ISRIB: A pill to fix dementia.

 Age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility, or a significant component thereof,  have been reversed in mice and almost with a single dose.  Source is at medicalpress.com

The back story.  When cells are stressed by viral or cancer gene attacks, they try to throttle protein production in those cells.  Aging brain cells are getting some of this throttling too.    "ISR" is "Inegrated Stress Response" and "IB" is "Inhibitor".   ISRIB turns off the throttling and a couple doses seems to restore quite a bit of the cognitive decline in aging and brain-damaged mice without stopping the body's ISR defense against viral and cancer gene attacks.  A single treatment was enough to get aging mice to try flexible maze solutions like their younger counterparts.

An implication:  Senility may be more about idled repair machinery and less about long term degeneration of nerves.

This is almost too good to want to believe, that a generic response to stress casts its net too wide.

Liquid water can have another form. One is 20% less dense than the other, but elusive.

 At -63C, liquid some H20 water molecules restructure to a 20% less dense form.  Because no one could observe water at that temperature without it turning to solid ice, this couldn't be proven until high speed recording captured the change before the solid ice could form.  It seems to be a dynamic equilibrium at local levels and the authors wonder if this property of water might appear at body temperatures in minute loci, affecting biological communication.  The geometry behind the density isn't described at the link.

A new look at World Wars 2 from Victor David Hanson

 The review linked here has many surprises.  The Axis mostly killed and starved non-combatants and the Allies mostly killed combatants.  LeMay repurposed the B29 bomber for low altitude flights with much higher bomb loads.  The Japanese jet stream played a role.  WW2 was multiple wars.  Production dispersed away from the battlefield helped Russia (factories moved east of the Urals) and Japan (factories dispersed in civilian areas which were not attacked initially) and USA  (no serious effort was made to bomb the USA).  In an existential war, the side that can destroy the other side's homeland is the winner.  Hitler's unforced move to declare war on the USA is highlighted again as a major failure.  The London Blitz was a strategic mistake after Berlin had been bombed when Hitler should have stayed focused on bombing air fields, aircraft factories and radar.  And more.

Update:  I'm just finishing my copy.  Very readable.  The exceptional can redirect a war but outcomes favour the one building and delivering the most killing resources.  Immense detail included about tanks, planes, infantry weapons and repair issues and how many were fielded and how fast they were fielded.

Competing narratives on assassination of top IRAN nuclear scientist, Fahkrizadeh.

Just the facts please.  Do you choose the remote control version or the pulled-him-out-of-the-car version. Both tales have veridical moments with "remote" winning for innovation and "by hand" for past track records.  The "remote" version is quoted from an Israeli write-up which in turn comes from an IRGC press release.   "Remote" is presumably bogus and makes the security people look less ineffective.  As a followup, the spin has competing narratives too:  "Sabotaging diplomacy" or "Iran has a clandestine program". 

UPDATE  More detail for the likely version, dozens involved in the planning and execution.

Gaming revenue chart: From the arcade to handhelds (and VR).

Sourced here. 

 

 

Space News November 2020

 Just for fun:  Alien art installation in Utah.  About a year ago someone placed a polished monolith in a remote desert location.  Fun if it really were aliens.

There's possible evidence of an active volcano on  the Tharsis volanic plateau of Mars.  A smudge showed up on a Mars photo October 22nd that wasn't there a few days earlier.  Spacenews.com October 25th

From Japan comes a detailed study of the last magnetic pole reversal of Earth about the time our species started moving out of Africa.  Sea sediments were studied in unprecedented detail.  A major finding is the change may have taken twenty thousand years with a long period of instability leading up. 

Planetary atmospheric surprises:  Recent years have brought photographic records of new phenomena:  Sprites and ELVES, gravity waves in clouds, STEVE and now reported this month, "little green cannonballs" on the edge of STEVE.

A meteor, 2020 VT4  the size of a small house,  scooted by Earth November 13th and was discovered the next day.  5-11 meter diameter, not big enough to alarm people but you wouldn't want it landing in your neighbourhood.  It passed below the space station orbit.

Sodium tail on Mercury:  A nice photo was published of the sodium trail, like the tail of a comet, that tags along with Mercury on the away side. It's a composite with filters, made dramatic by including trees peripheral to the view.

There's been progress looking for evidence of past supernovas that impacted earth.  A 3% spike in Carbon-14 is considered a strong signature.  Brakenridge tried to match four known events of the last  40,000 years with the patched together record of tree growth rings.  There was a correlation but the time signatures were too fuzzy to brag about.

NASA is putting together plans for a radio telescope on the far side of the moon.  It would be a wire mesh shape following the contour of an existing dish-like crater.   Great idea, anticipated years ago by Heinlein and made more appealing as the Arecibo observatory is being shut down without a funding plan to safely rebuild the suspension cables.   NASA has asked for proposals to set up a nuclear power plant on the moon and on Mars with the moon one ready to launch in 2026. .  Of course!    And China launched a mission this week to bring back a couple kg of moon samples.  What struck me is the plan to dig down up to six feet.

Buried "cave" in Antarctica:  This story is probably an artifact of the pixels but the possibility of a large unexplained opening to an underground void exists.  The NY Post includes a chatty 11 minute video clip that has some striking google earth imagery.

Hubble has a photo of one galaxy falling like a waterfall into the middle of a larger one.

Crazy but likely true:  

An asteroid trailing Mars appears to be a chunk blasted from our own moon.

