I blew it when I predicted in 2020 that the Covid scare would be like the many scares before it, much hyped but not nearly as deadly as the fear mongers suggested it would be. But I was spot on when I pushed back against the lockdown being pushed by the Imperial College London crowd (which recommendations were ultimately adopted by most nations). So concludes a new paper out of Johns Hopkins University, “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality,” As summarized in National Review, the “paper starts by noting that “an often cited model simulation study by researchers at the Imperial College London (Ferguson et al. (2020)) predicted that a suppression strategy based Read More ›

On January 12, 2022, Phys.Org had a PR on an article documenting “non-random” mutations found in wild tobacco plants, published by a team from UC Davis. Now, three weeks later (Feb 1, 2022), we have another paper, working with human populations in Africa, and which, according to a team from the University of Haifa, “surprisingly” turns up “non-random” mutations. From the PR on the first paper: The scientists found that the way DNA was wrapped around different types of proteins was a good predictor of whether a gene would mutate or not. “It means we can predict which genes are more likely to mutate than others and it gives us a good idea of what’s going on,” Weigel said. The Read More ›