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Firstly, thanks to al our fantastic contributors on the Cocktail Night blog, we learn from several sources that people liked them. And thanks to everyone who once again has read, shared and contributed to the blog, on here, face book, twitter and elsewhere. Too many to mention individually, we regret.

On then to brief selection of stories linking the most important themes in our lives for the week (no, we’re not going near that election!)

The whole sorry Covid-19 saga now seems to be turning on how long our antibodies will last. Whether you’re a herd immunity supporter, or a vaccine enthusiast, or just curious, everything depends on the duration of those pesky antibodies. In the Conversation, Sheena Cruikshank, a Professor at Manchester University, discusses fading and its implications.

https://theconversation.com/a-new-study-suggests-coronavirus-antibodies-fade-over-time-but-how-concerned-should-we-be-148957?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20October%2028%202020%20-%201770417166&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20October%2028%202020%20-%201770417166+CID_cc816b6bff7b3751fe48c8db091550d7&utm_source=campaign_monitor_uk&utm_term=A%20new%20study%20suggests%20coronavirus%20antibodies%20fade%20over%20time%20%20but%20how%20concerned%20should%20we%20be

Vaccines work; they have almost eliminated polio. But unless we keep up research, which means spending money, vaccination programmes will run down. It could even happen with polio. Here’s Nature

New Polo vaccine approved

Wild polio has almost been eradicated. But a version of the virus that arose naturally from the weakened polio virus used for vaccination is increasing. Now, a vaccine against this vaccine-derived polio strain is expected to receive emergency approval before the end of the year. If it does, it will be the first time the World Health Organization (WHO) has steered an unlicensed vaccine through its emergency listing process. “It’s going to be a very good exercise for us to look [at] how this works,” says WHO adviser Alejandro Cravioto. “Probably some of the COVID-19 vaccines will have to be authorized for use in the same way.”Nature | 7 min read

Message to all you wildcat capitalists out there: if you continue to to slash taxes and rip dividends out of companies every three months, there won’t be any long term research. Maybe high levels of testosterone will protect you from polio?

We love it when someone remembers our old blogs, like the one on magnetic polar flips. Here Mr Gary Herbert of Buckinghamshire uncovers a piece about an old tree which carries records of the last time it happened. Over to Doug Williams of Outdoor Revival:

ttps://m.outdoorrevival.com/news/magnetic-reversal.html

Animal lovers, who’s man’s best friend, a dog or a cat? According to Nature, it’s dogs by many thousands of years. We may have been breeding them since before 11 000 years BCE

Ancient dog DNA reveals canine evolution

The largest-ever study of ancient dog genomes has revealed a lot about our four-legged friends. The analysis of more than two dozen Eurasian dogs suggests that the animals were domesticated and became widespread well before 11,000 years ago. “Already, there were at least five different groups of dogs across the world, so the origin of dogs must have been substantially earlier than that,” says population geneticist Pontus Skoglund. With so many genomes, the researchers could follow ancient dog populations as they moved and mixed and compare these shifts with those in human populations.Nature | 5 min read
Science paper

Oh well, they were here first. But as the old saying has it-Dogs have masters; Cats have Staff

And finally, sadly, we bid farewell to Sean Connery; for most fans he is still the best Bond of all. He was an accomplished actor in many roles, and the world is a poorer place without him. Good bye, Mr Bond. Here’s the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/oct/31/sean-connery-james-bond-actor-dies-aged-90

#magneticpoles #seanconnery #jamesbond #polio #vaccines #covid19 #sars-cov- 2 #nature #antibodyfading

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Today we are honoured to welcome the noted journalist, broadcaster and entrepreneur Mr Lindsay Charlton of Kent as our cocktail guest

Cocktail: Ice cold Martini

“One day, dehydrated after a hot day’s filming, I found myself on my own in the cocktail lounge of Don Cesar Hotel, Florida, a pink oceanside palace that featured in Once Upon a Time in America. (In the scene, Robert De Niro wore a 1930s men’s bathing cosie with a bib and shoulder straps. Didn’t suit him).

