#science intensifies

[archiarthur]

[art-of-mathematics]

Looks like a toy for playing around with some knot theory stuff

The numbers can be re-attached via velcro patches.

One can use the threads/shoelaces for playing with some weaving patterns. Additionally one can use the slilicone pop-up dots as a binary/boolean indicator, which might be a good helpful tool.

Due to material reasons this thing only has 9 columns. The number 0 might get a different place or calculation mechanism.

I also still do not really know how I really want to use this strange thing.

...

A well-working flap:

And a (useless) information for free:

[ Source: lisburnmuseum.com ]

[aliceindaisychains999]

[transingthoseformers]

🎶so much bickering🎶 can occur when the scientists and medics team up to try and work in the synthetic energon formula

[carnivoraformes]

//I'm going to bed but first to anyone that may ever come to me about shipping with Aven I have one question: why? This man is a sensitive dramatic disaster when he actually likes someone and all his problems and insecurities will not go away. Also he will try to run like bitch the second feelings are being brought up.

So why would anyone want to deal with that? I have to ask for research purposes.

[elektroblues]

just found out my hs crush is studying philosophy in a state uni omfg my dream girl living my dream i think i just felt my heart turn into fine dust

[spacefoxy]

[iamscoby]

For @dinlukeweek 2022 Day 1 - Beskar & Kyber (or rather just beskar)

[captainderyn]

One week til graduation >:D last written assignments submitted today, just three exams standing between me and freedom baybeeeee

(That and the process of packing but shhhh that’s a later me problem that has until approximately Monday when my partner gets here because I will NOT have time to pack)

[queenlua]

“On these two views, scientific method is either so airtight that only errors from within can undermine it or so porous that its validity turns entirely on outside interests. There are certainly cases of each kind of blunder: recall the Reinhart-Rogoff Excel spreadsheet snafu on the one hand, tens of millions of dollars funneled by ExxonMobil to fund climate change denialism studies on the other. We misunderstand run-of-the-mill scientific practice, however, if we view it as either everywhere or nowhere settled by data. As historians and philosophers of science have long emphasized, “the data” can never take us all the way from observation to conclusion; we can interpret them only against some background theory that settles what the data are evidence of [. . .]”

[fumpkins]

Monkeypox outbreak questions intensify as cases soar | Science

The sudden appearance of monkeypox in 13 countries on four continents has jolted the public health community into action. A much milder cousin of smallpox that sporadically causes small outbreaks in Africa, monkeypox is thought to spread slowly and is unlikely to be a pandemic in the making. But scientists worry about the spread among men who have sex with men (MSM), who make up a disproportionate number of the cases so far. The outbreak is a strange and unsettling return to the spotlight for poxviruses, a largely forgotten threat since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared smallpox eradicated in 1980.

The current outbreak surfaced on 7 May in the United Kingdom, which so far has confirmed 20 cases. In the past 3 days, more than 100 suspected cases were reported in Spain, Portugal, the United States, Canada, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, and Israel. David Heymann, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who helped eradicate smallpox and first worked on a large monkeypox outbreak in Africa 25 years ago, expects “many more cases” to come to light in the days and weeks ahead.

Monkeypox virus typically spreads by close contact and respiratory droplets, but sexual transmission appears to be contributing to this outbreak. “This is not typical at all,” says epidemiologist Rosamund Lewis, WHO’s lead for poxvirus diseases. “We should definitely be concerned about this new situation, which has literally just come about in the last 5 days.” WHO’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on Infectious Hazards with Pandemic and Epidemic Potential, which Heymann heads, met today to develop recommendations covering everything from the need for more aggressive surveillance to the use of monkeypox vaccines.

