SCI-ART LAB

Science, Art, Litt, Science based Art & Science Communication

Q: Why were Albert Einstein, Galileo, Newton, Nicola Tesla, and other great scientists born only in Europe? Why did no Indian scientist illuminate his name?

Krishna: Didn’t hear about

*CV Raman (of Raman Effect)?

*Satyendra Nath Bose :

Bose-Einstein condensates were first predicted theoretically by Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974), an Indian physicist who also discovered the subatomic particle named for him, the bosonBose was working on statistical problems in quantum mechanics, and sent his ideas to Albert Einstein (1).

*Har Gobind khorana - Biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1968 for demonstrating how the nucleotides in nucleic acids control the synthesis of proteins.

*Meghnad Saha - Astrophysicist who developed the Saha equation, which explains chemical and physical conditions in stars.

*Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar - Astrophysicist won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his research on the evolutionary stages of massive stars.

and other scientists like them?

Who says India doesn’t have good scientists? Only thing is they ‘re not promoted by the media like they did the ones you mentioned.

All scientists are equal. But some are made more famous by the media. That’s all. That doesn’t take away the greatness of other scientists.

Footnotes:

  1. States of Matter: Bose-Einstein Condensate

Q: Why do some people develop covid despite taking vaccines?

Krishna: Yes, some people don't develop immunity. About 2–10% of healthy individuals fail to mount antibody levels to routine vaccines (2).

There are various reasons for this.

The immunology is quite complex.  Some people don't develop immunity despite getting covid! Some people have mild disease and the body doesn't fully activate humoral immunity. Or more simply it doesn't learn and remember the virus. In that case you have little to no immunity to another infection (re-infection).

There are 2 major factors responsible for vaccine failures, the first is vaccine-related such as failures in vaccine attenuation, vaccination regimes or administration. The other is host-related, of which host genetics, immune status, age, health or nutritional status can be associated with primary or secondary vaccine failures. The first describes the inability to respond to primary vaccination, the latter is characterized by a loss of protection after initial effectiveness. 

We have noticed that people above the age of 65 develop low immunity.  This can be attributed to the gradual age-related decline in immune activity.

If you are suffering from any major health conditions, then too your immune system doesn't work properly. 

People on immunosuppressive drugs too don't develop good immunity.

You should take good food to develop immunity. If your nutritional status is poor, you don't  develop immunity. You should be healthy and stress-free too to  develop good immunity. If the viral load is high and when people have low immunity, they develop breakthrough infection.

Some people develop covid because the virus has mutated and has a different make up to the one they had been vaccinated against (variant).

Some vaccines are not stored properly in some countries and therefore are not fully effective in mounting a good immunity response.   In real life, vaccine recipients may not receive doses at the right time, or receive doses that have not been refrigerated properly. All these differences impact the vaccine’s performance once it is rolled out widely.

We call these breakthrough covid cases when you get covid  despite taking vaccines. A breakthrough case is considered someone who tests positive for COVID-19 more than two weeks after their final vaccine dose. These people develop both symptomatic and  asymptomatic covid.

 A vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after receipt of all recommended doses of a COVID-19 vaccine. 

Breakthrough cases demonstrate a basic principle of infectious disease  – whether or not a person gets infected  depends on the balance between two factors: intensity of exposure and immune competence.
Intensity of exposure relates to how close an uninfected person is to a highly infectious individual spewing virus while talking and how long the two people are in contact. Immune competence relates to the body's inherent protection against Covid-19. Unvaccinated individuals who've never been infected with the coronavirus have no protection –– this is a completely new virus after all – while fully vaccinated people will be much more protected.

However, vaccine breakthrough infections occur in only a small fraction of all vaccinated persons and account for a small percentage of all COVID-19 cases . But these infections are still rare and mostly mild — a sign that vaccines are holding up well.

Vaccination is not a license to move around freely. 

Just 0.01 percent of fully vaccinated people in the U.S. are known to have caught the covid virus (3)

Footnotes:

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4962729/

3. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-vaccines-brea...

