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So far we have thought of Covid-19 as a respiratory disease. The symptoms*are pretty well-known to most people by now, as we also know that they vary a lot between different patients. But what if we are missing a trick? What if the thing is zeroing in on our nervous systems? And what havoc could that wreak?

According to a very well-researched article in New Scientist, Jessica Hamzelou* is finding more and more evidence that it could. We all know that many Covid-19 patients are presenting with some neurological symptoms, mainly loss of smell and taste. But Jessica reports that some neurologists are becoming worried by Covid-19 patients who are presenting with more acute brain symptoms such as encephalitis.

Good thinker that she is, Jessica presents a null hypothesis. We at LSS love a good null hypothesis. The damage to the brain is caused not by the virus, but by loss of oxygen due to acute respiratory failure, cytokine storms-all the usual suspects in fact.

Yet the evidence points to a different, and more sinister, explanation. Firstly, we know well that other coronaviruses such as HCoV-OC43 can indeed enter the nervous system and brain. And so can the SARS virus, which we all know is like SARS-CoV-2 ‘s mortiferous elder brother. Once in, what harm can it do? Well, we saw loss of taste and encephalitis above. There is also the risk of post viral fatigue syndrome, and a rather unpleasant disease called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which presents as a creeping paralysis. And never forget that some viruses, such as Herpes simplex virus can lie low in the nervous system for years, only emerging long after the initial infection has passed.

So what can be done? The first thing is to read Jennifer’s article. It is a least a month later than most of the other literature, so it’s bang up to date. Secondly-we are not medically trained. But it’s common sense to think that, if you are going back to work or socialising again, to still be very cautious. Our last thoughts- that this is the tip of an iceberg. If the virus has a neurological action, its effect on the growing brains of young people could be very dangerous. So, perhaps a little more spending on this, and a little less on road by-passes might be a very good investment indeed.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24632842-800-coronavirus-seems-to-reach-the-brain-what-could-this-mean-for-us/

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/check-if-you-have-coronavirus-symptoms/

#newscientist #jessicahamzelou #SARS #SARS-CoV-2 -covid19 #encephalitis #neurologist

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New movements in history start as attempts to address the dreadful wrongs of their times. Christianity began as a movement protesting against the cruelties and callousness of the Roman social system. Socialism was an understandable response to the inequalities and squalor of the Industrial Revolution. At first their adherents were clear; their cause was just, and together they would change things for the better. Which, on the whole, they did. But the unity of such movements never lasts for long. Students of the early Church will recall the Ebionites and Gnostics. Later there were much larger schisms as Athanasians battled it out with Arians, or Monophysites with their Orthodox co-believers. The divisions in the socialist movement were soon chronic: there were Social Democrats, Socialists, Anarchists, Communists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Trotskyists, Maoists, and many others, as each little group realised that their vision of the future was not to be quite the same as that of their Comrades.

What may be very loosely termed the Green or Environmentalist movement will soon face the same iron laws of History. The movement began as a very understandable response to the destruction of the planet in a reckless and utterly unsustainable manner, which will undoubtedly destroy us all. At first a whole plethora of groups like Greens, Friends of the Earth and Green Peace could rub along with the same goals, the same general actions Their efforts have been beyond praise. If anyone has given this narcissistic species one last chance, it was them. Yet success brings the need for hard choices and the following article by Harry Cockburn in the Independent shows how this will play out again and again in the years to come. We are grateful to Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire who has drawn our attention to this dilemma.

The UK Government is expected to give the go ahead to a remarkable new solar park project at Cleve Hill in the Thames Estuary. It will generate 350 MW of clean energy from 880 000 panels, no less. It will kick £1000 000 a year into local authority revenues. Patriots should rejoice, as it will be the world’s largest energy farm, leading the way to a zero carbon future. The company building it claim there will be a 65% increase in biodiversity. Understandably, Friends of the Earth support it.

