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By Jo Nova
No wonder climate models can’t predict rainfall
” Until now, isoprene’s ability to form new [cloud seeding] particles has been considered negligible.”
Broad leaf tees emit up to 600 million metric tons of isoprene each year, but no one thought it mattered much. For obvious reasons it is made near the ground, and it’s quite reactive and doesn’t last long. During daylight it’s destroyed within hours. So the experts didn’t think the isoprene could help seed clouds in the upper atmosphere. But there is still quite a lot of isoprene left in a rainforest at night, and tropical storms suck it up “like a vacuum cleaner” and pump it up and spray it out some 8 to 15 kilometers above the trees. Then powerful winds can take these molecules thousands of kilometers away.
When the sun rises, hydroxyl radicals start reacting with the isoprene again, but the reactions are quite different in the cold upper troposphere. And lightning may have left some nitrous oxides floating around too. This combination ends up making a lot of the seed particles that generate clouds in the tropics. It’s almost like the forests want to create more rain…
[…]
By Jo Nova
We’ve reached a point of Maximal Bureaucratic Psychopathy in Science
That’s where committees of committees aim to improve your health by giving one human the ability to kill a billion.
NIAID image of Monkeypox
In 2015 a scientist at Anthony Fauci’s agency thought it would be neat to mix two Monkeypox strains together to make a nastier one. For no reason anyone can explain, the National Institutes of Health’s Institutional Review Board thought it would be neat too, and approved it.
A normal person might worry that doddery Joe Biden has the nuclear codes, but all along, unnamed, unaccountable countless others might have their fingers on equivalent bombs, and they won’t need to input any codes to set off the bombs, just have a bad day.
The idea was to mix a deadly but slow strain of monkey pox with a tamer monkey pox strain that spread quickly. This could have created a virus with the “best of both” — an agent with a 15% fatality rate and a reproduction rate of 2.4, which would make it very much “pandemic potential”. (With one infected person infecting 2.4 others, this was a similar rate of […]
By Jo Nova
This paper shows exactly how good “Peer Review” is
It’s not just that a clever AI image slipped through peer review, it’s that it was garishly fake in a supersize kind of way. Scientifically everything about it was radioactive satire and yet it still got through “peer review”. The words are gibberish. The editors didn’t even run a spell checker on it before publishing it, let alone the gaze of a single trained biologist in the field.
The paper has been retracted thanks to the real peer review which happened on social media. This was a case of X (formerly Twitter) saves the day. Where normal peer review can take up to two years (if you are an unpopular skeptic) it was only three days from the X review to retraction.
The Telegraph sums it up:
A scientific paper purporting to show the signalling pathway of sperm stem cells has met with widespread ridicule after it depicted a rodent with an anatomically eye-watering appendage and four giant testicles.
The creature, labelled “rat”, was also sitting upright in the manner of a squirrel, while the graphic was littered with nonsensical words such as “dissilced”, […]
By Jo Nova
Maybe the world should talk about bioweapon research?
The way Robert F Kennedy Jnr describes it to Tucker Carlson, it seems Anthony Fauci was not only a “director of health”, he was also a director of bioweapons. And he was the most well paid public servant in the country, thanks to a 68% raise to his salary — which came not from the health department but from the Pentagon. It’s an odd conflict of interest.
Kennedy points out that to deploy an infectious bioweapon you need a pre-prepared successful vaccine so the infectious agent doesn’t make your side sick too. He claims there are something like 36,000 scientists involved in bioweapons research or gain-of-function work in countless labs in the US and overseas. “We have no idea how many there are”.
Kennedy calls it the inverse of medicine, where life scientists are really “death scientists” who make diseases more deadly. In 2014 three bugs escaped from three different labs in high profile breaks, one was smallpox.
“RFK: “Anthony Fauci got all the responsibility for bio-weapons development….[After three bugs escaped] in 2014, 300 scientists wrote to President Obama and said ‘you’ve gotta shut down Anthony Fauci, […]
By Jo Nova
It turns out that replicating a cow in a laboratory is not as simple as expected. A new study points at some very major and potentially very hard to solve problems with laboratory meat. We can scale up vats of bacteria in factories easily, but animal cells are very different. Muscle cells not only need a sterile complicated broth but they are basically a sitting-duck feast for any bacteria.
Quote of the day:
“USD 2 billion has already been invested in this technology, but we don’t really know if it will be better for the environment,” Risner said.