Q: What is the difference between misinformation and disinformation in science?

Krishna: Misinformation is “false information that is spread, regardless of intent to mislead.”

The spread of misinformation happens often in our everyday lives. We human beings—news flash—are not perfect. We can all make mistakes. We all forget things. We mishear or misremember details. We tell our friends something we heard on TV or saw on social media that wasn’t really true. If you are spreading around information that is wrong but you don’t know it is wrong, then you are, well, technically, spreading misinformation.

Misinformation doesn’t care about intent, and so is simply a term for any kind of wrong or false information.

Disinformation means “false information, as about anything, disseminated by a government or intelligence agency in a hostile act of tactical political subversion.” It is also used more generally to mean “deliberately misleading or biased information; manipulated narrative or facts; propaganda.”

Propaganda, which is information spread to make someone or something look bad or good, can be disinformation.

Like the antivaxxers do about vaccines. They spread disinformation like "Vaccines kill people or the mRNA vaccines change your genetic makeup" , to scare people and make them reject vaccines.

So disinformation is knowingly spreading misinformation.

Disinformation is very powerful, destructive, and divisive. It is deliberately causing harm to people or nations.

Q: Can homeopathy help in a COVID-19 infection?

Krishna: NO! Homeopathy is pseudo-science and doesn’t work at all.

If you listen to people who say that it works, you will put your life in danger. Period!

And this is my evidence:

1,800 Studies Later, Scientists Conclude Homeopathy Doesn’t Work

Homeopathy officially doesn't work, according to Russia's top scien...

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org...

This is what a liver transplant surgeon told me recently...

Homeopathy ineffective, study confirms

Q: Is science without religion lame? Is religion without science blind?

Krishna: People try to justify it because it ‘s attributed to Einstein. Even if Einstein said it, that reflects the thinking of the time he lived in.

But how can two things that work in opposite ways be brought together like this in the first place?

Science doesn’t need religion and the controversial stories behind it to survive. It can survive and stand on its own.

Science has two aspects to it.

One: The principles with which this universe came into existence (to atheists), or created (to theists) and run by it.

Two: The process with which we study this universe.

People usually take only the second one into consideration, not the first one while dealing with this aspect. But the truth is, without scientific principles, this universe in which we live, wouldn't have come into existence in the first place. Only when the scientific principles based universe came into existence, the consequences like galaxies, stars, planets, origin of life, its evolution, human beings and finally their religions became a reality.

So science is the basis for everything.

E=mc2 is an eternal condition and did not require the mind of man and the religion originated from it to understand it before it sprang into existence.

But yes, without following the scientific method to provide credibility to its existence, religion is just a blind belief without science.

People also think science doesn't deal with morals and emotions and therefore is not perfect without religion which is not true.

Science can deal with morals and emotions perfectly well. Read here how: 

can-science-explain-or-deal-with-emotions-and-morals

https://kkartlab.in/group/some-science/forum/topics/qs-people-asked...

Q: Why are scientists suddenly more interested in the lab-leak theory of Covid -19's origin?

Krishna: Scientists want to learn the truth. Why?

The WHO report on sars-cov-2 origins doesn’t say much.

If the virus 's leaked from a lab, we have to take more stringent actions while dealing with these deadly pathogens than we are taking now in biosafety labs*.

If it has animal origins, we can still learn how this happens and take precautions to stop pandemics like these happening again.

More knowledge helps in preventing disasters from happening again.

*What are Biosafety Labs?

Q: How do sun halos form?

Krishna: Halo is the name for a family of optical phenomena produced by light (typically from the Sun or Moon) interacting with ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. Halos can have many forms, ranging from colored or white rings to arcs and spots in the sky. Many of these appear near the Sun or Moon, but others occur elsewhere or even in the opposite part of the sky. Among the best known halo types are the circular halo (properly called the 22° halo), light pillars, and sun dogs, but many others occur; some are fairly common while others are (extremely) rare.