“Monkeypox” is a misnomer; the virus was discovered in 1958 in a colony of research monkeys, but its natural hosts are most likely rodents and other small mammals. The virus first surfaced in humans in 1970 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, causing fever, headaches, and lymph node swelling followed by an eruption of pus-filled blisters resembling smallpox lesions. Outbreaks occur occasionally in sub-Saharan Africa after someone comes in contact with an infected wild animal, and infected travelers sometimes carry the disease to other countries. In 2003, the United States had 47 cases that were linked to pet prairie dogs infected by other species imported from Ghana.

Most people recover within a few weeks. The Congo Basin strain kills up to 10% of those infected, but the recent outbreak appears to only involve the West African strain, which in past outbreaks had a fatality rate of about 1%.

Outbreaks “generally fizzle out on their own,” Lewis notes, because many infected people never infect anyone else. This outbreak, however, “is on such a broad geographic area that overall this number of suspected cases seems to be surprisingly high.”

Although “really rare and unusual,” the outbreak is not likely to become a major threat outside the MSM community, says Agam Rao, a scientist in the poxvirus and rabies branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which confirmed the first U.S. case. “It’s a small subset of the population, and we don’t expect it to be taking off the way COVID-19, for example, took off,” Rao says.

Scabs cover the skin lesions developed by a child and an adult who contracted monkeypox in the United States in 2003.CDC/Getty Images

Multiple introductions? 

The first reported case in the current outbreak is a traveler who on 4 May returned to the United Kingdom from Nigeria, a monkeypox hot spot. Clinicians confirmed the patient had monkeypox 3 days later. But that person had no connection to any of the other cases detected to date, according to the UK Health Security Agency, suggesting there may have been multiple introductions from Africa.

Yesterday, a team led by João Paulo Gomes at Portugal’s National Institute of Health posted the first full genome of the virus, which most closely resembles viruses that travelers exported from Nigeria in 2018 and 2019 to Singapore, Israel, and the United States. The Portuguese researchers sequenced the virus from a sample collected on 4 May, which means the infected person likely had no connection to the index patient in the United Kingdom. At the time, Portuguese doctors had no idea what caused their patient’s lesions, Gomes says, and they didn’t test the sample until they learned of the unusual clusters of cases in the United Kingdom. “No one could imagine a case of monkeypox,” he says.

Indeed, monkeypox is so rare that few doctors have ever seen a case. Its lesions resemble those seen with other diseases such as chickenpox and syphilis, and most doctors would not think to test for it. In addition to time-consuming tests that require sequencing the large virus—about 20 times larger than HIV—labs can also use the polymerase chain reaction assay, which can probe samples for tiny bits of monkeypox viral DNA and then amplify it to detectable levels.

Sexual transmission of monkeypox has never been proved, although Nigerian researchers in a 2017 report suspected it might have occurred, because several patients had genital ulcers. Fernando Simón, who directs the Spanish Ministry of Health’s coordination center for health alerts and emergencies, says all seven of the confirmed cases reported on 19 May in Spain were MSM or transgender people who had attended sex parties. (Spain today reported an additional 23 suspected cases.)

“Most of the cases have lesions exclusively perigenital, perianal, and around the mouth,” Simón says. There is no evidence that semen can transmit the virus. “So far, the most acceptable hypothesis is that it is transmitted after the contact with lesions.” But he stresses that transmission could have occurred by contact that did not involve sex.

None of the patients in Spain so far became severely ill or remain hospitalized. Two have HIV infections that are well controlled with medication. MSM and transgender communities have a high prevalence of HIV, but there’s no evidence that compromised immune systems have played any role in this outbreak. Health officials in many affected countries have, for privacy reasons, offered few details about the infected people. (Simón notes that small groups on social media have used the occasion to make offensive remarks about gay, bisexual, and transgender people. “It’s a pity, but these groups exist,” he says.)

It’s possible that monkeypox began to spread in MSM well before May, Heymann says, but wasn’t detected. Transmission may have been at a very low level during COVID-19 lockdowns, he speculates, “and then all of a sudden, things opened up and people begin living their lives again.”