Equally understandably, Greenpeace, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Kent Branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England do not. All have done incredible work to protect what little is left of nature from barbarism and who have also earned the right to be taken seriously. They point to the danger of the storage system, which will cover 25 acres, and the general visual impact of a huge new industrial installation in the melancholic beauty of the marshes.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the dispute it points to the increasing dilemmas which will be faced by the Green or Environmentalist movement. Dilemmas which its enemies will rush to exploit. Out there are some very rich unpleasant men, hooked on addiction to money, who will stop at nothing to wreck the growing movement for environmental responsibility. They are the common enemies of the groups named above. They fund denialist groups and fake science. They hire journalists and trolls to spread disinformation. They will use every trick to spread distrust and discord among environmentalists and progressives. They trade in paranoia, greed and despair.

Dilemmas and difficult decisions cannot be ducked or evaded. There will be defeats, splits and bitter personal animosities. But if everyone who cares about the environment always remembers why they are right, and that their cause is essential, they will still find the resources to win.

#harrycockburn #independent #clevehill #greenpeace #friendsofthe earth #solarpower

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cleve-hill-solar-farm-kent-biggest-uk-environment-battery-storage-safety-government-a9531361.html

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We at Learning, Science and Society must now offer our first correction to a mistake, and offer our first apology. In a previous Blog (Professor Brian Cox…LSS 27 May 2020) we described our correspondent Mr Gary Herbert as being Mr Gary Herbert of Bedfordshire.

In the course of our many conversations listening to Mr Herbert, we came under the impression that he and his family held lands on both sides of the Buckinghamshire-Bedfordshire border. A bit like one of those old Anglo-Norman lords, who had holdings in many counties in England, Normandy and Anjou. Big on wine, cheese and killing the lower orders. You know the ones.

Mr Herbert and his Legal People have advised us that in fact the vital Bedfordshire-Buckinghamshire border abuts, adjoins and therefore borders his lands. He should therefore be known as Mr Gary Herbert of Buckinghamshire, not Mr Gary Herbert of Bedfordshire, as he has been hithertofore described in these annals. We apologise to Mr Herbert for any hurt, distress and inconvenience to him, his family and friends which we have inadvertently caused. In future he will be referred to at all times by his correct title, which is, as attentive readers will recall, Mr Gary Herbert of Buckinghamshire.

We know that many people have referred to him by other terms in the past, but we will not use them here as this is a family blog.

#garyherbert #bedfordshire #buckinghamshire

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How big is everything? For a long time, the earth itself must have seemed vast enough. Imagine a Phoenician in about the year 1000 BCE standing on the shores of Spain and staring out across the void of the Atlantic. It must have seemed immeasurably vast and mysterious.

Ancient Greek astronomers such as Aristarchus and Hipparchus were the first to make scientific estimates of important distances, around the third century BCE. They were pretty good at it, considering that there were no telescopes. The Earth was about 39000 km in circumference (pretty accurate); the Moon about 383000 km(again pretty good); the Sun 16,210 000 km (out by a factor of ten). These distances were immense, inconceivable, by the standards of the time. The fastest ships would take weeks to make the passage from Alexandria to Rome. Trading expeditions to the East would need a year. To people of the time, reaching the moon was technologically impossible, it would be like us imagining a jaunt to the Andromeda Galaxy.

There matters remained for over a thousand years. But with the advent of modern science, things only got vaster. It was found that the earth rotated, and worse still, went round the Sun. Which discovery, as every schoolchild knows, was profoundly disturbing to most people. Cassini made the first accurate planetary measurements of Mars in 1672. With the use of telescopes and parallax, he was not far out. Once again the Universe had jumped in size. Once upon a time things had seemed very cosy, the world all on its own with God and the stars just above. Now what lay beyond Saturn, then the last known planet-and how far?

It was Bessel who in 1838 finally managed to squeeze enough out of parallax to finally give him a good distance for 61Cygni. For the record , it’s 11.398 light years. With the discovery of cepheid variables, astronomers such as Leavitt and Hubble were able to map out our local Milky Way Galaxy, then prove the existence of fractal numbers of other galaxies dotted around a universe which is currently estimated to be 46.5 billion light years across. Our current fastest spaceships, like the Voyagers and Pioneers have taken nearly fifty years to even get into interstellar space; they will take several tens of thousands to come near other stellar systems.

