Month: September 2020

Started reading Carl Zimmer’s “A Planet of Viruses,” and right in the first chapter, I notice an inconsistency. The author is supposedly renowned, but disappoints: the story of the discovery of viruses does not mention Dimitri Ivanovsky, who is traditionally considered the founding father of virology.

According to Zimmer, after Adolf Mayer’s studies on diseased tobacco in 1876, follow Martin Beijerinck’s work in 1898, followed by a series of second-wave scientists and discoveries.

This is not quite accurate: traditionally, Ivanovsky follows Mayer (1892), who hypothesized that the contagion was either a toxin or a microbacterium, and then six years later, Beijerinck appears, who merely repeated Ivanovsky’s experiment with Chamberland filters, and “properly presented” it to the scientific community.

This is such a well-known fact that I could even omit the proof link, but still – attached are an article from the Journal of Virology and an excerpt from the book “A Planet of Viruses”.

So much for reading Zimmer after this! Everywhere deception 🙂

This bike has been sitting here for six hours already. Waiting for darkness to fall, I wonder if it will last till morning?

It seems I won’t finish it before departure, so let it hang here as it is

it was supposed to turn out to be Elizaveta Alieva

I recently listened to a lecture (architectural affordances by Vlaskin) and there was an example of this very object. Can you guess its purpose and concept?

A nice 7-km descent, average speed 40 km/h, maximum – 59 km/h, almost the entire time maintaining 42-43, had to brake at several intersections. I enjoy this

Nadia and I rode our bikes to Purcellville. Here in the local coffee shop-bakery, there’s an excellent painting in the bathroom. It really made me want to buy that picture from them.

It turns out that Moderna received $2.5 billion in funding from the USA. $1 billion was given a while ago, and now $1.5 billion was allocated a couple of weeks ago. Approximately half of this amount will be granted upon successful development and market launch of 100 million COVID-19 vaccines (mRNA-1273). The article states that similar agreements (now without details on the amounts) exist with Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca Plc, Pfizer Inc, BioNTech SE, Sanofi SA, and GlaxoSmithKline Plc, to reach the necessary 500 million vaccines.

It was also found that RNA vaccines — specifically those being developed by Moderna — have not yet been released for human use by anyone. There are about 100 vector vaccines, like the one currently being produced by Gamaleya, (both released and in trial phases, according to clinicaltrials.gov). As for RNA vaccines approved for human use, there are none yet.

A good dashboard for vaccines:

An excellent (but now quite outdated) overview: https://meduza.io/feature/2020/05/08/ischerpyvayuschiy-nu-pochti-putevoditel-meduzy-po-vsemu-chto-uzhe-izvestno-o-vaktsinah-protiv-covid-19-kogda-gde-i-kakimi-oni-budut

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-inks-1-5-billion-020816629.html

It turns out we have secret farms here where chickens are raised to lay special eggs (fertilized) for breeding flu vaccines. Each year about 145 million such eggs are needed. The locations are classified because this is a matter of national security.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/27/health/chicken-egg-flu-vaccine-intl-hnk-scli/index.html

Decided to check on Yandex, and it gave me a captcha in Japanese. Hmm.

Google trends – and what happened between August 2-8 that caused the popularity of covid-19 to momentarily soar to the levels of March-April?