Filling a niche

Monkeypox’s cousin, smallpox, was a major scourge for centuries that killed up to 30% of those infected. A massive global campaign in the 1960s and ’70s brought transmission to a halt; today, the virus is the only human pathogen to have been eradicated, although samples still exist at laboratories in Russia and the United States. As cases plummeted in the early ’70s, countries began to stop using the smallpox vaccine because its risks outweighed potential benefits. The vaccine contained a labmade virus called vaccinia that replicates inside the recipient and sometimes caused severe side effects, killing one in 1 million vaccinated people. WHO’s vaccination campaign ended in 1977, the last year a natural case of smallpox occurred.

Smallpox infections and the smallpox vaccine both protect against monkeypox, so an increasing number of people have become vulnerable to monkeypox over the past 50 years. Some researchers have worried that monkeypox might evolve to fill the “ecological niche” left behind by smallpox. Indeed, reported cases have steadily increased in Africa over the years—and the new outbreak is the first one to take place on several continents simultaneously.

Two vaccines that protect against smallpox and monkeypox are available in Europe and North America. One, manufactured by Emergent BioSolutions, is similar to the vaccine used during the eradication campaign and can still cause severe disease and even death in people who have compromised immune systems. The other, from Bavarian Nordic, uses a nonreplicating form of vaccinia, specifically designed to cause fewer side effects. It is the only vaccine explicitly approved for monkeypox.

Vaccines in short supply

Earlier this month, the United Kingdom started to offer vaccines to health care workers who had been in contact with monkeypox patients. Spain has yet to do so, says Simón, who notes that the country’s infectious disease clinicians have the personal protective equipment and experience to protect themselves. Massachusetts General Hospital, which is caring for the only confirmed case in the United States, also has not offered staff a vaccine. They, too, take appropriate precautions, says Paul Biddinger, who heads the hospital’s center for disaster medicine. But even though the United States has approved vaccines, clinicians cannot prescribe them: They only exist in a national stockpile that CDC controls. For now, it deems health care workers at the hospital in an “intermediate” risk category that doesn’t warrant vaccination.

The vaccines, which prevent disease even if used up to 4 days after a person is exposed to the virus, could also be used to protect contacts of suspected or confirmed monkeypox cases. So far, no countries have announced plans to do so. Both vaccines are in short supply and typically only available through national stockpiles.

In a bizarre coincidence, Bavarian Nordic held a meeting with Heymann and nine other public health leaders from around the world this week, planned 6 months ago, to discuss the need for more countries to stockpile its vaccine, given the increase in monkeypox cases over the past few years. “We were really thinking that experts in this field and authorities need to start to reflect on it,” says Bernard Hoet, the company’s vice president of medical strategy. “A company like ours cannot stockpile for all the countries forever. Today we have some doses available and we are going to distribute them, but how do you want us to decide if they go here or there?”

Drugs also exist to treat severe cases of monkeypox. One, tecovirimat, in 2018 became the first drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat smallpox after it proved safe in human trials and effective in animals given closely related viruses. Based on similar data, FDA approved a second drug for smallpox, brincidofovir, last year.

Although drugs and vaccines offer hope for limiting the severity and scope of this outbreak, a WHO statement issued on 18 May cautions that “these countermeasures are not yet widely available.” And alarm bells will likely ring louder and louder if cases continue to mount and the virus surfaces in ever more countries.

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/05/21/monkeypox-outbreak-questions-intensify-as-cases-soar-science/

[that-neurodivergent-gay]

(not so) friendly reminder that a non-exaustive list of war crimes that isreal has committed is:

Wilful killing

Torture or inhumane treatment, including biological experiments

Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health

Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly

Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking part in direct hostilities

Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects which are non-military

Intentionally directing attacks against humanitarian assistance

Intentionally launching an attack knowing that it will cause loss of life, injury or harm to civilians or civil properties

Intentionally launching an attack knowing it will cause significant damage to the natural environment without necessity

Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives

Intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science, charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the wounded are collected, assuming they are not military objectives

Employing asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gasses, and all analogous liquids, materials or devices

Employing weapons, projectiles, and material and methods or warfare which are of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering

Intentionally directing attacks against buildings, material, medical units and transport and personnel

Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival

If you still think this is isreal defending itself, you're ignoring the signs. This is a genocide. These are war crimes. More than 25,000 civilians have been murdered. This is not okay.