Sundogs are patches of light that are colorful and appear to be bright on either or both sides of the sun. They are approximately 22 degrees on either or both sides of the sun. Sundogs cover the same distance as the sun above the horizon. Sometimes they are seen as part of a ring surrounding the sun. Scientifically, the name used to refer to sundogs is “parhelion.” It is a Greek word which means “beside the sun.” Phantom or mock suns are other common names used to refer to sundogs. The formation of sundogs is by refraction and the scattering of light from hexagonal ice crystals suspended in cold cirrus clouds. Sometimes when the weather is too cold, ice crystals float in the air forming the sun dogs. Despite the fact that sundogs mostly form during cold weather, the presence of cirrus clouds leads to the formation of sundogs at any time. The air has ice crystals which take the place of a prism thus refracting sun rays making the sundogs appear. The sun rays bend in such a way that the side that is closest to the sun appears red while the side that is farthest appears blue. There is a whitetail that stretches horizontal at 22 degrees away from the sun. These colours are neither saturated nor pure since they overlap each other. The red and blue colours end up merging; showcasing a white parhelic circle. The sundogs may also form in the night when there is a very bright full moon. Paraselenae are sundogs that occur at night. Another common name for it is moon dogs. However, moon dogs rarely appear. The moon dogs are rare because they can only appear when the moon is full or is very close to being full. Sundogs are conspicuously visible when the horizon is very near to the sun. The two halos of the sundogs tend to co-occur with each other forming a circumzenithal arc that is very colourful. When the sun rises higher, the rays passing through the ice crystals prisms get more skewed. Subsequently, there is an increase in the angle of deviation, and the sundogs end up moving further than the standard 22◦. (2)

Most of the times, the sundogs appear either at sunrise or sunset. They appear as bright patches of white light. Light is the primary factor which influences the formation of a sundog. The shape of ice crystals determines the form of a sundog and acts as prisms to refract the light rays. The distances of the sundog from the sun affects the colour of the sun dogs. The angles at which the sun rays are refracted also influences the colour of the sundogs. Other planets like Uranus and Jupiter affect the position of the sundogs. Halos around moon:Sometimes we observe rings around moon. The moon can produce interesting optical effects when conditions are right. The most common of which are moon rings, moon bows, which are similar to rainbows, moon dogs and moon pillars. A rainbow is produced when sunlight is refracted through water droplets - A similar effect is produced when moon light refracts through ice crystals.The ring around the Moon is caused by the refraction of Moonlight (which is reflected sunlight) from six-sided ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. The shape of the ice crystals results in a focusing of the light into a ring. These ice crystals refract, or bend, light in the same manner that a camera lens bends light. The ring has a diameter of 22° , and sometimes, it is also possible to detect a second ring, 44° diameter. Thin high cirrus clouds lofting at 20,000 feet or more contain tiny ice crystals that originate from the freezing of super cooled water droplets. These crystals behave like jewels refracting and reflecting in different directions (1).

The ring around the Moon is caused by the refraction of Moonlight (which of course is reflected sunlight) from ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. The shape of the ice crystals results in a focusing of the light into a ring. Since the ice crystals typically have the same shape, namely a hexagonal shape, the Moon ring is almost always the same size.

Less typical are the halos that may be produced by different angles in the crystals. They can create halos with an angle of 46 degrees.Solar and Lunar Coronas:A corona is produced by the diffraction (refers to various phenomena which occur when a wave encounters an obstacle or a slit) of light from either the Sun or the Moon by individual small water droplets and sometimes tiny ice crystalsa of a cloud or on a foggy glass surface. The corona consists of small number of concentric colored rings around the celestial object and a central bright aureole. The angular size of the corona depends on the diameters of the cloud droplets - small droplets produce large coronae. For the same reason, the corona is clearest when the size of the droplets is most uniform. Coronae differ from haloes in that the latter are formed by refraction (the change in direction of propagation of a wave due to a change in its transmission medium) from comparatively large rather than small ice crystals. Reddish colors always occupy the outer part of a corona's ring. A corona is essentially an Airy disc caused by the atmosphere (1).

