The bear is back– it looks as if investors and borrowers may be in for a rough time during the next few months. The long bull market may about to be replaced by a mean old bear, which has been lurking in the corner ever since inflation worries emerged. How long is it going to last? Here’s a nifty little piece from Julia Kollewe and Graeme Wearden in the Guardian.

Global stock markets drop as inflation fears prompt sell-off | Stock markets | The Guardian

You can be an Oxford University Scientist by Monday-staying on the theme of bears, how would you like to be a scientist doing original research for Oxford University, starting next week-and, get this, from the comfort of your own home? Apple News report that Oxford want the public to help them analyse ten years’ worth of photos for behavioural studies. We say; the more data we get, the more chance there is of saving these amazing creatures from extinction.To quote the words of La Belle in their popular song Lady Marmalade “hey Joe- wanna give it a go?”

_{We thank Mr and Mrs L Charlton of Kent for this lead}

Oxford University are looking for armchair citizen scientists for a polar bear research project (inews.co.uk)

Tigers-Two steps forward, one back: Humanity can be proud of the stupendous efforts made to conserve the graceful Tiger. India has had particular success. But now its parks and reservations face the same problem that zoos and sancturies have known for decades-inbreeding among tiny populations. Looks like one we’ll have to tackle in the forthcoming decades. Both ESSO and Kellogs do well from tiger branding- how about passing them the old hat? Here’s The Hindu, via Nature Briefings.

Tigers (Panthera tigris) in India could lose their rich genetic diversity as their habitats shrink in size, according to an analysis of the complete genome sequences of 65 tigers. Hemmed into increasingly fragmented protected areas, the tigers might mate only with those in their own population, including their relatives. The analysis found that several individual tigers had low genetic variation, suggesting that inbreeding has already occurred. Some 70% of the world’s tigers live in India.The Hindu | 9 min read
Further reading: India’s tigers seem to be a massive success story — many scientists aren’t sure (Nature | 15 min read, from 2019)
Reference: Molecular Biology and Evolution paper

Finally….how much is a bottle of wine? It could be up to $2.07 million dollars, if you like champagne, although more reasonable prices start around $21 000-$34 000 a bottle. We were amazed when we read this article on the Finance online website. It’s not a question of the rights and wrongs of spending that money. It’s simply a question of why bother?

Top 10 Most Expensive Champagne Bottles In The World In 2021 – Financesonline.com

That’s it for the week. We counsel you all that if you are going to enjoy a tipple with your Saturday Night Supper, you indulge in something that is priced a little more moderately.

#stockmarket #bearmarket #bullmarket #inflation #polarbears #climatechange #tiger #conservation #champagne

• 

• 

• 

Having a powerful new refrigerator has awakened us once more to life’s simple delights. A nice cold beer, and maybe some nuts, on a Friday night before dinner. Makes a change from cocktails- who needs all that mixing, recipes and complicated apparatus every week? And as for the washing up! So today we are going to review some old friends,ones that have stood us in good stread for decades, to let you make some choices. But, gentle readers, these are only our first drafts, if you will pardon the pun. We are certain you will have many ideas of your own. Let’s start in on the beer-and be certain it’s frosty cold!

San Miguel -The stand by of many a Benidorm Package Holiday, now available in all good UK supermarkets, the yellow, mellow caballero is the perfect company for warm nights in the Gardens of Seville. Or Scunthorpe. Or anywhere else. Marks and Sparks now have a marvellous tasty range of snacks like chorizo bites and jamon serrano crisps to give that authentic Spanish tang. Download a few flamenco guitar numbers,and your Iberian immersion will be worthy of Don Quijote himself!

Heineken– UK readers will recall this brand as having the funniest adverts of the nineteen seventies (Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach) Definitely a taste of its own, with notes of cereals and shades of long chain carbohydrates. Perfect with peanuts, especially dry roasted.(allergy sufferers avoid!)

