rather than a discovery, but still very nice.

 

 

scientific papers for kids

Kids do the reviewing for understandability.

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Frontiers for Young Minds believes that the best way to make cutting-edge science discoveries available to younger audiences is to enable young people and scientists to work together to create articles that are both accurate and exciting.
That is why distinguished scientists are invited to write about their cutting-edge discoveries in a language that is accessible for young readers, and it is then up to the kids themselves – with the help of a science mentor – to provide feedback and explain to the authors how to best improve the articles before publication.

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This is difficult to make work and exciting..  I don't know how good they are and it seems like there's a mismatch in suggested grade level, but the basic idea is good - very similar to the Flame Challenge. 

 

 

 

what time is it on the moon?

Not exactly an easy problem.

I'm guessing this will appeal to Steve

 

yet another remarkable fossil

This time a very pristine find at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

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Borealopelta markmitchelli found its way back into the sunlight in 2017, millions of years after it had died. This armored dinosaur is so magnificently preserved that we can see what it looked like in life. Almost the entire animal—the skin, the armor that coats its skin, the spikes along its side, most of its body and feet, even its face—survived fossilization. It is, according to Dr. Donald Henderson, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, a one-in-a-billion find.

Beyond its remarkable preservation, this dinosaur is an important key to understanding aspects of Early Cretaceous ecology, and it shows how this species may have lived within its environment. Since its remains were discovered, scientists have studied its anatomy, its armor, and even what it ate in its last days, uncovering new and unexpected insight into an animal that went extinct approximately 100 million years ago.

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good news on the bivalent booster

It offers good protection from the current crop of variants.

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Jackson said additional data the CDC was posting to its website on Wednesday showed that people who got the updated booster have a 13-fold reduction in the risk of death compared to people who are unvaccinated. People vaccinated with the bivalent booster had more than a two-fold reduced risk of death from Covid compared to vaccinated people who had only received monovalent vaccine.

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how to meet safely - mike osterholm

 

on ethics and lab animals

Bits of change.

 

what early abortion looks like

Not what most expect - early development is far from anything sustainable, feeling or thinking.

 

 

spillover

An interesting approach to zoonotic risk assessment.

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Given the death toll of COVID-19 and the enormous economic and social havoc it has left in its wake, reducing the risk of future zoonotic events and mitigating their impact on human health and society should be important public health objectives. Meeting these objectives requires a dual-pronged approach, because zoonotic spillover events present two distinct but related public health challenges. A “spillover risk” is associated with viruses that can be transmitted to humans from other animals, sometimes repeatedly, and lead to severe illness or death; these pathogens are, however, not able to establish further human-to-human transmission since humans are dead-end hosts for them. By contrast, a virus has “epidemic potential” if, upon spilling over into humans, it is able to establish transmission between humans. For example, West Nile virus (WNV) infects thousands of humans in the USA each year, and a significant proportion of patients suffer severe neuroinvasive disease such as meningitis. Yet, WNV does not have “epidemic potential” because it is primarily transmitted among birds via a Culex mosquito vector. Viruses with epidemic potential, such as SARS-CoV-2, comprise only a small subset of zoonotic spillover events. Their early detection, as well as preventing or limiting their spread, should therefore be the focus of pandemic preparedness plans.

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a tip of the hat to Roland

antiabortion "heartbeat" laws

They're nutty

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Two critical questions arise, however: Should a flicker of cardiac activity on an ultrasound limit options available to pregnant people, particularly those who desire or need to end their pregnancy? Furthermore, is a beating heart either a necessary (essential) or sufficient (adequate) standard upon which policy makers and cultural influencers such as antiabortion groups can decide the moral and legal status of either a human or a fetus? We follow the criterion for moral status used in bioethics—an entity “vulnerable to wrong or wrongdoing”—and legal status is defined as the rights granted to that entity.

With decades of experience between us as physicians helping our patients grapple with the decisions a complicated pregnancy can present, our answers to those questions are “no” and “no.”

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The laws are little more than religious hate.