Solar Halo Image source: google images

Solar CoronaThe effect caused by moon light is called Lunar corona. Just like lunar halos, coronas are produced by high thin clouds. But unlike halos coronas are very small in size.

Footnotes:

  1. Why some interesting things happen in Nature according to science
  2. Why some interesting things happen in Nature according to science -...

Q: Which thing can not be found by science?

Krishna: Your wild imaginative things like Gods and ghosts.
Q: What is zero shadow day?
Krishna: A zero shadow day is a day on which the Sun does not cast a shadow of an object at noon, when the sun will be exactly at the zenith position. Zero shadow day happens twice a year for locations between +23.5 and -23.5 degrees of latitude (between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer). The dates will vary for different locations on Earth. This phenomenon occurs when the Sun's declination becomes equal to the latitude of the location. On a zero shadow day, when the sun crosses the local meridian, the sun's rays will fall exactly vertical relative to an object on the ground and one cannot observe any shadow of that object. 
Q: Does a scientist use social media?
Krishna: Yes, mostly to communicate science.

Views: 151

Replies to This Discussion

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45% of patients left hospital in worse physical state

Millions of people have been infected and thousands have lost their lives due to Covid19. The second wave of deadly virus is quite precarious. According to a new study, as many as 45 per cent of patients hospitalised for Covid-19 experienced a significant functional decline after being discharged. Of survivors who experienced a functional decline, 80 per cent were referred for additional therapy after being discharged. Nearly 20 per cent of all patients lost so much ability that they were not able to live independently after their release, indicates the study.

https://www.indiatvnews.com/health/covid19-45-of-patients-left-hosp...

Scientists demolish “Wuhan lab” conspiracy theory of coronavirus origins

 21 of the world’s leading experts on the origins of infectious diseases published a paper demolishing the conspiracy theory promoted by the Biden administration and US newspapers that COVID-19 was a man-made virus.

The paper was written by an international team of biologists and virologists, led by professor Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney and professor Andrew Rambaut from the University of Edinburgh. Among the co-authors are Georgetown University virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen and Kristian G. Andersen, director of Infectious Disease Genomics at Scripps Research Translational Institute.

The paper summarizes the existing scientific evidence for the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, concluding it is zoonotic—a transfer from an animal source to humans. The paper, entitled “The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review,” was published as a preprint on Zenodo.

Their  careful and critical analysis of the currently available data provided no evidence for the idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory.

"There is no evidence that any early cases had any connection to the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV] in contrast to the clear epidemiological links to animal markets in Wuhan, nor evidence that the WIV possessed or worked on a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic,” the scientists wrote.

Rather, they argue that “there is substantial body of scientific evidence supporting a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2.”

The “Wuhan Lab” conspiracy theory was originated in January 2020 by the fascist Steve Bannon and his allies among right-wing Chinese expatriates such as Miles Guo, who claimed, in the words of Trump advisor Peter Navarro, that COVID-19 was a “weaponized” virus.

This year, the theory was revised and given a pseudo-scientific presentation by Nicholas Wade, who, in an article published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, presented a narrative in which US and Chinese scientists created SARS-CoV-2 through “gain of function” experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Wade is infamous for a racist and pseudo-scientific book published in 2014.

Part 2

Wade’s narrative was embraced by the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, all of which published editorials or major op-eds citing Wade without explaining his background. According to Wade, leading US, Chinese and other international scientists secretly collaborated on “gain of function” research, accidentally released the virus, then covered up the incident so effectively that no evidence of the conspiracy can be found to this day.

The “Wuhan Lab” theory consists of piling speculative leaps on top of one another and claiming they add up to a convincing argument. The scientists’ response takes each of these speculations—for which there is no evidence to begin with—and explains their impossibility.

