David Bradley – Page 61

Here come the viral curtain twitchers

Great to see the police have put a form up online so that we can report on breaches of lockdown rules…but, how do you know that your neighbour, for instance, is actually breaking the rules?

Say you have a keyworker living next door to you, but you didn’t know they are a keyworker. They leave their house entirely legitimately but more than once on a given day. The first time is as part of their important public service work, the second time to take some brief exercise around the local areas avoiding the incessant stream of new joggers on the paths that seem not to care about social distancing and spatter you with sweat as they plough through. Your neighbour was hoping to have a bit of a brain reboot during their exercise allowance to help them cope with the viral situation and the pressures of their work.

You log this in your little logbook from behind you twitching net curtain.

The police receive your report and assign a constable to check it out. They discover your neighbour was well within their rights to do their job and to take their daily exercise away from their home. An hour of that copper’s time less than well spent, one might suggest.

Meanwhile, a bunch of friends has gathered together in a back garden a few doors down. There’s music, but it’s quiet, for now. They’re having a barbecue to celebrate being furloughed on full pay and clinking glasses of punch, double dipping their tortilla chips in the hummus, and generally having a pathogenic time. One of them is looking a bit sweaty though and seems to be coughing a lot…but you can’t see any of that…

Important breathing advice for Covid-19 sufferers

A doctor at Queen’s Hospital offers some self-care advice for people with Covid-19 to help prevent pneumonia developing. The bottom line is that you need to keep your lungs working as well as they can.

1. Sit up, take a deep breath, hold it for five seconds. Do this five times and on the fifth breath, have a good cough into a tissue or cloth and safely bin it. Repeat this whole procedure. This will all help expel fluid/mucus from the lungs.

2. Lie on your stomach and breath fairly deeply for ten minutes. The main mass of your lungs is actually closer to your back than the front of your chest so this presumably allows them to fill even more efficiently than they do when you’re supine. The exercises will keep up the strength in your breathing muscles.

3. Repeat instructions 1 and 2 regularly.

Breathing exercises and posture are important generally. So, it is perhaps worth doing these exercises regardless of whether you have Covid-19 or not.

Heal the world

Humanity has behaved like a parasite on planet Earth, sucking out all of the goodness from the forests, the oceans, the land and laying its waste at the feet of Mother Nature. It fills the rivers with poison and the seas with plastic. It has spent almost two centuries creating the kind of cloying atmosphere that leads to boundless desertification, washes islands away, and promotes the release of yet more cloying gases from the frozen extremes. Humanity is the parasite that cages and curates all the others species with which it shares the planet, draining the life from them, and reducing its diversity through anthropocenic mass extinction.

In the light of such ongoing devastation perhaps, some outside agency thought, what the planet needed was a bit of pest control…

How about a fast-spreading illness that forces the parasite to curtail the parasite’s airborne activities? One that stops it spreading its pollution along arterial conduits with its countless gas guzzlers? One that shuts down its commercial and industrial activities that the planet might begin its recovery? One that reduces the resources available to the parasite and forces it to retreat into its domestic shells? One that even stops it allowing its bird-killing secondary pests into the outside world?

It seems that already atmospheric aberrations are already declining, the rivers are clarifying, the stars are coming out in numbers not seen for decades, the birds are singing, and wildlife is gently extending its range into the parasite’s silent cities.

Is the world healing?

Might the parasite evolve to adapt to its ecosystem in the wake of this anti-pestilence? To live in greater harmony with the rich diversity of all life on Earth? Might it settle into a more subtle existence, one that does not wreak havoc and devastation but one that speaks harmony and remediation?

Noc migging- Night flight call recording

I mentioned noc migging at the end of last year as something I planned to do in the spring of 2020. “Nocmig” or Night flight call (NFC) recording as the Americans know it, is basically making an audio (or indeed video) recording of the sky above you at night with the aim of plucking from the audio the calls of birds flying overhead as they migrate.

We’re coming into the main migratory season in the UK with a few of our summer visitors already here, many more heading this way and crossing the Iberian Peninsula and other parts of the continent lying between their winter holiday homes further south and The British Isles. Of course, the wintering birds are also returning to their summer roosts and mating grounds further north, in the far reaches of Scotland, Scandinavia, Siberia, and The Arctic.

