CharonY

One could change the wording a bit insofar that an engineer applies known principles to make things work rather than necessarily having a rigorous scientific framework (which is probably less applicable to modern engineering).

Also to emphasize that the article I linked also shows that the US private space sector has raised much more than the Chinese private sector.

It is not an either or question. China also has a fledgling private space industry (mostly involved in satellite delivery). https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/21/1016513/china-private-commercial-space-industry-dominance/ And looking at an apple-to-apple comparison the Chinese private sector has total lower volume in investments than their US counterparts. Also regarding unilateralism, the US congress has banned NASA from any bilateral agreements with China (with few exceptions). However, with respect to the Chinese space station, there are at least agreements with the Italian space agency and I have heard of some European universities involved in designing microgravity experiments.

In other words, all of them had at best a science-based education, but none of them worked in any capacity as scientists.

A new report has provided new estimates for COVID-19 deaths. Verified death numbers obviously are a lower estimate. By looking at excess deaths and accounting for non-COVID-19 related deaths the authors estimate a current death toll of 6.9 millions globally (more than double of verified cases). In the US the estimated total deaths are over 900k. In the UK both numbers are closer (209k vs 150k).

It got highlighted in the news for a while as fatal cases (often strokes) occurred also in younger (below 55) hospitalized patients. There are follow-up studies indicating that even after discharge COVID-19 patients were at a higher risk to suffer from thrombembolic events, so the numbers I provided above might actually underestimate the risk, if they only looked at the time during hospitalization (I honestly cannot recall the details, there is just so much being published and quite a bit of it is somewhat useless).

In addition to what Phi and exchemist said, there are folks who have lost loved ones or know of folks who did. The whole outbreak was perpetuated by the inability of us to pull together and do the right thing. The fact that even now, when the chance of herd immunity is slipping away, there are folks who cannot think beyond their own benefit is galling, to say the least.

We could shorten the discussion by simply stating that a) there is no age group where providing the vaccine does not benefit the population as a whole and b) with the potential exception of under 20 year olds there is no age group where vaccination does not significantly reduce the risk of adverse health outcomes. And even then in younger folks it would depend a lot on active case numbers and other factors, which goes back to a). I mean, theoretically you can avoid those risks altogether by isolating alone indefinitely in a bunker, but that likely carries other health risks.

There are values actually published and circulated in various news (I could try to find them, but it was maybe a few weeks ago). There is a bit of a problem with how the reporting should be done, as there are different thromboses risks. Looking at the published numbers The result was about a 10 fold higher level in COVID-19 patients. In the study the calculated rate was about 40 per million CVST (the form of thrombosis associated with AZ and J&J) in COVID-patients and about 7 per million for mRNA vaccines. However that study did not (to my knowledge) include AZ and J&J vaccines (i.e. adenovirus-vaccines). We cannot simply compare raw numbers as the cohort need to be matched and it appears that there is significant gender effect there. However, they also looked at PVT, which is a more frequent type of thrombosis found in COVID-19 patients (~400 per million), whereas the rate for the vaccinated group was again only ~7 per million. There is another pre-print out suggesting that CVST is actually not statistically significantly higher in a vaccinated cohort compared to baseline incidence.

This understanding is very wrong. As you mentioned the overall goal of vaccinations is to limit spread of the disease and thereby the creation of new variants that could increase morbidity in younger folks. This is happening right now, B.1.1.7 has resulted in much higher hospitalizations among younger folks. In many areas half the ICU cases are now under 40. However, even ignoring that, the risk of death drops with younger age, but even in the 30s it is still estimated at around 0.2%. This is way higher (orders of magnitudes) than any risk (i.e. not only counting death) from any vaccine. Taken together, individual as well as population risk suggest that vaccinations will improve both outcomes

As mentioned, those folks are not trained scientists by education, but perhaps more importantly, they did not make money via science or research careers. It also helped that their respective families were relatively well-off (not sure about Bezos, tbh). If anything the example actually demonstrates that one should not have an academic career if wealth is the goal. In fact, academics tend to earn less over a career than their counterparts in industry. A part is that after a PhD entry salaries in many industries are at least decent, whereas postdoctoral salaries is often just somewhat higher than minimum wage (depending on where you are) and then by the time you actually manage to get a faculty position, the industrial counterpart has moved on to senior position, outpacing academic salary at every step. Although being lower than industrial jobs, tenured salaries are not bad, but certainly far from making mountains of money (and certainly not anything near mansions). That being said, it is far worse for those who do not get a tenure track position. Sessionals barely make a living, for example. In other words, if you are in just for the money, focusing on research is not the way to go. As others mentioned, the actual reward is in the job itself, though it may depend on the individual to find what is important to them. Teaching, for example can be challenging, especially when you realize that the class dramatically drops performance when you make it harder for them to copy/paste assignments and exams to post online. The joys of online teaching... In addition, in many countries, including Canada, France and Germany (not sure about the UK and not that common in the US) professorial salaries are negotiated as part of public service or similar unions. So there are hard limits on upper salaries.