“Anyway, I told the barman that I had never had a proper Martini before, but he said that he’d soon sort that for me. This is what he did:

Ingredients: ice cold gin, olive, twist of lemon, quite a lot more iced gin.

“Forthwith, I drank: Martini so good, so astonishingly strong that I relaxed entirely, savouring the ambience, the light chatter in the air conditioned bar, and the gentle murmuring of music. It wasn’t long before I had ordered a second, and downed that too. Minutes later, having entirely lost the power of speech, I had to be helped off of the bar stool and padded off somewhat asynchronistically to dinner.  I realised when I had fully regained consciousness that the Martini was not for the amateur cocktail drinker. (you’re dead right there-ed)

Who else drinks them? Everyone knows that. But how he, 007, shoots straight after drinking them is beyond me.

https://www.guestreservations.com/the-don-cesar-hotel/booking?msclkid=09883e56b96c1e04b87461ca97bc979f

#martini #doncesarhotel #sergioleone #robertdeniro #gin #florida

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Fans of Paleontology, and non-fans of Paleontology, there’s something for everyone here, so don’t click away. But fans will instantly remember the marvellous Burgess Shale formations of British Columbia. They’re about as good as it gets: Old (Cambrian, 520million years BCE); incredibly well preserved (you can see the compound eyes in trilobites); and above all the first good examples of just about every major group of animals is suddenly here, fully formed and ready to go. Here are all the answers to what the first arthropods. the first molluscs and the first vertebrates looked like, and its dazzling. And some people were dazzled . Over the years enormous theories were erected about this sudden Cambrian Explosion. Why so sudden? Why nothing like this earlier? There seemed to be nothing but a few old funny shapes, which may not even have been animals, in the poor old Precambrian. And bacteria-but as they are not exactly photogenic, who cared about them?

But some people always had doubts. Firstly, the molecular evidence pointed to a much earlier divergence of animal groups-maybe by two or three hundred million years. And there were all those pesky little burrows and strange shapes in places like Ediacara in Australia and Charnwood Forest in England. And some multicellular things like red algae have been around unchanged for fourteen hundred million years and are still washing up on beaches today. Now Traci Wilson of Nature tells how discoveries in the Precambrian are completely upending the Cambrian explosion and showing how the really important stuff was happening long. long before. There’s loads of good stuff here, and links, and great pictures. For us the highlight was some scientists who recovered 550 million years old cholesterol to prove some of the strange blobs were real animals, but there is loads more.

However, the real point is: don’t get carried away by one discovery, however good it looks. No one book holds all the answers. No scientist thinks that Darwin wrote the last word on biology, or Newton on physics. What people think about the Cambrian is no real danger to the world. But there are plenty of other people with fixed ideas who are. And who kill for them, even in churches.

Animal, vegetable or something else entirely? For decades, researchers were baffled by fossils of bizarre living things that dated back to the Ediacaran period — around half a billion years ago. But recent evidence suggests that some of these alien-like species were in fact animals — including ones that had guts, segmented bodies and other sophisticated features. Researchers are using these finds to re-examine a pivotal event in evolutionary history: the Cambrian explosion. “I would just love to be swimming over these communities and see, finally, how are they really growing? What on Earth are they?” says palaeobiologist Rachel Wood. “So much would become obvious.”Nature | 12 min read

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/29/knife-attacker-in-nice-kills-three-people

#niceattacks #cambrian #precambrian #yilingiaspiciformis #ediacara #charnwoodforest

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If you are a historian from the future, looking back on old blogs to see how people coped with the Covid-19 pandemic, welcome to Wednesday 28th October 2020. Because the consensus on restrictions is breaking down. Their have been riots in some of the great cities in Europe; people all over England are blithely ignoring restrictions from the highest levels of society all the way down. And we at LSS think that, if the government wants to use the Police to break up Christmas lunches, there will be no law left at all by the New Year.

