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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Chen & Saeed ask a reasonable question the answer to which would be valuable to know. That said and however SARS-CoV-2 really came about, it emerged right on the doorstep of a facility experimenting with just that kind of virus. Do we really want scientists actively to create a killer variant the possibility of which leading experts have been warning about for months?
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“The most parsimonious hypothesis is that the pandemic emerged through the animal market system,” Daszak says as quotes by Cohen. That statement is quite obviously wrong. The pandemic started right on the doorstep of an institute known to have undertaken just that kind of experiments with bat vira. You can’t get more parsimonious than that. On the other hand it seems the genome changes are far too many, too dispersed all over the genome, and too random looking to make them plausibly engineered. At least that’s what virologists stated that sounded trustworthy to me.
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By now and with the infectivity of Omicron nearly all children have already come into contact with the virus at least once. The arguments for vaccinating children and very young adults have never been strong and current knowledge about side effects makes them still weaker. Their recent decrease as reported by Couzin-Frankel looks like a previous infection immunizing children against the risk of vaccination. While encouraging in itself it is, if anything, a further argument against vaccinating those age groups.
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Monson et al. is mostly an exercise in successful p-hacking. Both absolute prenatal growth in g/d as well as absolute brain weight are strongly correlated to adult body weight and thus with each other. The relation is not absolute as the gorilla birth weight of only 2.2 kg – small compared to humans – shows but it seems humans are the main outliers here. For the dental data the whole range in MMC from 0.9 to 1.25 has no discernible predictive value at all. Again humans are the outlier on both axes determining all of the shape of the chosen approximation.
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Villameriel et al. cite “comparison with previous finding”
. As Feynman has frequently and consistently stressed, any meaningful comparison requires reproduction of the control in the experimenter’s own laboratory with all its subtle and idiosyncratic quirks.
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Placebos and psychosomatics have always been treated as strange quirks making science and studies difficult. Newer results like Keller et al.’s move them toward the centre of the human immune system and other adaptations. This important result has far reaching implications for the politics of health care too.
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States, especially large and rich states, have the primary access to state of the art knowledge about propaganda, manipulation and brainwashing. Geßler’s hat has never been about greeting but about unquestioning obedience. Just what many have long suspected to be the main effect and probable purpose of mask-wearing has now been demonstrated by Lu et al. So how to attain that desirable goal? Yang et al. demonstrate the existence of tipping pints that make social behaviours self-sustainable. Efficient propaganda is hard to sustain in the longer term but with this results a short sharp campaign may suffice to do the trick.
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