Kronenburg (“Vot about my unfinizghed pint ov Kronenburg?” as the composer Schubert is reported to have said of his eighth symphony.) Actually it’s French, not German, despite the name and the celebrity endorsement. Generally marketed in pints or litres, the old soixante-quatre is a big in-yer-face pub beer, which means it goes well with things like potato crisps or other pub snacks. But can fit well in the warm demi-monde of summer house and lawn, if you want to have it large.

Honourable mentions: Stella Artois, Fosters, Fullers’ London Pride. Roasted almonds. Bits of cheddar cheese.

San Miguel Beer exploring the world  | San Miguel

Welcome to Heineken UK

Kronenbourg 1664 | UK | A Taste Suprême (k1664.co.uk)

Classic Ads: Kronenburg Schubert starring Alan Lake – Bing video

#beer #nuts #cocktails #fridaynight #franzschubert

• 

• 

• 

Covid-19 may finally be on the wane, but how would you feel if we told you that there are worse pandemics out there, waiting to happen? Because before Covid, during and after, lies the threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The alpha and the omega of pandemics. Long sufferering readers on LSS will recall our interest in this chilling theme,as well as allusions we have made to both bacteriophages and CRISPR. (LSS passim) Now there’s real hope that someone is to bringing all this together to deal with antibiotic resistant organisms before they pose a real threat.

For newer readers: a bacteriophage is just a type of virus that kills bacteria insted of us. Find the right one and it will kill dangerous bacteria as quickly as lions going through a herd of wildebeest. The technique was successfully pioneered over a hundred years ago. But it was eclipsed. by antibiotics, especially in the west Time for a comeback! Kevin Doxzen, writing in The Conversation tells of how, using the new CRISPR technology, a phage has been engineered to attack Clostridioides difficile. Because this bacterium is antibiotic resistant, it is now killing 29 000 people a year in the USA alone. Or it was until CRISPR bioengineers came along.

We know you like good news, gentle readers. Here thanks to basic science R&D, is some really good news. But science needs money, and it takes time. Next time someone tells you only the balance sheet counts, tell them about this.

Engineered viruses can fight the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (theconversation.com)

Bacteriophages – an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

#phages #antibioticresistance #gramnegative #covid-19 #bacteria #medicine

There are many ways to contend with antibiotic resistance. In the UK the charity antibiotic resistance UK is leading the fight like no other! Please help by clicking below

Antibiotic Research UK | Fighting Antibiotic Resistance

• 

• 

Running out of space-round where we live very spare inch of land is built over for flats, flats and more flats. Vineyards and open country are smashed up again and again for more housing- so what’s going to soak up all that extra carbon dioxide? Talking of which, we now have about eight years before we hit an irreversible tipping point and the climate changes forever. What’s the point of building all those nice housing estates if they are uninhabitable? But humanity just goes on growing away- we long since passed 7 billion copies of ourselves and are well on the way to 8 billion.

There is a solution. No one dies. Everyone gets richer. Everyone’s children and great- great- great- grandchildren lead longer, happier and sustainable lives. Think of it as a vaccine if you like-like the ones for Covid-19. The answer is education for women. All the data show that it produces better outcomes. Lower infant mortality. Healthier children. Rising National Income. More things to talk about. Above all, stable or falling populations. So below we link to two sites which we hope will give you a jumping-off point, gentle readers.

But please don’t just read. Do. On your feeds, on your blogs, in all your Letters to the Editor,whether they’re to the Parish Magazine or the Los Angeles Times, please plug, push and promote this one as much as you can.

After all, isn’t there a little matter of Natural Justice somewhere in here as well?