Is the Universe actually infinite? One problem is that people who know talk about these things in complicated mathematics. The use of words simplifies, but it also profoundly distorts. One man who tries to bridge the gap is the very intelligent Professor Brian Cox, In a you- tube video recommended to us by Mr Gary Herbert of Bedfordshire, Professor Cox gives his thoughts on the many exciting discoveries of modern astronomy-and their unsettling implications.

https://youtu.be/wieRZoJSVtw

#briancox #sizeof universe #bigbang #relativity

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As the world entered the Covid-19 crisis, we all knew the massive economic damage that would follow. Many no doubt well-meaning people predicted a rapid bounce back in the autumn of 2020. They even talked of a V-shaped model of economic activity. We at LSS are never certain; but over the next few weeks we shall try to find evidence to support that-and evidence against.

Larry Elliott of the Guardian has always been a reliable guru on the doings and don’tings of the UK Economy. His sharp analysis of the UK property market (real estate to US Readers) is a good jumping off place to give us some pointers to how things might turn out in general.

People in England are now talking about a bounce back in the UK housing market as demand, pent up by the lockdown, is released. There is even talk of a mini boom. Elliott is rather more circumspect. He points out that rising unemployment (currently 2.1 million) is often a harbinger of falling house sales to come. There’s more. A lot of UK employment is backed up by the Chancellor’s furlough scheme. This starts to tail off in August, and formally ends in September, at which point quite a large number of decisions will have to be made about which jobs are economically viable. And, to quote Shakespeare, here’s the rub: the government’s mortgage support scheme ends in October. People worried about their jobs will have to start thinking again about where their next mortgage payment is coming.

Elliott’s discussion is restricted to the UK property market alone. What follows next is our own take. Property-the decision to buy a house- is a classic “big ticket” item in a household budget. But there are others, in roughly this order-home improvements, cars, holidays, and eating out. All of them supporting thousands of jobs, and all intensely vulnerable to decisions on discretionary spending that all households make. As these jobs are lost, indicators of things like unemployment, consumer spending and purchasing fall faster, further depressing confidence. Demand and supply uncouple like the two sides of a DNA molecule, and the economy starts to die. Some foreign readers may smile at this point, because Britain is a service based, highly financialised economy, particularly vulnerable to shocks of this kind. That may be; but the same laws of economics apply in all economies to a greater or lesser extent. In a capitalist economy, confidence is the key, and we think it has taken a very hard knock everywhere.

Elliott notes that the last nail in the UK property market is usually rising interest rates-and at the moment all policy is geared in the opposite direction. But he closes with a sombre warning from Professor Tim Congdon, no less: all this printed money will one day generate inflation. And the way you deal with that is interest rates. That’s where Friedman displaces Keynes. Those of us who remember the boom and crash of the nineteen seventies remember Friedman well indeed.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/24/most-ingredients-are-in-place-for-a-property-crash-later-this-year

#ukpropertymarket #larryelliott #guardian #keynes #miltonfriedman

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We at LSS have always been campaigners for a cleaner, greener future. But we are even keener on learning about alternatives to anything. Even when we think it’s a great idea, like electric cars. It’s what scientists call the Null hypothesis, and today’s null hypothesis is- hydrogen fuel cell cars.

We found a lovely chatty little piece on this in Autotrader, so as usual we’ll just summarise.*

You’ll all remember that although the idea of fuel cells has been around since 1839, they didn’t really get going until the space programmes of the nineteen-sixties. Since when, they’ve been a bit like exercise bikes-everyone should be using them a lot more often, but somehow hasn’t quite got round to it. In theory, they are a Green Dream. The only exhaust, give or take the odd molecule, is water. The filling time is only the same as your petrol car. The ranges you get are strictly comparable to diesel. As for electric cars -well maybe they’re not so goody-goody as you think. For a start, all that electricity for batteries has to come from somewhere-and as of date, relatively little is from renewables. Then there’s all those nasty metals in the batteries, dug out of the ground in countries run by nasty people, in mines owned by nasty people, by people who really should be doing their school lessons, in an ideal world. And what do you do with old batteries. To be fair, most of the hydrogen for full cells comes from natural gas, so it’s not too green either.

Hang on, you say-don’t hydrogen cells tend to go bang, with frightful consequences? Don’t I remember something called the Hindenburg? Well, there are increasing technological solutions to this- and petrol can have quite a bang too, at times. There can be problems with lithium ion batteries as well , so no one is really off the hook.