You were talking about phages. They only work with bacteria and it is fairly to get a site specific construct. Also expression systems typically do not require site-specific insertion into the host genome. The goal there is not to modify the genome, but to express specific proteins (or RNA). Site-specific mutations of eukaryotes are an entirely different thing, but again, you would not use bacteriophages for that one. I mean, if you are actually interested there are a whole bunch of books (including open source textbooks) you could read on that topic.

That's right. They looked vaguely familiar to me for some reason, that could be it.

These are bacteriophages, i.e. they only infect bacteria and there is no need to use CRISPR. They have been used traditionally as a cloning vector since they do not care too much about what is packaged in their heads and can therefore be used for specialized transduction. Nowadays there are versatile in vitro systems that utilize viral recombination reactions which makes the virus itself redundant and can be used to e.g. create mammalian expression vectors and other purposes outside of bacteria.

I would not frame it in evolutionary terms for a variety of reasons. The simplest being that I don't see a good reason to use that framework over classic cell biology. While it is not my field, I think that everyone promoting even only doubling of healthy lifespans is massively overhyping the little we actually understand. To me it seems like we just figured out how to somewhat reliably make fire and now want to create cold fusion based on what we just learned. There are many steps between and these have not been outlined in a satisfying way (and/or include hand waving away massive knowledge gaps and challenges). Note that cancer is not the only issue associated with aging, it is just one of the many things associated with it. Also there many cancer forms where it is more likely to die with it rather than of it (e.g.prostate). The average lifetime risk of getting cancer is about 44% in Canada and 40% in the US. The risk of dying from it is about half that, respectively.

Yeah the desire to get somewhere first or fast is not necessarily the friend of doing it safely, which also applies to manned Mars expeditions. NASA struggled with that, too (Challenger).

No. The method used is typically solid-phase synthesis. But no, if you have no training or background one should not attempt it.

That is very likely the case. However, I will add that there is also literature specifically on stock analysts highlighting effects such as bias due to fund relationships and conflict of interest (e.g. related to incentives), which as a whole is not really surprising. It may very well be the case that these effects over long term tends to even out (I suspect the fact that most investors do not beat the market could be an argument for either outcome). There were a few papers discussing whether analysts were consistently able to make reliable recommendations and the results were fairly mixed. I remember one paper where the authors indicated that past successes were not predictive of future accuracy, whereas some others indicated that there might be "star" predictors who consistently perform well. Otoh one of the top 30 stock pickers was a chimpanzee: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/like-1999-still-a-chimps-party-on-wall-street-2012-12-27 (not really an argument, but I always found that amusing).

I am not entirely convinced (though it could simply be attributed to ignorance on that matter). Roughly from what I understand on a high level values are largely determined by confidence in a particular stock. Now it could be that stock brokers are rational actors and that the system would be accurately described under the efficient market hypothesis. I.e. there are rational calculations to be made and investors largely follow them for evaluation. Under this assumption, things like bubbles do not exist, for example. Interestingly certain investors themselves argue against the rationality of the market pointing toward wild swings (and some use those to create profits for themselves, which in a perfectly rational system would not be possible). There are also behavioural studies indicating that investors do not follow the model of rational actors very well, in part because information is unevenly distributed or sometimes purposefully obtuse and in part because some behaviour can be closer modelled as herd behaviour where someone (influential) asserts or indicates stability or instability in certain stocks and other follow suit. Now this is obviously based on very superficial reading on the matter but what I took away is that the market is potentially more volatile than I assumed it to be.

Vaccine rollout needed to be global to stamp out this threat. However, the opportunity for eliminating the disease may have posed as most countries did not manage to keep infections sufficiently low. Most folks I talk to think that it will become endemic and require continued management (like flu).

In a similar vein, a host of organohalogens such as perfluorinated compounds, are not really biodegradable and have been seen to accumulate in humans and wildlife all over the world (including the arctic).

I think the recent Gamestop debacle shows that stock market values do not need to correspond anything rational per se (or maybe I am misunderstanding your comments).

I think you mean the Youtube auto-radicalization algorithm.

Aside from the feasibility and safety of a manned mission, one oculd also raise the question of how large the influence of private companies in this endeavor should be. As long as it is a purely an explorative/scientific mission, but if, as some posters suggest, there are practical reasons for travel and colonization, the framework might change.

No, it is not the mixing. In fact, both methods require the dilution of the cells you want to count. Also, in both cases it is important that your dilution is high enough that you only get a limited number of colonies, so that you can actually count them. The main difference (actually there are a few more, depending on the bacterium and specific type of pouring medium, but we can ignore that for now), is how you spread your cells. Using the overlay, you swish it a little bit around and let it settle, in the other you have to use a spreader. In principle both work pretty much equally well if you have the right technique, though.