Articles to 2020-04-02

Zum Seitenende      Übersicht Artikel      Home & Impressum

First the link to this week's complete list as HTML and as PDF.

***

Not much more about Covid this week. Everything that should and had to be said is already out there. The new things published now are for virologists, doctors and vaccine developers alone. Let's leave them to their job. The main exception is Gonenborn.

***

Saint-Maurice et al. is one of those findings that is certain to find its way into textbooks and overviews as established fact. It isn't. Instead it turns out a prime example for Richard P. Feynman's admonition always to check the primary sources. What they certainly do find is a very strong correlation that does not go away when applying adjustments. But still their tables show an extremely strong covariation of steps with age, obesity, general health and fitness, and lifestyle. All of those very strongly point to a common cause. The authors themselves conclude that a causality can not be shown, but hidden in the text while their abstract claims a “dose-response relationship”. Daily walking has certainly turned out to be a strongly predictive symptom for mortality but no more. As always this is not proof that a causal influence does not exist, it just means it's not demonstrated.

***

Blom et al. only show a neural reaction in the visual cortex for the simple movement of objects in space. Extrapolating wildly from their finding one might claim that a strong expectation makes you not only imagine to have seen but actually physically see something beyond your senses. There is nothing in their result to warrant such a wide extension but still perhaps an idea worth looking into.

***

As Klages et al.'s modeling shows, carbon dioxide alone was not sufficient to account for the extreme Cretaceous warming. Instead they demonstrate the importance of ice albedo. The role of industrial soot in darkening and melting high-altitude glaciers has already been shown. For the future it may be important to watch and control this important part of anthropogenic influence.

Zum Anfang      Übersicht Artikel      Home & Impressum

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License Viewable With Any Browser Valid HTML 4.01! Valid CSS!