In way, that’s where we stand. Hydrogen cells have been the Next Big Thing for thirty years-and could be for the next thirty. Various companies like Mercedes-Benz, Honda, and GM continue to experiment with models. However, thanks to the percipience of Mr Lindsay Charlton of Kent, we note the following story from Energy and Capital: Amazon is buying hydrogen stocks.

That’s right, Amazon and Jeff Bezos, no less, are starting to put money into this Cinderella technology. We at LSS always counsel: let the big boys get on with it, don’t risk your hard earned dollars and euros, gentle readers. But according to the authors, Elon Musk may be getting worried. So watch this trope-things might get very interesting indeed.

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/content/advice/hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-overview

https://secure.energyandcapital.com/148938

#elonmusk #amazon #hydrogencars #electriccars #lithiumion

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One of the pleasures of blogging, especially in the difficult worlds of science and biotechnology, is coming across guides who know their stuff backwards, have the contacts, and can explain difficult topics clearly in real time. Phew, that’s a big ask. One such is Daniel Mediavilla of El Pais. We have been following Dan for years-he’s sound on things like antibiotics as well. Here we are just going to summarise his state of play article on where humanity is on this sunny Sunday in May 2020. And then get out of his way. You really should read this for yourselves.

Firstly, we have two vaccines now at stage two trials-and that’s a lot better than we were in 2002 with SARS. Among the best runners and riders are Moderna of the US where a vaccine trial with 45 volunteers is throwing up antibodies just like those in patients who are recovering from Covid-19. Well, eight of the 45, anyway. Then there is the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology and Cansino Biologics, currently trialling with 108 volunteers. It looks promising-it looks safe, they are getting antibodies, and the vital T lymphocytes, with theirs. Around the world, there are at least 100 candidate vaccines. Feel better?

We hope so, because now for the bad stuff. Firstly, even Dr Wei Chan, who heads up the exciting Chinese project above , admits that there is going to be a very long march until we get to a safe vaccine. Generally speaking, it looks as if phase 11 and phase 111 trials will run this summer and into the autumn, That’s a long, long time, and a lot of people may have to “die for the Dow” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it.

Here’s a daunting list of the mountains we have to climb.

The earth has about 7600 million residents at the time of writing. How many doses will we need? And how much in each dose? Will it be a one off dose-or will you need one every year, like the flu?Are some vaccines easier to produce than others? Are companies going to do it on their own? Or will countries do it, pooling resources where necessary? All of these questions are considered in a second article by Dr Elisa Sicuri, whose CV and titles are so long and impressive we will simply extract: Institute of World Health, Barcelona, and Imperial College, London.

Anyway you can find all three pieces below. My English language followers will need a translation app.

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-05-22/los-resultados-iniciales-de-la-vacuna-china-indican-que-es-segura-y-genera-anticuerpos.html

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-05-22/cuanto-se-tardara-en-fabricar-la-vacuna-de-la-covid-para-todos-los-habitantes-del-planeta.html

#danielmediavilla #coronavirus #sarscov2 #covid19 #imperialcollege #paulkrugman

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Once again, a big thank you to all our readers who saw all these stories this week, told us about them-and we didn’t have time to cover them. There are quite a few! With out further ado, here goes:

We have always suspected that the small mammal populations of the world are home to countless variants of coronaviruses-and others. Just the tip of the iceberg is demonstrated by this excellent New Scientist piece, brought to us by Mr Gary Herbert. Seven new coronaviruses have been found lurking in bats in Africa. The moral of the story? No more bushmeat. Repeat: no more bushmeat!