Think of a cow as being an entire industrial production campus for meat — to deal with chemical toxins it comes with a customized chemical factory (a liver) and two industrial filter systems (kidneys), and a full immune defense force on a 24 hour watch to deal with the constant flood of microbial contaminants. Cows also have nutrient intake systems to break down grass into separate chemical components which are stored, transported and chemically tweaked to suit. All departments are self repairing, and are equipped with their own laboratory testing, messaging and alert service. The sterile […]
By Jo Nova
Two weeks treatment costs $3.75*
In Tunisia from February to May last year 470 people with Covid were randomly either given 50mg of zinc each day for two weeks or given a placebo. In the zinc group, after 30 days, 6% had died, and 5% had been admitted to intensive care. Meanwhile in the placebo group 9% had died and 11% had gone to the ICU. People taking zinc got out of hospital a few days before the people who didn’t.
Since there were no serious adverse effects in anyone from taking zinc, it’s obvious that good governments were handing out zinc tablets in carparks, schools and shopping malls, thus saving lives, millions of dollars, and keeping hospitals half empty. The rich world looks to healthcare systems like El Salvador. Shame about the other sclerotic swamps and backwaters of crony medicine. Sometimes countries have too much money to get good treatment.
In Australia, the government spent billions on experimental barely-tested vaccines with hidden results and secret contracts. Our TGA told everyone the vaccines were safe and useful but fined someone $8,000 for advertising on their website that ivermectin and zinc lozenges were effective against Covid. But who […]
By Jo Nova
Why-O-Why has this taken so long?
Finally we have a preprint paper assessing SARS2 as if it might have been an engineered product from a laboratory. We now know it was very likely a lab product and we can probably even name the tools that were used to tweak it.
The virus appears to be too clean, lacking in the noise that all its wild type cousins have. Random evolution in bats and pangolins just doesn’t work like this. SARS2 has the unmistakable fingerprint pattern of a virus that not-so-coincidentally is perfectly suited to being manipulated with two of the most common laboratory enzymes available available at a biolab near you for $150. (Shop here, here, or here).
The authors stress that even though their results strongly suggest this virus was a “synthetic” virus, that doesn’t tell us whether it was intended to harm, or was released deliberately. But their results do cast a very different light on the rush to declare the wet markets were to blame, and the too-fast calls, based on no evidence, that anyone who said otherwise was a conspiracy theorist. This kind of analysis could have been done in Feb-March 2020 and […]
by Jo Nova
And you thought I was being satirical, but no, it’s just today’s installment of two-star climate porn from The Guardian.
What the journalist didn’t mention was that one degree of warming will save 166,000 lives a year, but maybe kill one more person per annum from amebic meningoencephalitis.
Let’s spend a trillion dollars:
How the climate crisis is fueling the spread of a brain-eating amoeba
Naegleria fowleri grows in warm fresh water, making it well-suited to proliferate as temperatures rise in the US
Katherine Gammon, The Guardian
Naegleria grows best in warm waters – temperatures above 30C, and can tolerate temperatures of up to 46C, says Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona. That makes it well-suited to spread in a warming climate.
“It likes warm surface waters during the summer in the northern latitudes,” he says.
The amoeba causes an illness called primary amebic meningoencephalitis, and while getting sick is rare – between 2012 to 2021, only 31 cases were reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control – it’s incredibly lethal. According to the CDC, only four […]
Who knew? A study came out way back in 2016 showing that most people still had antibodies against tetanus, or “Lockjaw” even 60 years after their last vaccination. It’s a reminder of what successful vaccination can look like. It also shows the extraordinary ability of the human immune system to acquire lifelong protection — that doesn’t happen with all diseases, but it does with things like influenza, polio, measles, and mumps, and possibly tetanus and diphtheria.
The study tested the blood of 546 people. Given the striking results the authors suggest that the need for a ten year booster should be reassessed, but six years after the study came out the CDC and the Australian government are still saying we need “ten year boosters”. Is anyone even looking at this data?
Notably, shifting to a 30 year schedule could save the US government US$280 million each year. But Big-Pharma won’t be too happy about that. It may also prevent “80–160 cases of brachial plexus neuritis” — a rare side effect.
New Study Suggests We Don’t Actually Need a Tetanus Booster Every 10 Years
by Fiona Macdonald, April 2016
We’ve all grown up knowing that we need […]
Sometimes Randomized Controlled Trials are not the golden trophies of science that some say they are. (Like yesterday’s Ivermectin study). While some say that nothing less than an RCT will do, actually, sometimes it’s just silly to do one. And all RCT’s will wallow on the rocks of confirmation bias if they try to study something people already know the answer to.
For a long time there were no RCT studies showing benefits from parachutes — yet people continued to use them. It wasn’t until 2018 that a paper was finally published, surprisingly showing that there was no statistical difference in jumping with or without one from an average altitude of 4,000m.
This satirical paper makes real points about the flaws of the hallowed RCT’s:
It’s easy to design an RCT to show the opposite of the truth. Reading the abstract of a paper is rarely enough. Reading a news headline, even less so. Details are everything. RCT’s are not random if the test subjects have opinions and can self-select themselves out of the experiment.