So…I just need to waterproof a microphone to stick out of the window and setup some audio recording software to run overnight. I’ll use my music software as it has lots of options for cleaning up the sound. With a “tape” in hand it can either be scrolled manually looking for bursts of sound in the waveform and these sampled out to be analysed spectrally or it fed into a second bit of software such as a spectrogram to filter out barking dogs and vehicles and other non-avian noises. Cornell University then has an app – Raven – that can take the cropped analysis and identify the birds from their calls in your recording.

I’ll keep you posted…

You can’t scratch my back

Even when the only “online” we had was old-fashioned landline phones, long before, Skype and Facetime, Whatsapp and Zoom, HouseParty, and th rest, people often ended a call with a “let’s meet up soon”. We need that face-to-face, the handshakes, the hugs, the pat on the back, the ruffling of hair, the you (literally) scratch my back…

While we’re all social distancing in our splendid isolation, staying home to stay well, those online chat apps and what have you have come to the fore. Most of us have now partaken of at least one such “event”, a virtual pub crawl, a band rehearsal, a charity quiz…we can see each other’s faces, we can chat, we can message, we can share digital commodities. And, seriously, for now, while the waves of pandemic and panic endure, it really is all we have, thank goodness for the advent of what we used to called Web 2.0 when most people had only just go on to Web 1…

There’s something missing though…it’s that face-to-face, it’s the body language, the subtle look, the full-on laughter, the chance to connect in real-time in real-space without buffering, without dropouts and glitches, without sound delays and the out-of-sync video. But, there’s no way around it until the tech people come up with zero-latency electronics and even then you still have the problem of not sharing the same physical space.

So…is there something that can make it more real, something that triggers the dopamine receptors and boosts oxytocin, something to chemically or electronically substitute for the feelz? If there is, the government needs to roll out that app or send us a prescription fast…

Thirty years of the barrier method and other science stories

Thirty years ago this month I wrote my first professional article. It was a short feature about the biggest organism having the biggest orgasm and was entitled ‘The Barrier Method’. It explained some of the chemistry, biology, and geography of the sex life of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and appeared in the April 1990 issue of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s young chemists’ newsletter Gas Jar.

Incidentally, I later renamed the magazine and helped relaunch it in full colour as New Elements with Editor Dr Mandy Mackenzie, which carried my Elemental Discoveries news round-up for several years from 1995 onwards.

I also used to publish Elemental Discoveries online on what was perhaps the first chemistry news website. It was to become a model for several news site launches over the following years that I instigated or was involved with for various organisations, including Reactive Reports for ACD/Labs, PSIGate Spotlight, which became Intute, Spectral Lines (for Wiley, now SpectroscopyNOW.com), Distillates for the RSC magazine Education in Chemistry, and a couple of others. Elemental Discoveries itself was hosted by ChemDraw creators Cambridge Soft for a couple of years before I relaunched it as Sciencebase.com in July 1999.

The article ‘The Barrier Method’ was chosen as runner-up in the 1990 Young Science Writer Awards hosted by The Daily Telegraph and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. A later article entitled “Not every sperm is sacred” won in 1991 and led to my writing about science for The Telegraph for several years after that. I got a merit award after the sperm and eggs with an article about xenon and anaesthesia, but sex science has remained a focus of much of my writing over the years, hah!

You can see a hopefully complete list of all my clients from the last thirty years as a freelance science writer here.

The photo accompanying the article was by Mrs Sciencebase long before she was Mrs Sciencebase. I can’t find the original magazine, hence the monochrome copy.

The Stormy Petrels – a song

In splendid isolation or otherwise, I try to find time to write a song every once in a while. The title of this one – The Stormy Petrels – refers to the desperate fishermen of my home village of Cullercoats who used to brave the North Sea in their cobles regardless of the weather and sometimes taking pride in riding the storms to bring home the catch. Unfortunately, not all were lucky, there were many tragedies.

The Stormy Petrels – a song

The painting I’ve used for the artwork for this song is “Daughter of the Coast Guard” (1881) by Winslow Homer, she’s brandishing a voice horn mentioned in the song. Homer is often known as the American Turner, one of my favourite artists. Spent time in Cullercoats in the 1880s when it had a strong reputation for craggy cliffs and characters (it still does!). It was something of an artists’ enclave, their being drawn by the light, the sea, the craggy characters, back then and to some extent it still is in the modern day. I’ve written about Winslow Homer before and used another of his paintings for an earlier song – The Spate Gatherers – about the village’s fishwives.