Girls’ education | UNICEF

How education can moderate population growth | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)

#feminism #educationforwomen #unicef #wef #populationcontrol #birthcontrol #covid-19 #climatechange #ecology #sustainability

• 

• 

• 

Come on, you know which virus we’re talking about: Sars-Cov-2, the one that’s causing the Covid-19 pandemic that’s wreaking such havoc on peoples’ lives, and the balance sheets of Finance Ministers the world over. Well, the lockdown are working, the vaccines are rolling out-but can we afford to be complacent? Will the virus mutate, and find a way back? How do viruses mutate anyway?

One person who knows is Maya Wei-Haas. In an article in National Geographic*(incidentally a gem of scientific journalism; clear, precise and with some fabulous pictures), she tells every concerned Mum, Dad and everyone else exactly what they need to know. The more cases you have, the more mutations you’ll get. A limited number, like the famous Kent 1.1.7 will produce new challenges to our immune systems. Coronaviruses aren’t quite as good at mutating as flu viruses are-however they’re not bad at it either.

For those who like to drink deep from the Well of Knowledge, there’s always good old Wikipedia*. Warning: it’ll take more than a coffee break to do this earnest, deeply researched and utterly worthy piece real justice. But you will come out actually knowing something, which is more than the blowhards at the Dog and Duck do.

Our thoughts? Currently,there’s no virologist on the staff at LSS, and many of the readers of this will be cleverer than the writer. That said, we think that Sars-Cov-2 will go endemic, as flu viruses have. That won’t be a problem if we continue to predict the variations, maybe using AI. And continue to develop new vaccines, using money. That is true for many other potential threats, like antibiotic resistant bacteria, for example. Perhaps if humanity found ways of building just a few less superyachts and a few more research laboratories, we could all sleep safer in our beds at night.

The coronavirus is mutating—but what determines how quickly? (nationalgeographic.com)

Viral evolution – Wikipedia

Top 100 World’s Largest Yachts | Superyachts.com | Superyachts.com

#sars-Cov-2 #covid-19 #superyachts #coronavirus #fluvirus #evolution #mutation #rna #dna #artificialintelligence

• 

• 

• 

Old LSS hands will know our house style. Something on science, something on political economy. maybe education, with a bracing cocktail or two on Friday nights. Now, imagine a site that does that and a lot more. Gentle readers, we earnestly refer you to Big Think. https/bigthink.com A heady, eclectic mix of science, sex,psychology, surprises, religion, culture-and much more that the thinking woman or man needs to know. All served up in readable, chatty articles which you can take in with your morning coffee and chocolate hobnobs. We discovered it while looking for things that go faster than light,* only to see the link later, buried on out Apple News feed. Funny old world.

Spoiler alert; These people are not to be confused with The Big Think which seems to be a perfectly worthy, but rather specialised educational foundation

*some do, sort of

#bigthink #science #health #sex #religion #culture #politics #currentaffairs

• 

• 

• 

Everyone is worried about fake news, conspiracy theories, unreason and deep political divisions. And rightly so-this is no longer the balmy climate of the late nineteen nineties! So why the growth in extremism, and the stubborn refusal to accept facts?Now a team at Cambridge University think they have the answer. They studied 330 participants aged from 22 to 63 on a variety of neuropsychological tasks. According to the excellent report by Natalie Grover of the Guardian, they found:

people with extremist attitudes tended to think about the world in black and white terms, and struggled with complex tasks that required intricate mental steps, said lead author Dr Leor Zmigrod at Cambridge’s department of psychology.

“Individuals or brains that struggle to process and plan complex action sequences may be more drawn to extreme ideologies, or authoritarian ideologies that simplify the world,” she said.

It’s a fascinating idea, and seems to hold a key to a major problem. But beware easy answers, like “nasty people are stupid”. For one thing, it’s dangerous to underestimate the enemy. But there’s another. We’ve seen a lot of clever, hitherto successful people make some dreadful errors. Often because they grab hold of an obsession and won’t let it go. Often such people are under extreme emotional and psychological stress -factors first identified by Norman Dixon in his ground breaking work The Psychology of Miliary Incompetence. Think Napoleon and Russia-but there are many many other examples. Maybe you’ve seen people do it in your organisation. And can we flip this-could it be that people who are under great stress, maybe due to poverty, thereby turn to extremist beliefs? More research needed, surely.