The paper begins by noting that the transfer of animal diseases to humans has been definitively shown to have caused nearly all previous pandemics. “SARS-CoV-2 is the ninth documented coronavirus that infects humans and the seventh identified in the last 20 years,” it states. “All previous human coronaviruses have zoonotic origins, as have the vast majority of human viruses.”

The paper adds, “The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 bears several signatures of these prior zoonotic events. It displays clear similarities to SARS-CoV that spilled over into humans in Foshan, Guangdong province, China in November 2002, and again in Guangzhou, Guangdong province in 2003.”

The authors further note that the SARS-CoV-2 virus does not resemble any virus that could theoretically be used as a “backbone” to create a new virus. The paper adds, “Under any laboratory escape scenario SARS-CoV-2 would have to have been present in a laboratory prior to the pandemic, yet no evidence exists to support such a notion and no sequence has been identified that could have served as a precursor.”

The scientists note that while “gain of function” research is typically carried out in laboratory mice, the virus is not well adapted to rodents, indicating that “SARS-CoV-2 is highly unlikely to have been acquired by laboratory workers in the course of viral pathogenesis or gain-of-function experiments.”

The paper adds that, “since its emergence, SARS-CoV-2 has experienced repeated sweeps of mutations that have increased viral fitness,” refuting the claim that COVID-19 was somehow originally optimized to infect humans. “Combined, these findings show that no specific human ‘pre’ adaptation was required for the emergence or early spread of SARS-CoV-2, and the claim that the virus was already highly adapted to the human host… is without validity.”

The scientists conclude, “As for the vast majority of human viruses, the most parsimonious explanation for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotic event… The documented epidemiological history of the virus is comparable to previous animal market-associated outbreaks of coronaviruses with a simple route for human exposure.”

The conclusions of the paper by some of the world’s leading scientists confirm the analysis made by the WSWS, including in a three-part series published last month, “How science demolishes the right-wing fiction of a Wuhan ‘lab leak’....”


The publication of the paper takes place against the backdrop of a major intensification of the campaign in the US media to blame China for the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post published an editorial endorsing an official US government investigation into the pandemic. The newspaper, which speaks for dominant sections of the American ruling class, made clear that the focus of the investigation should be not the US government’s criminal response that led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, but an effort to blame China for the pandemic.

“China’s resistance is a lingering obstacle,” the Post complained. It alleges that the Chinese government has “initiated a massive campaign of denial, cover-up, diversions, delay and disinformation.”

No, it is Washington that denied the pandemic, covered it up, delayed and spread disinformation. As a result of the actions of US capitalism, somewhere between 600,000 and one million Americans are dead. If Washington wants to “draw lessons from a global catastrophe,” it should look in the mirror.

Over the past year, documentaries, investigations and witness testimony have made clear that the US government deliberately covered up the spread of the pandemic, allowing it to rapidly spread throughout the country and become massively entrenched by the time the public was even aware of the dangers.

Beginning in April 2020, the Trump administration defied its own public health experts to reopen businesses while the pandemic was still raging, a policy continued and intensified under Biden.

With the resurgence of the pandemic caused by the Delta variant, governments around the world are doubling down on the demand that the population “live with” the COVID-19 pandemic. In the UK, the Johnson government is openly carrying out a policy that it acknowledges will lead to a surge of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. But the Johnson government is only expressing in more developed form the policy of every capitalist government, which aims to sacrifice human lives to the protection of corporate profits.

The Wuhan Lab theory has never been a real “theory,” in the sense of a scientific explanation rooted in empirical evidence. It is a “theory” driven by purely political considerations: to deflect attention from those responsible, to justify the continuation of a policy that has led to millions of deaths and to serve as ammunition in the geopolitical conflict with China.

But the efforts to blame China for deaths caused by the insatiable greed and sociopathic tendencies of American capitalism will be treated by working people the world over with scorn. Workers in the United States and internationally, as they enter into struggle in defense of their lives and livelihoods, will put the blame where it belongs: on the ruling class and the capitalist system it defends.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/09/pers-j09.html

https://zenodo.org/record/5075888#.YOlAEegzbIU

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