exchemist

This is trolling. You’ve already posted that article on your other thread, where I read it and replied to you, pointing out it does not say what you claim it says. There is no excuse for you to re-post it and accuse me of not thinking for myself, when I have gone to the trouble of doing that, to help you. I am reporting you for posting in bad faith. The Axios article makes clear that the current vaccines remain very effective at preventing severe disease due to BA 4 and 5 variants. So why do you post it suggesting it says the opposite? Meanwhile, here is a sane article , by an eminently qualified academic, about the implications of Omicron BA.4 and 5 for a well-vaccinated population (UK): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/13/rise-covid-cases-what-we-know-so-far Note that a further booster, using the existing vaccines, is recommended against these variants. So the original vaccines are still effective.

Not necessarily, no. You need to know who is dying. In the UK, there is high prevalence of Covid (I had it myself recently, as did my 94 yr old father), but almost always it is the unvaccinated, or people with comorbidities, that end up in hospital or die. My father and I just had mild colds. If we had not been testing ourselves, we would not have known it was Covid. Both of us are triple vaccinated. Re Portugal, we need to know who is dying. Portugal has quite an elderly population, whereas S Africa has a young one. This will make a big difference. The fact is that nobody in Europe is expressing serious concern about Portugal: there are no travel restrictions or advisories.

Actually, I had never heard of this guy. He seems to be an eccentric Belgian vet with no relevant expertise. I suggest you stop posting this crap.

This appears to be balls. What source are you quoting?

In what country?

You think Reuters is unreliable, do you? No reputable study has found any sign of immune deficiency induced by COVID vaccines. ”VAIDS” is pernicious nonsense, peddled by eyeball-rolling ignoramuses and worse.

VAIDS is a myth: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaids-fakes-idUSL1N2UM1C7 and you, I think, are either a sucker or a troll.

It does not. All it says is that antibodies against a part of the virus other than the spike protein are lower in vaccinated people than in people who caught the disease. That is not specially surprising and does not suggest the immune response has been harmed. It is just that different responses have been triggered. At least that is how I read it.

Read some books.

Who says the Covid vaccines damage the immune system? I’ve never read anything to suggest that. Nothing you have posted so far seems to support such a suggestion.

Goddess Kali? This is a science forum.

No, it’s catenation chauvinism, if it’s anything. If you can’t make long chain molecules, you have to be looking at such a radically different biochemistry that really you would be just guessing as to whether it might work or not.

The problem, though, is it has only 3 valence electrons but needs to share 8 ( i.e. form 4 bonds) to form a closed n=2 shell through covalent bonding. Hence it has a tendency for multicentre bonding, which tends not to lead to chains, i.e. catenation does not seem to be a feature of boron chemistry.

It seems to me we have learnt enough to realise the futility of interstellar travel. So I think advanced aliens would not be so thick as to try to visit physically at all. Either they would rely on robots, sent on multi-millennium missions, or else on remote sensing methods. If the latter, we might never know of their interest.

Yes I think the problem with Freud is that his theories didn’t really make testable predictions. He could theorise about the reasons for something after the event, but he couldn’t find a child that not been hugged, say, and correctly predict it’s behaviour without knowing it beforehand. It all seems to be ex post facto explanation. Mind you, I sometimes get a bit queasy about certain rationalisations of behaviour in chemistry, for similar reasons. For instance, One can read qualitative explanations of why Hg is a liquid at r.t.p., but I’m not sure any theory is capable of predicting that outcome exactly. With very complex systems in science, one can get a fair amount of rationalisation after the event.

I’m with @Ken Fabian on this. Einstein et al weren’t trying to disprove the theory. They wanted to test it to see if it gave correct predictions or not. Falsifiability does not mean you have to try to falsify a theory, just that for a theory to be science it must be testable in a way that is capable of showing it false if its predictions are not borne out by observation.

No. What’s the link? It looks spammy. Set my mind at rest on that and maybe we can discuss why boron is not a great candidate for biochemistry.

My degree, my career, at least in part, and a lifelong interest.

Quite. The book is old news and was discredited years ago, as the Wiki article on it explains: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin's_Black_Box Behe* has had no credibility since his appearance at the Kitzmiller / Dover School trial, back in 2005. Basically, the pseudoscience of “Intelligent Design” is dead, but the corpse still twitches from time to time when people surface from the creationist community. * though he still seems to have tenure at Yee-Haa university or somewhere..............

Your ignorance is showing. Nobody uses carbon dating for objects more than a few thousand years old. I won’t bother with your other statements. Posting this level of junk on a science forum is pointless.

Yes I think that’s about right. Let’s see if our poster is willing to argue some specific points of contention here on the forum. My guess is he won’t want to try.

It seems vanishingly unlikely. As, by your own admission, you can’t be bothered to read what Darwin wrote, why would anyone take seriously a book recommended by you criticising his ideas? in any case, criticising Darwin is of little interest to scientists. Science has moved on quite a bit in the 150 years since Origin of Species came out. You seem to be flogging a dead horse.

It must have been some sort of trial of behaviour in which it was important that the feeding intervals were truly randomised, to exclude the possibility that the pigeon could be acting in response to some other, time-related, factor, or something.

Excited I don’t know, as I don’t follow abiogenesis research enough to know how radical this finding is. But if mafic glasses available on the surface of the Hadean earth can catalyse RNA polymerisation, that has to be an important piece of the jigsaw. Are there models for where the nucleoside phosphate monomers could have come from?

Suggest you try the test I recommended, by changing the angle of illumination and watching what happens to the colours as you do so. Rotating the specimen slowly may do the trick. If the colours are due to diffraction, as both @sethoflagos and I are proposing, you should see them changing. I think it unlikely that Iridium is responsible. The colours after which it was named were not those of minerals, but colours of the halides in various oxidation states when the element was dissolved in "marine acid" (HCl). The explanation of oxidation of the surface to goethite seems far more likely.