So what is to be done? One answer is to shield the vulnerable. let the virus rip and hope that the resulting build up of immunity in the survivors will provide protection for all in the long term. It’s a point of view defended in this clip from Talk Radio by Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, no less. Whatever you say about the funding and origins of the Great Barrington Declaration, some one has to make the case for getting the economy going!

The essential case against is that “Herd Immunity” is scientifically questionable, and that the cost in lives of attempting it without vaccines would be unacceptable. Here are the counterarguments

Last week we linked to a piece from Nature: here it is again

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02948-4?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=b7acfea873-briefing

We would also like to link a piece by Graham Lawton of New Scientist

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2257258-it-is-bad-science-to-say-covid-19-infections-will-create-herd-immunity/

We at LSS are always saddened when scientific questions become political. It happened over smoking and global warming. Though we haven’t crossed that threshold yet on this one, we fear it could go the same way. Oh for a couple of really good, reliable vaccines before that day!

Our thanks to Mr Gary Herbert of Buckinghamshire who is the moving spirit in this post.

#covid19 #sars-cov-2 #coronavirus #herdimmunity #greatbarringtondeclaration #epidemiology #herdsafety

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No crime is worse than domestic violence, pitting a strong big man against a smaller, weaker woman. It’s just cowardice. And no tyranny is more total than a domestic tyranny. That’s why we want to offer today’s little blog in support of the sterling efforts of campaigners everywhere against this atrocity.

Domestic violence awareness month seems still to be an American thing, judging by its media footprint. Our link offerings are therefore to an excellent US site called Domestic Violence-it’s everybody’s business. We’ll take one little fact-ette for you gentle readers: in the US there is a victim every 15 seconds. So what’s it like in other countries? There’s loads of facts here, ideas on how you can help, even if it’s only by wearing a purple ribbon.

https://domesticviolence.org/domestic-violence-awareness-month/

Back across this side of the pond, we found this marvellous little link. Jamie Brassington of the Smethwick Express and Star tells how a marvellous little Sikh Temple in the Black Country have cover themselves in purple for the whole month in support of the campaign. They are called Guru Nanak Gurdwara, and we are sure that donations to the roof fund will not go unappreciated

http://www.expressandstar.com/news/local-hubs/sandwell/smethwick/2020/10/06/sikh-temple-turns-purple-to-raise-awareness-of-domestic-violence/

And finally..spare a thought for our four legged friends. The decision for a woman to bail out of abusive relationship can be agonising. One more agony is if she has to leave her beloved cat or dog behind. Now Purina Petfoods have come up with the Purple Leash Project. The idea is to help victims move on their pets, and care and support these poor animals during the dreadful transition process. Declaration of Interest: none. We get no money from Purina, but we think they’re great. For the record, ours is a Whiskas household!

https://www.purina.com/about-purina/purple-leash-project

#domesticviolence #domesticabuse #purpleribbon #purina #purpleleash

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• <img src="https://onlinescientias.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/pexels-photo-3935506.jpeg&quot; alt="Photo by Irina Babina Nature and Wildlife on <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-and-gray-reptile-on-brown-sand-3935506/&quot; rel="nofollow">Pexels.com

• <img src="https://onlinescientias.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/pexels-photo-3722717.jpeg&quot; alt="Photo by Erik Karits on <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-and-white-leopard-on-green-grass-3722717/&quot; rel="nofollow">Pexels.com

• <img src="https://onlinescientias.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/pexels-photo-4011962.jpeg&quot; alt="Photo by Tom Fisk on <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/komodo-dragon-4011962/&quot; rel="nofollow">Pexels.com

courtesy of pixabay

When we in the west think of Thailand, most of us can muster little beyond marvellous beaches, Singha beer and slightly risque cabaret shows in Bangkok. A lamentable ignorance on our part; no doubt that country has many cultural treasures with which to educate the world. None more than the fact that apparently the worst insult you can proffer in the Thai language is to call someone a Monitor Lizard.