People with extremist views less able to do complex mental tasks, research suggests | Psychology | The Guardian

On the Psychology Of Military Incompetence Norman F Dixon Pimlico 1994

#neuropsychology #cognitivedissonance #stress #blackandwhitethinking #extremism

• 

• 

• 

Perseverance pays The stats show that the success rate on Mars missions is only 50%. So what an achievement to send a one tonne vehicle to exactly where you want and get it to work straight after landing! We at LSS don’t believe in mystic forces- but it’s funny how sometimes a nation’s luck does seem to turn. Could this just be the first such sign of the Biden era? We hope for more to come.

Magnetic Flips Back in July,(LSS 23 7 20) we gave you one of our little warnings about the dangers of the Magnetic Poles flipping-which they do from time to time. Now scientists think the last such flip may have done for poor old Neanderthal Man, or Neanderthal Person as we now call them. Before you think you’re so clever, Homo sapiens, remember Neanderthals didn’t run incredibly intricate systems like internets, power grids and satellites, all of which depend on a stable electromagnetic environment. Here’s four of the world’s top experts in The Conversation.

Earth’s magnetic field broke down 42,000 years ago and caused massive sudden climate change (theconversation.com)

And remember-there’s no where to escape to, because they have magnetism in down in Cancun too.

Virus Variants-Of course it’s worrying that Sars-Cov-2 can evolve new mutations, especially when it’s spreading fast. And yes, we will have to keep upping our game on vaccine design and development. But evolution has given our side a few tricks to play as well, and one of them is T cells. Here’s Nature: Killer T cells could boost Covid Immunity

In the race against emerging coronavirus variants, researchers are looking beyond antibodies for clues to lasting protection against COVID-19. In particular, scientists are hopeful that T cells — a group of immune cells that can target and destroy virus-infected cells — could maintain lasting immunity. Preliminary evidence suggests that the vast majority of T-cell responses are unlikely to be affected by new mutations in the virus. Some coronavirus vaccine developers are already looking at ways to develop next-generation vaccines that stimulate T cells more effectively. “We know the antibodies are likely less effective, but maybe the T cells can save us,” says biotechnology analyst Daina Graybosch.Nature | 6 min read

Irresistible Quote CNN, via Nature Briefings “America, welcome back to the frontline of the global fight against climate change” British parliamentarian Alok Sharma, the president of the COP26 climate change conference, welcomes the United States back into the Paris accord, which it officially rejoined today. (CNN | 4 min read)

And for those who want everything……..

Here’s Dan Avery of the Mail with news of a flying car that can reach 10 000 feet (3048 m) and do 100 mph (61 km) Don’t worry about fitting it in your garage;you can take the wings off. We at LSS never look for good guys or bad guys- we just think poor old Ted Cruz was unlucky. If he’d had one of these he could have nipped down to Cancun without anyone spotting him in the airport!

ttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9263043/Worlds-flying-car-travels-100mph-altitudes-10-000ft-cleared

#flyingcars #joebiden #tedcruz #perseverance #neanderthal #magneticflips #extinction#sars-cov-2 #covid-19 #tcells #lymphocytes #globalwarming #COP26 #cancun

• 

• 

• 

Eder G.

English Teacher, Barons Court, London

What have you chosen for us?  Watermelon

Who were you with?   An ex-boyfriend took me out for dinner a few years ago.

Where? We went to Bellini, a rotating restaurant at the World Trade Centre in Mexico City.

Why the watermelon? My ex was a big dry martini drinker but I’ve always preferred a sweet drink so the bartender suggested it, saying I was going to love it, and he was right.

Do you always drink this one? I’ve tried to get it in various places but I haven’t been successful except from that time I found a cocktail bar in Camden but they didn’t use natural watermelon and it was just not the same. 