These authors are black-belt professionals at medico-lingo. Those that appreciate the wit will want to read the whole thing rather than just the snippets below […]
Russia says the US has bioweapon research labs in Ukraine, an outrageous claim that was instantly fact-checked to oblivion until Senator Marco Rubio stopped the show by asking a US official under oath: Does Ukraine have chemical and biological weapons?
Victoria Nuland, US Under Secretary of State, could have said “No” but instead she said:
Ukraine has Biological research facilities… which in fact we are quite concerned about — that Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of. So we are working with Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into Russian hands should they approach…
So not only is there some kind of research going on, but it’s so safe and fine that the US is worried the Russians might get it. And despite the Russians queuing for days in tanks at the border, no one thought to secure or destroy it?
Then the US official who hid secret labs and worries about what the Russians will do tells everyone that
“It’s classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they are planning to do themselves…”
I’m not sure whether to hope the US secures […]
Just another day in a cold Biotech War?
“The international team of researchers suggest the virus may have mutated to have a furin cleavage site during experiments on human cells in a lab.”
Image: Scientific Animations
To put this in perspective the whole virus is essentially a code with 29,000 bases in a row, and this story is about a sequence of 19.
The code is in the same four letter “alphabet”, more or less, as all life on Earth — A, T*, C and G. But in this new discovery there are 19 particular bases (or nucleotides) in a row. These are the bases that were so useful that Moderna patented the sequence in 2016. Oddly, no other coronavirus has that sequence. Indeed, nothing else in a virus or animal cell does either.
The reason these 19 bases are so interesting is that they make up the critical point called the “Furin Cleavage Site”. Furin is an enzyme inside our cells that acts like a specialist scissor, cutting only certain proteins in an exact way. A number of nasty germs sneak in and use our Furin snippy tools too — like HIV and Ebola, and […]
They told us the mRNA in the injections wouldn’t last long, barely a few days, and the protein spikes made from the vaccines would only stick around for “a few weeks”. But now, after 60% of the worlds population has been vaccinated, now we find out that the CCP bioweapon spikes are still there in lymph nodes two months after the last injection, and so is some of the mRNA. And we don’t know how much longer those spikes keep churning out, because no one has done that study.
Pause for a moment to wonder how it is that we could inject four billion people “for health reasons” yet no one knew the most basic things about how it worked, like, how long the vaccine mRNA might survive, and keep producing spikes for, or how many spikes it might keep making.
Now comes the bad news that mRNA-vaccinated people may be making more spikes than severely ill Covid patients, and that the mRNA survives much longer than anyone expected.
A Health Public Policy Nightmare
Robert Malone
The hidden highlight (lede) buried in this peer reviewed paper is that protein production of spike in people vaccinated with […]
. Scientific Animations
Handy!: A group at Johns Hopkins checked 295 people who had caught Covid before (and tested positive). Amazingly, all but two of them still had antibodies and there was “no indication” that the antibodies were declining.
Natural immunity doesn’t always work this well. There are plenty of diseases where protection wanes after six months, like RSV, or Norovirus, and many common cold coronaviruses.
Natural Immunity to COVID-19 Detected at 20 Months After Infection: Study
Zachary Stieber, Epoch Times
Protection against the virus that causes COVID-19 among the recovered was detected by researchers at 20 months post-infection, adding to the body of evidence that such protection, known as natural immunity, is long-lasting.
Researchers found antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) in 99 percent of study participants who tested positive for COVID-19, with some having had the illness as long as 20 months prior.
“The major takeaway is that natural immunity … is strong and durable,” [Dr Dorry] Segev told The Epoch Times in an email.
Dr. Dorry Segev, the director of the Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation at Johns Hopkins University.
[…]
A Bomb: Last week a lawyer for military personnel spoke about the extraordinary rise in medical conditions that occurred after vaccination against Covid. This is one of the largest and best kept medical datasets in the world, the people in it are mostly young and healthy, and the whistleblowers have signed legal declarations.
The military data suggests most national vaccination databases suffer from gross underreporting of adverse events.
In the World-We-Thought-We-Lived-In, this would have been Frontpage news the next day. Calls should be coming in from all around to pause vaccinations immediately until it can be reviewed.
The three whistleblowers noticed strange patterns in the patients they were treating. They trawled through data on medical billing from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED).
Aside from the [300%] spike in miscarriage diagnoses, there was an almost 300% increase in cancer diagnoses (from a five-year average of 38,700 per year to 114,645 in the first 11 months of 2021). There was also a 1,000% increase in neurological issues, which increased from a baseline average of 82,000 to 863,000.
—CovidWorld
The event was a five hour hearing held by US Senator Ron Johnson. Lawyer Thomas Renz has […]
It’s a miracle. Common sense. For the first time in two years government rules are shrinking.
