Recent content by Ygggdrasil

Here's a nice diagram illustrating the point: image source: https://socratic.org/questions/what-are-activation-energies As others in the thread have said, the free energy difference between the reactants and products is still the same. However, the path between the two needs a higher...

It's worth noting that CureVac developed an mRNA vaccine that does not use the modified nucleoside (N1-methylpseudouridine) used in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Unfortunately, their Phase 3 trials of the vaccines showed that it is much less effective (only ~47% efficacy against COVID-19...

Note that TMPRSS2 is a human protein that has normal functions in the human body aside from being hijacked to help process the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. While there are successful antiviral drugs that target host proteins, these drugs are more likely to have side effects that could limit the...

Perhaps a better way to compare COVID-19 deaths across countries without having to worry about differences in how countries count COVID deaths is excess death statistics. Excess deaths shows essentially, how many more deaths occurred in a country over the baseline level of deaths typically seen...

I think the paraphrasing you quote does accurately portray the findings from the article cited. However, it is important to note that the finding is an association and that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. The data analyzed in the paper all comes from observational studies not...

I'm approaching this from the point to view as one trained in biophysics who has seen some of these ideas develop in studying biological systems. This topic is definitely interdisciplinary and draws from many different disciplines. Many of these studies are focused on biological systems and...

There was a thread on this study when it was first posted to a pre-print server: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/significant-loss-of-brain-grey-matter-after-covid-19.1004274/ Here is my post from that thread (I have not yet read through the version published by Nature, though through a...

I'll repeat my post from the previous thread here: A lot of the issues with the potential for a future "hydrogen economy" that was touted in the early 2000s applies to the idea of these ammonia fuel cells. See https://www.technologyreview.com/s/402584/hype-about-hydrogen/ for a nice discussion...

While what you say is true now, it will not necessarily continue to be true in the future. Various companies are working on ways to better automate the processes involved in generating CAR-T cells to make them cheaper and more widely accessible...

Also, for reference, here is a link to the Worobey et al. pre-print manuscript discussed by the NPR article cited in the OP: The Huanan market was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 emergence https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YiOnNejMKUn Abstract: Here's another helpful summary of the pre-print...

This statement seems to contradict what is stated in the NPR article: (source: NPR article cited above) Here's a link to the May 2021 letter published in Science (of which Worobey is an author), which states that "Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain...

From quickly browsing the article, it looks like the researchers studied only exocannabinoids (specifically only cannabinoids from hemp). The article does not even mention endocannabinoids.

T-cell immunity, which is likely a major factor providing protection against severe illness, does not seem to be affected much by the variants. For example, see the following article: SARS-CoV-2 vaccination induces immunological T cell memory able to cross-recognize variants from Alpha to...

The relative prevalence of BA.2 does seem to be increasing both at the worldwide level (as assessed by sequencing data from GISAID from NextStrain) as well as in the US (as assessed by sequencing data from the US CDC): Here's the GISAID data from NextStrain, with BA.2 being the darker orange...

Are you sure that the abstract is of observational data? Here's the text of the abstract that you link to: Seems like to me, the authors are building a machine learning model based on experimental data on other variants to infer the properties of Omicron BA.2 (without including any...