Edit:

For all the people asking me for a source, here is a list:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/18/israel-starvation-used-weapon-war-gaza

Any of Bisan's videos/writings. There are so many people on the ground in Gaza who are documenting this. Stay safe and stay educated

[kaibacorpbros]

smooshes Seto B)

Silently smooshes back. Oh wow, Atem's hair is a bit pliable. Looks funny that way.

[exhaled-spirals]

« To mention the global loss of biodiversity, that is to say, the disappearance of life on our planet, as one of our problems, along with air pollution or ocean acidification, is absurd—like a doctor listing the death of his patient as one symptom among others.

The ecological catastrophe cannot be reduced to the climate crisis. We must think about the disappearance of life in a global way. About two-thirds of insects, wild mammals and trees disappeared in a few years, a few decades and a few millennia, respectively. This mass extinction is not mainly caused by rising temperatures, but by the devastation of natural habitats.

Suppose we managed to invent clean and unlimited energy. This technological feat would be feted by the vast majority of scientists, synonymous in their eyes with a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions. In my opinion, it would lead to an even worse disaster. I am deeply convinced that, given the current state of our appetites and values, this energy would be used to intensify our gigantic project of systemic destruction of planetary life. Isn't that what we've set out to do—replace forests with supermarket parking lots, turn the planet into a landfill? What if, to cap it all, energy was free?

[...C]limate change has emerged as our most important ecological battle [...] because it is one that can perpetuate the delusional idea that we are faced with an engineering problem, in need of technological solutions. At the heart of current political and economic thought lies the idea that an ideal world would be a world in which we could continue to live in the same way, with fewer negative externalities. This is insane on several levels. Firstly because it is impossible. We can't have infinite growth in a finite world. We won't. But also, and more importantly, it is not desirable. Even if it were sustainable, the reality we construct is hell. [...]

It is often said that our Western world is desacralised. In reality, our civilisation treats the technosphere with almost devout reverence. And that's worse. We perceive the totality of reality through the prism of a hegemonic science, convinced that it “says” the only truth.

The problem is that technology is based on a very strange principle, so deeply ingrained in us that it remains unexpressed: no brakes are acceptable, what can be done must be done. We don't even bother to seriously and collectively debate the advisability of such "advances". We are under a spell. And we are avoiding the essential question: is this world in the making, standardised and computed, overbuilt and predictable, stripped of stars and birds, desirable?

To confine science to the search for "solutions" so we can continue down the same path is to lack both imagination and ambition. Because the “problem” we face doesn't seem to me, at this point, to be understood. No hope is possible if we don't start by questioning our assumptions, our values, our appetites, our symbols... [...] Let's stop pretending that the numerous and diverse human societies that have populated this planet did not exist. Certainly, some of them have taken the wrong route. But ours is the first to forge ahead towards guaranteed failure. »

— Aurélien Barrau, particle physicist and philosopher, in an interview in Télérama about his book L'Hypothèse K

[science-fish-archived]

well well well well

what do we have here

smells like a dork fish over here

"Dork Fish at your service! What can I do for you, oh fellow citizen of the Underground?"

[writers-potion]

Got anything for dialogue

Writing Dialogue 101

Dialogue is conversation, nothing more, nothing less. The catch is: diagloue is EDITED conversation. It must be more concise, purposeful and witty than the everyday sentences we speak, while sounding natural.