Herpetologists among us will recognise monitor lizards as belonging to the family Varanidae, a widespread and successful group of reptiles spread across vast regions of the warmer parts of the globe. They play a humble but essential role in many ecosystems, and in towns often function as rat catcher and rubbish scavenger in chief. They have one star member; the giant Komodo Dragon, biggest lizard on the planet, and one even capable of sustaining a cameo on James Bond films (Skyfall 2012).

But there is hope that the Dragon may be able to do even more for us yet. Teams of researchers have been investigating certain proteins in the animals’ blood that appears to protect them from bacteria. Dragons seem to collect the most horrendous bacterial fauna in their mouths, mainly due to their diet of carrion and sewage water. Now it seems that these proteins could form the basis of new treatments to protect us against superbugs even such as Staphylococcus aureus, the fons et origio of MRSA.

We’re linking to several pieces today: Peter Dockrill in Science Alert, the BBC and Medical News Today. Before you say oh, Phuket, it only goes to show: be careful whom you insult-they might save your life one day!

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/316929

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-blood-of-komodo-dragons-could-help-us-to-slay-antibiotic-resistance

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39554531

#monitorlizard #thailand #antibioticresistance #mrsa #komododragon #blood

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Regular readers of this blog and Facebook will have noted our strong interest in the dangers of antibiotic resistant microorganisms. Up to now, we’ve had a bit of a bias towards bacteria-but fungi are microoganisms too, and they can be deadly.

“Eramos pocos, y se pario la abuela” say the Spanish, which loosely translated means “it never rains but it pours.” And so amid the general woe caused by COVID-19 , Live Science and National Geographic report the rise of a virulent strain of a yeast called Candida auris. And it’s not nice; it can affect ears, open wounds, and enter the bloodstream. We link to Nicolette Lanese, but through her you can get to National Geographic and the US Centre for Disease Control.

Before Covid-19, some of us were worried that an antibiotic resistant superbug would be the next pandemic. Well, here’s Covid-19 dragging one in its wake, so to speak. It’s worth keeping up with things like this, because, to put it bluntly, it’s your family at risk.

https://www.livescience.com/superbug-fungus-spread-covid19-hospitals.html

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/10/drug-resistant-superbug-candida-auris-thriving-hospitals-coro

If you want to contribute to solving the problem of superbugs, please visit the site of antibiotic research UK Please listen to their appeal on Radio 4 this Sunday 1st November 2020

Homepage with ASK

#superbugs #antibioticresistance #fungi #covid19 #sars-cov-2 #coronavirus

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According to the Daily Mail, *patience with Government Covid 19 restrictions is wearing thin in Britain. If the policies fail, presumably we will fall back on Herd Immunity. For a vaccine is a long, long way off as far as we can see. But is herd immunity a real scientific concept? Or do epidemiologists talk about something else? How is it calculated, and is it the same in all nations? Here Nature has a fascinating read for those who like to think, rather than taking everything at face value.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8873731/Focus-group-reveals-voters-despairing-coronavirus-lockdown-me

The false promise of herd immunity for COVID-19

The term ‘herd immunity’ used to be typically discussed as a desirable result of wide-scale vaccination programmes. During the pandemic, it has become a shorthand for allowing the coronavirus to run its course. It’s a shift that horrifies many public-health researchers. “We have never successfully been able to do it before, and it will lead to unacceptable and unnecessary untold human death and suffering,” says Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Nature digs deep into the misunderstandings that fuel the arguments in favour of the approach and sets out the relevant facts.

Nature | 11 min read

If we are going to understand epidemiology, or anything else, we all need to be more numerate. Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire offers us two pieces towards the deeper understanding of statistics and people who think that they can predict the future. Especially Fund Managers!

The first, from the Wall Street Journal, tells the story of how some financial journalists outguessed a group of market experts

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/random-darts-beat-hedge-fund-stars-again-2019-06-26

The second by blogger Philip Tetlock, looks at the deeper reasons why things go wrong. In the murky world of algorithms, models and statistics, it’s all about assumptions. Get these awry, and your whole massive effort, however well-intentioned, falls flat.