We thank Eder not only for today’s column but also for being a great team leader and exceedingly patient with our halting attempts to speak meaningful Spanish.  However, the word “Watermelon” covers at least eleven possible recipes, including mojitos, margaritas and a punch. So we’ve included a link to the excellent spruce eats website, so you can make your own. The location looks great. The nearest we’ve ever been to anything like this was Pizza Express in Kingston Upon Thames, and that didn’t go round and round

11 Refreshingly Sweet Watermelon Cocktail Recipes (thespruceeats.com)

Bellini Restaurante in Mexico City | My Guide Mexico City

#cocktails #bellinis #watermelon #mexicocity

• 

• 

• 

Astute followers of Britain, its society and class system will know the overwhelming power of its right-wing newspapers. Alright, their circulation is smaller than in Mrs Thatcher’s heyday- but with 4 139 962 readers they still set the agenda and internet activities of a massive majority of Britons. By contrast papers which could be reasonably described as moderate or left-of-centre in outlook come in a pitiful 1 356 260.(source;Wikipedia) It’s not facts that count; it is the way they are treated that matters, and this ascendancy tells much about where Britain is now, culturally, economically and politically. (Foreign readers take note-we at LSS don’t care if this situation is right or wrong, we simply observe evident truths).

One area where this plays out is Climate Change. Traditionally, centre and left- leaning people are more receptive to ideas on climate change: the Right has been the haven for deniers. Much of the argument has swirled around the figure of Rupert Murdoch, who, love him or loathe him, is the nearest the Right has to a global leader. The FT article summarises the latest below*

Yet Murdoch and his followers would claim that they are moving. That’s why the piece by Pawas Bisht for The Conversation so intrigues us. Now even a publication as impeccably right as the The Daily Express and, more importantly, the Sun, are beginning to stir their followers into action on climate change. There is an intriguing subtext; Brexit means a lot more buying British. For years environmental campaigners have been urging people to buy local and shorten supply chains. Could Internationalism and Nationalism be about to meet?

Nationalism in Britain is strongly expressed in support for the Monarchy, an institution butressed with ferocious energy by the right wing tabloids. Which is why the Mail piece by James Gant is so odd. “Fury as as anti monarchy group release video...etc” Ostensibly it,s a Mail hit job, unleashing righteous wrath on a tiny group of Republicans who have released a rather lumbering video in support of their cause while the Queen’s Husband is attending hospital, for some minor ailment we hope. In which case-why run it at all? As one astute commentator observes-why give these people free publicity?

Does the Mail too scent a change in the wind? Look at the other comments underneath. We expected all to be rabidly, foamingly pro-monarchy. Yet at least half displayed a range from grudging support via sardonic indifference to outright hostility. The Queen was largely exempted (she has been an exemplary monarch) but there is clearly real doubt about her successors. One astute Mail watcher of long standing told us “they are very pro Elizabeth II- but have real doubts about Charlie.”

As go the right-wing papers, so goes Britain. As even Conservative politicians like Michael Heseltine and David Cameron found out when they got on the wrong side of them. We at LSS believe that something needs to be done about climate change. But we also think that, in an age without revealed religion, the monarchy may provide a source of comfort and focus, especially to those whose life journey has left them less able to access reflection and with a less broadly grounded basis in facts. Either way, progressives may be getting what they have wished for. Always a good time to be cautious.

Former Australian PMs put Murdoch in the hot seat on climate change | Financial Times (ft.com)

Britain’s right-wing tabloids have turned to ‘green nationalism’ to sell climate action (theconversation.com)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9271727/Fury-anti-monarchy-group-release-video-titled-Time-Prince-Philips-hospital.htm

#climatechange #denial #globalwarming #RupertMurdoch #monarchy #tabloids #nationalism #internationalism #ukmonarchy #hmqueen