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2243749-seven-new-coronaviruses-have-been-found-lurking-in-bats-in-africa/

In theory journalists are just researchers, following stories like contact tracers go after the coronavirus. Not so, according to Barton Gellman of the Atlantic. After a fairly routine meeting with Edward Snowden, he found himself in a immersed in a murky world of cyber attacks and service denials, presumably from national intelligence agencies-but which ones?. This piece, recommended to us by Mr Lindsay Charlton, is a fascinating insight into how the latter day targets of intelligence agencies are your computers, phones, recorders and anything else they can find. Fans of traditional spy literature will find honeytraps filled with beautiful women as well. The Atlantic was a joy when we discovered it, and well worth a delve on any topic

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/edward-snowden-operation-firstfruits/610573/

We at LSS value intelligence above all. When somebody uses their professional skill to so something really well, in all fields from jewellery making to astronomy. Proof of the latter comes in this article from Forbes, in which Jack Madden and Lisa Kaltenegger of Cornell University unveil new spectroscopic techniques to analyse the atmospheres of exoplanets, and see quickly if they are potential abodes for life. We thank Mr Peter Seymour for this story-and ask our selves- wasn’t Cornell where the late, great Carl Sagan used to hang out?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2020/05/23/new-planetary-color-models-will-decode-signs-of-extrasolar-life/#1b105b3c7d10

Disinformation just grows and grows. Here’s a little quote piece from Nature, followed by a short read which suggests that no less than a whopping 45% of tweets on coronavirus are from fake accounts.

45%-The proportion of 200 million tweets about the coronavirus that were probably from fake accounts designed to sow disinformation, according to an as-yet-unpublished analysis. (NPR | 4 min read)

And so we wish all of you a happy Saturday night. We thank all new readers from around the world who have joined us this week, and apologise that there is no longer time to thank you all individually. Be Lucky!

#disinformation #exoplanets #theatlantic #forbes #newscientist #coronavirus #covid19

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And tonight we celebrate the Gibson, in homage to Hitchcock’s stylish thriller North by Northwest, starring Cary Grant, Eva-Marie Saint and old stalwart James Mason. Remember those fifties Hitchcocks? When men shaved properly, wore tailored suits, and a lady knew what gloves to wear to dinner? When it was still possible to cross the United States in a luxurious train and sip a cocktail as the majestic scenery slipped by? Of course, James Bond does scenes with cocktails, and trains, and ladies. And does them well. But for us, there’s nothing like Grant’s silky smooth delivery, and the whole ambience of a time before trains hadn’t quite been killed off by aeroplanes.

Well, even if you haven’t seen the film, here’s what it tasted like. (Editor’s note: we are indebted for this recipe to a site called Allrecipes.com They use fluid ounces, which we presume must be something like a measure we recommend on normal Fridays.)

2.5 fluid ounces white gin- Gordons is always our first go-to at LSS. 0.5 fluid ounces dry vermouth.

Mix over ice, then pour into a standard cocktail glass. Your garnish is a single pearl olive.

Well happy drinking. Cheers, and may reason prevail over stupidity.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/222413/gibson-cocktail/

https://www.bing.com/search?q=film+north+by+northwest&form=EDNTHT&mkt=en-gb&httpsmsn=1&msnews=1&plvar=0&refig=19bf7e54095e4e02f0519f04c12

#alfredhitchcock #carygrant #gibson #cocktails

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It’s not that we want to boast or strut about with an oh-so-clever-told-you-so lower sixth form grin on our faces. But we at LSS have been extolling the virtues of Artificial Intelligence in countless fields. (LSS 28 April 2020) And so we feel ever so slightly vindicated at today’s repro from Nature updates. The researchers in this article are using the power of AI to look for new materials to help reduce CO2 emissions. We pointed out how AI had helped to discover a new antimicrobial called halicin.* Either way, the implications for research into the Covid-19 pandemic are blatant, if our leaders could get their acts together. It’s amazing what people can achieve when they think, as opposed to screaming with their emotions.

here’s the Nature summary, which gives you the main paper:

Researchers on the hunt for new materials are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Algorithms can predict the physical characteristics of selected crystal structures from first principles, and neural networks can use that information to make guesses about much larger gamuts of possible materials. In future, automated labs might help to make the materials more quickly. But even a robotic lab will need human overseers: synthesis still involves “a fair amount of artisanship,” says electrical engineer Ted Sargent. Wired | 6 min read
Source: Nature paper

Before you go off to read the paper, the team that did this looks sort of international and cooperative to us. Is that telling you something? Or maybe you’re the sort who thinks your football team should only use players from your own country. Well, it’s one way of doing things.

*J Stokes R Barzailly J Collins et al A deep learning approach to antibiotic discovery CELL vol 180 pp 688-702 Feb 20 2020

#artificialintelligence #nature #materialsscience #catalyst