The Stormy Petrels

The seas were fair as far as the eye could see
The waters still and bare
The wind laid low, there was time to spare
There’d be no storm to keep us here

The nets were all tied and the fishwives were ready
The cobles would leave on the tide
We’d sail Â to the north and head for the shoals
Their shawls held tight, home on the breeze we would ride

The hours went by and the swell it grew heavy
The men would e’er swallow their pride
The rises and falls of the fish life a penny
The true, tried, and tested on-side

The nets were all tied and the fishwives were ready
The cobles they sailed on the tide
We’ll head for the north and race for the shoals
Their shawls they’d hold tight, till home on the breeze we will ride

We rowed a fair clip with a glint in our eye
The tide would carry us wide
The sun it shone through as the land disappeared
The spindrift blew through, but no siren could draw us aside

The net’s been aside and the fishwives were ready
Our cobles they sailed with the tide
We’ll head for the north and race for the shoals
Their shawls they’d hold tight, till home on the breeze we will ride

It was bright and white horses there were none to see
And the wind couldn’t blow owt our oils to deceive
But the pressure will fall we’ll not bear a hasty retreat

Whistle and you will be damned
A hastier judgement to hand
A voice horn calls out
“No survivors will e’er see the land”

The nets were all tied and the fishwives were ready
The cobles would leave on the tide
We’d sail to the north and head for the shoals
Their shawls they’d hold tight, till home on the breeze we would ride

New ways to detect emergent viruses

In a recently published review dedicated to the diagnostics of viral infections, a Russian research team featuring MIPT (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) researchers is the first to systematically describe and summarize the cutting-edge technologies available. A number of new effective methods of virus detection have been developed over the past few years, including those targeted at unknown pathogens. The authors described the so-called high-throughput next-generation sequencing as a potent new approach. The method promises to revolutionize the detection and analysis of new pathogenic viruses, but it will be at least several years until it is introduced into mainstream clinical practice.

“There are, by various statistical estimations, over 320,000 viruses that can infect mammals,’ explains MIPT’s Kamil Khafizov. “To date, less than 1% of this vast multitude has been studied.”

Most viruses, including those that cause respiratory, digestive, and other diseases in humans, remain unresearched and thus almost undetectable. The reason behind this is the narrow spectrum of viruses that the modern testing systems are designed to target.

‘Metaphorically, we are attempting to look at a vast sea of threats through the eye of a needle,’ the authors write in the review. Among other things, they explore the shortcomings of the polymerase chain reaction method. This essential technique for microorganism molecular testing fails to identify poorly explored viruses, and this constitutes one of the key problems in modern virology. There are, however, new methods that may potentially solve the issues of detecting and identifying new microorganisms. The authors describe next-generation sequencing as the most promising. Also known as high-throughput sequencing, it enables the analysis of multiple DNA molecules in parallel, be it a set of samples, different regions of the same genome, or both.

“Efficient mathematical algorithms are a key part of the method,” explains says MIPT grad student Alina Matsvay. “They allow researchers to compare the genome of an unknown virus against all available references of viral genomes, and predict all of its possible characteristics, including its pathogenic potential.”

Khafizov noted that the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated the importance of next-generation sequencing methods for identifying new pathogens in clinical samples and studying the molecular mechanisms of virus transmission from animals to humans.

https://doi.org/10.3390/v12020211

Smart phone test device for Covid-19

Scientists in the UK are developing a new smart testing device for the coronavirus and now need backers to get the device manaufactured quickly and in large quantities.

The team from Brunel University London, Lancaster University and the University of Surrey reckon the can test for Covid-19 infection in half an hour. The device has already been successfully tested in The Philippines to check chickens for viral infection and the team has now adapted it to detect Covid-19 in people. The system is quick and easy to use, requires little training and could be used by healthcare workers and even lay people.

“Now we have access to multiple genomes (blueprint) of SARS-CoV-2 virus, we can develop reliable molecular assay in a week and have them up and running on the device in three or four weeks,’ explains Brunel’s Wamadeva Balachandran. “We are confident it will respond well, and we rapidly need industrial partners to come on board. It will have a huge impact on the population at large,” he adds.

The operator takes an oral or nasal swab, puts it into the device and connects to the smart phone app. Samples do not need to go to a laboratory and the same device can be used to test six samples simultaneously. The addition of telemedicine functionality will make the device even more useful. The idea is to try and make it cheaper than other tests so it can be used worldwide at home, in doctor’s surgeries, hospitals, and workplaces. Once the infection is identified, the intelligent system will track down all people who had close contact with the newly identified patient in the previous two weeks and alert them to the threat.

Source: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/uk-scientists-develop-new-rapid-smart-testing-device-for-coronavirus