The Purpose of Dialogue

Diaglue is definitely a fiction elements that pops everything up and out. Thus, dialogue is going to have more impact than your normal paragraphs, in order to:

Characterizes/reveals motives

Sets the mood in the story

Intensifies the story conflict

Creates tension and suspense

Speeds up your scenes

Add bits of setting/backgronud

Communicates the theme

Matching the Dialogue to the Genre

The dialogue in a book should speak the reader's language. There is a type of voice that suits each genre/category of fiction, and we must understand what matches the reader expectations and rhythm of the plot we are writing.

Magical Dialogue

"Do not kill him even now. For he has not hurt me. And in any case I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood. He was great once, of a nobel kind that we should not dare to raise our hands against." - The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein

"As much as I want you and want to be with you and part of you, I can't rear myself away from the realness of my responsiblities." - The Bridges of Madison County, Robert James Waller

This is the language of The Hobbit, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

When writing literary and mainstream fiction (that is targeted at the general public rather than a target audience), we need to go with what sounds real, even with a magical setting

Science fiction and fantasy can be more unreal, i.e. things like "May the Force Be With You."

In romance, magical dialogue takes on a differen form. It's magical in that it transcends the way we talk to each other in normal society. Magical in that all of it makes perfect sense and is said in such eloquent langauge that we marvel at it while at the same time knowing that if we are left to ourselves, we would say something absolutely banal.

Cryptic Dialogue

"You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger." - Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk

This is the dialogue in literary and religious stories that dealw ith abstract ideas and vague concepts and has double meanings. Readers aren't meant to understand theses right away.

These bits of dialogue plant sublimnal messages in the reader's mind that help communicate the theme later on, ultimately making sense.

Cryptic dialogue is difficult to do well. If we're not careful, we'll end up sounding preachy, moralistic and dogmatic.

You need to be able to view the world in different perspectives.

Descriptive Dialogue

The literary, fantasy and historical story often relies on dialogue for worldbuilding (expplaining history, magic rules, etc.)

The author's goal in descriptive dialogue is to provide the reader with information. However, the character's goal cannot be sacrificed for the author's. Dialogue can still have tension and suspense and can be inserted into a scene of action so the story doesn't bog down while the readers get some info.

Shadowy Dialogue

In shadowy dialogue, the character's job is to keep the reader suspended in a state of terror/suspense. Then you periodically tighten and loosen the tension.

The key here is uncertainty. The reader cannot trust the speaker, so we're always questioning him, wondering whether he's speaking truthfully or is presenting the full picture.

Keep the tone as dark of possible, using action and background as supporting tools.

Make it cryptic, or even better, offering an omnious threat of what is to come.

Provocative Dialogue

This is the type of dialogue that conveys the theme, talking about the "universla truth" your book is trying to convey.

Readers like to be challenged in their thinking, provoked to consider other ways of thinking, and shaken up in their belief systems with a fresh perspective about the world.

Consider this example from To Kill A Mockingbird:

"...but there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal - there is one humna institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockfeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignornant man the equal of any college president."

There is no way we can read this and not think about something that is bigger than our daily lives.

Make your readers squirm, and shock them out of their comfort zones.

Uncencored Dialogue

Uncencored dialogue in YA stories are of young people, but that doesn't mean it's filled with hip-hop words and slag.

While adults cencor themselves when they speak, teenagers haven't yet learned that skill so their dialogue is more raw, edgy and honest.

Readers of YA novels expect realism, so make it as authentic as possible. The last thing we want to is for our characters to be brash and honest, but NOT sound like they've just stepped out of Planet Way Cool.

For example:

"What if he doesn't like me back?" "You are too much of a chicken to do anything aboutit but mope."

As an adult, how often do you admit fear of rejection out loud to another, or call out your friend to her face? In YA-type of dialogue though, we can just write what comes into these characters' minds.

So that sums up the different types of dialogue. Consider the nature of your plot, what your readers and the genre of the story you are writing to choose an appropriate way for your characters to speak!

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