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/tag/philip-tetlock/

We think that is more than enough heavy reading for one weekend! Enjoy.

#algorithm #statistics #forecasting #covid19 #sars-cov- 2 #coronavirus #fundmanagers

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Attentive readers will recall the name of Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire as an assiduous scourer of the world’s media for informative articles on rather serious subjects such as Political Economy, Science and Medicine. Yet even he has time to relax, as this piece about life in the brash, far-off nineteen eighties makes clear.

“My choice for cocktail hour is the Dark Mojito, for which I supply the recipe below. As with all cocktails, it is often the circumstances which make a particular recipe memorable. They are as follows:

The Place : John L Gardner’s Ringside Bar, Playa Las Americas Tenerife

The Company: Mr Gary Herbert of Buckinghamshire

The Circumstances: “After an exhausting day in the sun by the swimming pool, it was back to the room to get ready for the evening. Gary and I would take about 5 minutes to do this and we would go for an aperitif while our respective other halves (Mrs Seymour and Mrs Herbert- ed) needed a bit longer to get ready. We ordered our drinks, mine a draft lager and then there was what became the customary 6.00 power cut. It seems that although Las Americas had lots of shiny new hotels, nobody had thought to hire a decent electrician. So when all of the hair dryers went on at 6.00pm there was a power cut. More importantly the pump in the bar wouldn’t work either and so I couldn’t get my lager. Rather than wait for the power to come back on Bill, the manager, suggested a cocktail. On looking at the cocktail menu I discovered the dark mojito and have never looked back.

If you go to the excellent website Rum Therapy https://www.rumtherapy.com, you will find an excellent recipe as recommended by Mr Seymour. This site has numerous recipes for other rum drinks, and many excellent pictures.

https://www.rumtherapy.com/2013/06/dark-mojito/

Coda: Mr Seymour also informed us that while on this island, he was mistaken for the popular 1970s boxer Joe Bugner. Perhaps he should have tried a Rum Punch instead!

#rummojito #playadelasamericas #tenerife #cocktails

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_{images courtesy of pixabay}

We only recommend books by academics when they’re well written and genuinely tell us something refreshing. But such is the case with Brexitland by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford (CUP 2020). In the tradition of Amy Chua and Eric Kaufman, the authors see ethno-tribalism as a compelling force in human affairs. Its clash with the equally powerful multi-ethnic cosmopolitanism which is the inevitable consequence of free markets is the issue of our times.

The fundamental narrative is how the adherents of the latter, taking their power and goodness for granted, belittled and negated those of the former, until in Britain they were destroyed by them. As Fintan O’Toole observed, the Brexit vote was all about Britain, not Europe. Brexit was the British expression of a long-building cultural war which is playing out in many countries. It generally pits the older and less educated (by no means less intelligent!) rural dwellers against the newer younger graduate denizens of the cities. Consider Trump in the USA. The same drama is played out in countries such as Turkey, whose populations are certainly considered beyond the pale by white nationalist purists.

The fall of Communism did not bring about the perfect world that its advocates promised. The politics of this century are and will be about identity, not class and economics. Yet the authors see hope, as at last these concerns are being addressed, however imperfectly. To which we would add: identities are always contingent and particular, the accidental results of large forces of history and biology. Do you know any Romans? How many of them now would fight and die for that city, as they did in the time of Scipio and Marcus Aurelius? Will Wessex go to war with Mercia this year-or are they happy now to be ruled by remote bureaucrats in London? The concerns of ethno-nationalists are deep, real and won’t go away. But there must be room for other, longer-lasting concerns too.

Eric Kaufman Whiteshift Harry N Abrams 2018

Amy Chua Political Tribes Barnes and Noble 2016

#ethnonationalism #identitypolitics #brexit #culturalwars #donaldtrump #erdogan #conservative #liberal #freemarket