A lot of this is thanks to Omicron, the gift from Africa.
In terms of infections the UK is past the peak, but most of Europe is a viral Firestorm. France just recorded a half a million new Covid cases in a single day, and with a test positivity of 31% awesome percent. Something like 1 – 3% of the entire French nation caught Covid yesterday.
All the past awful waves shrink before Omicron. | Source OWID
Despite the bonfire of cases, the deaths are lower than any wave:
A glorious contrast in graphs:
Deaths per million in Europe | OWID ..
With the disaster averted in the hospitals, suddenly political leaders are changing tune. We might think this is all just thanks to the magic of Omicronic nicety, but cases are still rising in places like Denmark and France and yet the Governments are already pulling back. That’s surely thanks to the pressure of mass protests. Without that pain and anger, political leaders wouldn’t be acting so early.
Though it helps that millions of people are catching Omicron and […]
flockine
Plastics are a free dinner for life on Earth so it was just a matter of time before microbes evolved to eat it.
A PET bottle normally takes 16 – 48 years to break down, but if it were lunch for microflora it would take weeks instead. Hydrocarbons are ultimately just different forms of C-H-O waiting to be liberated as carbon dioxide and water. The only question was “how long” it would take bacteria and fungi to break those unusual bonds.
Sooner or later all plastic will be biodegradable.
Polyethylene-terephthalate (PET)
The first bacteria known to chew through PET bottles was discovered at a Japanese rubbish dump in 2016. But we had no idea then just how advanced the microbial world of plastic processing was.
Instead of hunting for single bacteria Zrimec et al mined through collected metagenomes of soil and ocean and found not just 5 or 10 new enzymes but 30,000. It appears that they could metabolize at least ten different types of plastic.
And in places where there was more plastic pollution, there were more enzymes. All over the world a whole new ecosystem is rising out of the puddles and bubbles […]
Absolutely no one who writes for newspapers has any idea of why Covid may have almost completely disappeared from Japan since the sudden Delta wave in August. The trajectory collapsed on August 25th and vaccines don’t explain it.
“While Omicron explodes around the world, COVID cases in Japan plummet and no one knows why”
Sydney Morning Herald, Dec 23
Call it the hunt for a potential “X factor,” such as genetics, that may explain the trend and inform how Japan could deal with the next wave. While the new highly transmissible Omicron variant has appeared in the country and experts suspect there is already some community spread, the overall transmission rate of the virus and coronavirus-related deaths in Japan have remained low. “
” “Honestly, we do not know the exact reason behind the sudden drop in COVID deaths in Japan,” said Taro Yamamoto, professor of global health at Nagasaki University’s Institute of Tropical Medicine. “
There is no mention of the-drug-that-shall-not-be-named — Voldermectin. But on August 13th as the third major wave was running out of control, a high ranking doctor in Tokyo recommended doctors use ivermectin. Dr. Haruo Ozaki, the […]
In more news you can use before Christmas, here’s another cheap easy way to put the brakes on Covid — this time with the antiseptic Povidone-Iodine (PVP).
While Carrageenan can clog up the virus in the passages behind your nose, it doesn’t necessarily do much to stop the virus replicating in your mouth and throat. But a regular swish or a sniff with Povidone-iodine can reduce the viral load to nothing in a matter of 15 to 30 seconds. Note, you’re supposed to spit it out again, not drink it and make sure to use a very dilute solution.
Saliva can contain as many as 100 million infectious copies of Covid per ml, so the aim here is to reduce the number drastically every four hours. It’ll reduce the risk of you infecting people around you, and probably help buy yourself time to fight back against the virus.
Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator
Between February and August last year Choudhury et al enrolled 600 people in Bangladesh. Half were asked to use a 1% povidone iodine solution to gargle, use in nasal drops and eye drops. They were asked to do this every 4 hours for 4 […]
Irish Moss, by Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen. | 1896
More than one hundred years ago the Irish believed an extract from a red seaweed could cure sick cows, and humans with colds and flu’s. In terms of early treatment modern medical science is slowly catching up with 19th Century farmers. In a small trial this year medical workers were 80% less likely to catch Covid if they were using a nasal spray with the “Irish Moss” carrageenan extract. It’s only a case of 2 out of 200 catching Covid in the test group, compared to 10 out of 200 in the placebo group, so the “80%” is a rubbery number, but it was a randomized control trial, and there are other lab test results which suggest the effect is real.
And because we recently figured out it was useful against common colds and influenza’s, nasal sprays with this common safe food additive are already on sale at the Chemist. So you can pop in and get one before Christmas Parties.
Carrageenan or “Irish Moss” is a polysaccaride gel from a red seaweed. It works by gumming things up for quite a few viruses — basically getting in […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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