The group of "Trojan" asteroids that trail along after Mars orbit has one rock whose spectral image doesn't belong.  "The spectrum of this particular asteroid seems to be almost a dead-ringer for parts of the Moon where there is exposed bedrock such as crater interiors and mountains," explains AOP astrochemist Galin Borisov.

First ever rogue planet found drifting through our galaxy without a home star.  The moment you think of it, it's obvious there will be many more to find.  This one was found by gravitational micro-lensing, tiny blips in the light of some stars it passed in front of.  Estimated size is close to that of mother Earth.

Tunguska explosion update:  Evidence is stronger that it was a near miss by a meteor twice the length of a football field

October report in Forbes:  No extra-terrestrial debris has ever been found from the 1908 event that flattened trees over an immense area.  It was seen over a distance of 700 km which rules out an ice object that would have vaporized.  The Siberian Federal University did computer simulations that ruled out ice and estimated the object's size.  There were a series of air bursts that left high atmospheric dust explaining glowing clouds reported later in Europe.

Once again, the very wealthy hold more than 80% of the rest of America combined.

 See chart but think about it too.

There's no data for "the common man" before the seventies but the wealthy data points cover a century.
Before the stock market crash and well into the 1930's, the very wealthy held a similar immense share of all of America's wealth.
That the immensely wealthy have again as big a share of the pie as they did 90 years ago may not indicate dysfunction.  Missing from the chart is a report on how much the pie has grown since then for the benefit of all.
When you add up the top tenth of a percent, the top one percent (presumably excluding the top tenth of a percent)  and the eighty percent, there's a lot of wealth held by the other 19%.
And remember that much of what we call "poor" means "young" as new entrants to the workforce are at the bottom rungs of their career and earning power.

Unemployed and Homeless: A Love Note

How can I be unemployed and homeless?  Blame it on Helen.

My best use is to appreciate one or two people well, and when she died this spring of cancer, I became unemployed.    

"What does home mean to me?" a friend asked.   
When Helen stirs awake and turns towards me, she tucks her head under my chin, casts a leg over and drift back to sleep in my arms.  That's home and since she gave up the ghost, I've been homeless too"
.

Where exactly are people getting sick? Here's data from Kentucky and it's NOT restaurants.

 Data reposted by Instapundit from Knox County TN show 70%
of all infections, whether symptomatic or not, are accounted for by Nursing Homes, Assisted Living  and interactions in the community at large...NOT restaurants, bars and grocery stores and workplaces.   This is a small sample geographically but comprehensive..

Sick and Symptomatic are not the same.

From the WUWT survey titled "Where are all the sick people", come a reminder that every winter we knew people who were sick with the usual Type A and B flus but most of us know no-one or almost no-one who's had Covid-19.  That's egregious because the Covid-19 numbers are based not on symptoms but on (somewhat erratic) test reports whereas the flu numbers are based on sniffles and coughs and complaints we could see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears.  As noted, the numbers of symptomatic flu cases is 35 to 45 million every year

Here in the same article is a survey of several thousand people.  The questions were "Do you know anyone currently sick with Covid-19" and "Do you know anyone personally who had to stay home because of Covid-19 in the last nine months?"

Most people don't have anyone in their circle who is sick or who was sick and most of the exceptions know 1 to 5 at most.  Is this enough to shut down productive society, to stop relationships, to isolate neighbours, to bankrupt restaurants and hotels and brand people with masks, enmeshing them in curfews even?

When I read reports about "cases" rather than sick people in the most recent stories, I call baloney.
If, however, you want to protect the elderly with other morbidities, let's do it to our utmost.

People with dementia become collateral damage of pandemic proclamations.

 From the Washington Post.

A lot of elderly people died without a hug, collateral damage of Covid management.
I expect good data to have balance, on  the one hand this, on the other hand that.  The other hand has been silent about the costs of isolation and the cancellation of normal life.

You want your bank PIN secure. Why not your vote?

 

Lockdown plays favorites and money talks

 From suggestion at Instapundit.  Rules are for little people. Edit "rich" menu to include "credentialed with a side of smug"

Green and yellow parrot teams play basketball. Change my mind!

Genetically engineered corn has eliminated an insecticide.

 So, are you okay with less insect poison and not okay with more corn with edited DNA? Check out the chart. BT corn (resistant by design to a specific bacteria) is the main maize grown now and all that insect poison has disappeared. 

 Item "B" in the picture from Nature compares BT and non-BT resistant corn.

The chart on insecticide use is from Watts Up With That.
The insecticide disappears from the data in 2010.

Canadians saving stimulus money: Wealth redistributed from government to individuals!

 Canadians put aside record amounts of cash this year, thanks to government.  Centralized money was redistributed and not immediately wasted, an astonishing turn of events.   Comment from the National Post source:  "Government transfers were actually larger than the amount of money lost in the labour market"  and  "it’s not unthinkable that some of this money went to people that didn’t need it" and "High savings rates are in turn expected to put a damper on Canada’s economic recovery".  Businesses as well as individuals have set aside some extra cash. Set asides may be higher as cash accounts but not investment accounts were tallied.

Make room for ignorance: Unknown unknowns.

 "A library should include as much of what you do not know as your means allow". Quoted here.
This is in the same spirit as the Feynman quote heading this blog:  "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.".    At the link is another pointed quotation:  

“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.”  — Lincoln Steffens

To add one more layer to this ham sandwich before you bite down, remember Donald Rumsfeld's apothegm:  

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones".