Sunday, April 5, 2020

Exponential Growth of COVID-19

In the study of epidemiology, the basic reproduction number can be thought of as the number of additional cases we can expect one case in the population to generate. This is usually denoted as R naught or R0.

This number determines how fast a virus spreads. If the R0 is less than one, it doesn’t spread well and dies out pretty quickly.

If it’s two, then one person infects two more people, those two people infect four more, and so on. This is the classic doubling that we see in exponential growth.

According to research from the University of Bern in Bern, Switzerland, the R0 of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, was believed to be somewhere between 1.4 and 3.8.

We obviously know now that the R0 is nowhere near 1. We are clearly experiencing exponential growth. It’s likely that every person infected with COVID-19 will pass it to about two to three other people.

We know the virus first appeared in late 2019. And we can safely assume that hundreds of, if not more than a thousand, infected people arrived in densely populated cities like New York, San Francisco, and Seattle in early January. From there, the virus spread unhindered for nearly a month.

With an R0 of 3, here is what exponential growth in the spread of COVID-19 would look like:

· Day 5: 81 new people would be infected.

· Day 10: Nearly 20,000 more people would be infected.

· Day 15: Almost 5 million new cases.

· Day 18: An additional 129 million would be infected.

· Day 20: Over 1.1 billion new cases.

And here is the problem with determining the spread of COVID-19… Most people have no idea that they have it.

68% of the Population Infected

Strong research out of Iceland determined that around 50% of those who tested positive are asymptomatic. In other words, they have none of the symptoms associated with COVID-19.

Most of the remaining people who have tested positive have only mild or moderate symptoms that do not require hospitalization.

How did Iceland determine these statistics? It did something smart. It tested about 5% of its entire population… whether or not individuals were sick.

And the results are incredibly valuable for understanding COVID-19 and the actual mortality rate.

The World Health Organization did not recognize the situation as a public health emergency until January 30. That means the world was actively, and unknowingly, spreading COVID-19 at an exponential rate up to that point.

New research out of the University of Oxford supports the idea that COVID-19 is already well dispersed among the population.

Its research models determined that COVID-19 has already infected somewhere between 36% and 68% of the U.K. population.

That’s not a typo.

For context, the population of the U.K. is about 67 million. That implies as many as 45 million people in the United Kingdom are already infected with the virus.

It’s also likely that 99% of them don’t know it because they are asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms.

We have every reason to believe that similar infection rates exist in the U.S.

I know that may sound terrifying, but here is where the good news comes in.

The mortality rate of a virus is calculated by determining the number of deaths relative to the total infected population.

The mortality rate for COVID-19 is usually cited as being 2–3%. This rate is based on confirmed cases, not on the total infected population.

These numbers do not account for the number of people who have contracted the virus but have not developed symptoms, or have mild symptoms not requiring medical care and a test.

It means that the actual mortality rate may be far lower… perhaps even lower than 0.1%. Compare that to the mortality rate from influenza in the 2017–2018 season (0.14%).

And research from other countries supports this.

Again, Iceland is unique because it has tested about 5% of its entire population for COVID-19. Only 45 have been hospitalized out of the country’s 1,364 confirmed infections. And there are only four deaths as of this writing.

As the U.S. collects more data on infection rates, the fuller picture of COVID-19 will emerge. And that time is coming quickly.

Friday, July 12, 2019

Chemists Make Breakthrough in Understanding the Origin of Life

Yasmin Tayag

By Yasmin Tayag

on July 11, 2019

Filed Under Chemistry & Evolution

In the beginning, there was soup. One leading explanation for how life arose on Earth is that simple chemicals in water, a primordial “soup,” formed in the hot, tumultuous early world and spontaneously came together to create the building blocks of life, in time creating molecules like RNA and DNA and, eventually, complex life forms like humans.

The roughly 4-billion-year-old recipe had eluded scientists for decades, but on Wednesday, the authors of a Nature paper announced a breakthrough.

For a long time, scientists could not explain the spontaneous formation of one critical building block known as a peptide, which proteins and enzymes can’t exist without. “They are essential to all life on Earth,” co-author and University College London organic chemistry reader Matthew Powner, Ph.D., tells Inverse.

Peptides are known to be made up of smaller molecules called amino acids. But for over 60 years, researchers who threw amino acids into water under the right conditions and waited for peptides to form just couldn’t make it work. If they couldn’t do it, how could the reaction have happened randomly in the primordial ooze?

“Many before us have concentrated on trying to join amino acids together to make peptides, but these reactions aren’t very good,” co-author and fellow UCL chemist, Saidul Islam, Ph.D., tells Inverse.

But together with first author Pierre Canavelli, Ph.D., the team landed on a formula, offering us a glimpse into a process that might have helped give rise to life on Earth millions of years ago.

How Peptides Formed on the Early Earth

All life can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts. Humans are just big bags of cells, cells are bags of proteins, proteins are made up of peptides, and so on. The team’s “key observation,” as Islam puts it, was that their elusive peptides didn’t have to be built from amino acids themselves but the building blocks of the amino acids.

Those precursors are called aminonitriles and were probably abundant on the early Earth, says Powner, adding that it’s “very clear” they can be synthesized easily from non-biological mechanisms. Those molecules, combined with the hot, eggy hydrogen sulfide gas that wafts naturally out of volcanic cracks, even today, created the perfect conditions for peptides to spontaneously form.

“We took a step back, figuratively and literally, and hypothesized that the chemical precursors of amino acids could react selectively in water to yield peptides,” explains Powner.

Amino acids (the gray circles) are the building blocks of peptides (the chain). But the UCL team shows that peptides can be formed spontaneously from the precursors to amino acids.

The precursors were enough. Floating around in water, as they might have been at the beginning of life on Earth, they went through what Islam calls “gentle” interactions with the volcanic gas to form the elusive peptides, bypassing amino acids completely. Gentleness suggests ease. There was no need for some strong catalyst or external force to coax these molecules together. Just gas, aminonitriles, and water, which Islam calls the “solvent of life.”

This, says Powner, is a “significant change of perspective that presents a simpler solution to peptide synthesis.”

How Did Peptides Lead to Life?

Powner says this finding helps solve the “classic chicken-and-the-egg problem” that haunts scientists studying the origin of life. The peptides that form proteins are formed today with the guidance of other proteins, but that couldn’t have been the case at the beginning of life. “If you need proteins to make proteins,” he asks, “what made the first protein?”

The simple answer is that the first proteins arose spontaneously — chemistry preceded biology — and that’s exactly what the team showed by demonstrating how peptides can form from aminonitriles.

That said, there’s a big, unexplained gap between peptides and the emergence of actual life. As Islam says, “it’s all very well making these peptides, but at some point, they had to do something.”

He imagines they might have developed the ability to catalyze important reactions or act as a “chaperone” for primitive life to develop and evolve. In explaining the origin of life, there is a long way to go, but Islam says “We are very excited about this prospect and think we’re close to observing function in short peptides.”

The formation of peptides at the cusp of life is one important problem of many in the attempt to explain our beginnings. The “emergence of life,” Powner points out, “is a very complex set of problems, not a single problem.”

Nevertheless, the team’s discovery left him feeling “satisfied,” he says, because for years he and Islam had worked with aminonitriles and had been frustrated by chemistry that just didn’t seem to make sense. Aminonitriles lose a lot of their inherent energy when they come together to form amino acids, but that energy is needed when the amino acids try to form a peptide. Now they know that the energy-wasting step could have been skipped.

“My immediate thoughts were ‘this is all starting to make sense now’ in the broader picture of the origins of life puzzle,” says Islam. Encouraged by their work, the team is now looking for other ways that peptides might have formed from aminonitriles. The more evidence they find, says Islam, the better they can support their solution to the chicken-and-egg problem Powner described.

But this is the primordial Earth we’re talking about, a place we can only begin to imagine using the data we collect today. “It’s important,” says Islam, “not to rule anything out.”

Abstract:

Amide bond formation is one of the most important reactions in both chemistry and biology1,2,3,4, but there is currently no chemical method of achieving α-peptide ligation in water that tolerates all of the 20 proteinogenic amino acids at the peptide ligation site. The universal genetic code establishes that the biological role of peptides predates life’s last universal common ancestor and that peptides played an essential part in the origins of life5,6,7,8,9. The essential role of sulfur in the citric acid cycle, non-ribosomal peptide synthesis and polyketide biosynthesis point towards thioester-dependent peptide ligations preceding RNA-dependent protein synthesis during the evolution of life5,9,10,11,12,13. However, a robust mechanism for aminoacyl thioester formation has not been demonstrated13. Here we report a chemoselective, high-yielding α-aminonitrile ligation that exploits only prebiotically plausible molecules—hydrogen sulfide, thioacetate12,14 and ferricyanide12,14,15,16,17 or cyanoacetylene8,14—to yield α-peptides in water. The ligation is extremely selective for α-aminonitrile coupling and tolerates all of the 20 proteinogenic amino acid residues. Two essential features enable peptide ligation in water: the reactivity and pKaH of α-aminonitriles makes them compatible with ligation at neutral pH and N-acylation stabilizes the peptide product and activates the peptide precursor to (biomimetic) N-to-C peptide ligation. Our model unites prebiotic aminonitrile synthesis and biological α-peptides, suggesting that short N-acyl peptide nitriles were plausible substrates during early evolution.

Saturday, March 16, 2019

This Is the Next Space Race

By Jeff Brown, editor, The Near Future Report

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union made history…

It successfully launched Sputnik I into Earth’s orbit, the first-ever artificial satellite to make the trip.

Not only was the Soviet Union first to launch a satellite, it managed to put the first human into space in 1961 with Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight.

Thus, began a race for technological superiority between the United States and the Soviet Union – the “Space Race.”

It was a tremendous time in human history.

The world witnessed things that were long thought to be out of reach. By 1969, the race culminated with the U.S. landing the first humans on the moon with the Apollo 11 mission.

The scale of the U.S. effort was incredible. By the end of the Apollo program, the U.S. had spent the equivalent of $100 billion in today’s dollars.

And the United States reaped the rewards…

Beyond spaceflight, the Space Race brought about a wealth of new technology that we now use every day.

It was the birth of the satellite industry and global communications technologies like GPS – which shows your location anywhere on the planet, accurate up to 4 meters. This technology is used in every smartphone, and every modern car or truck on the planet.

But that was really just the beginning. The advancements in aerospace and semiconductor technology as a result of the Space Race are too long to list.

And even simple things that we use daily – like water purifiers, smoke detectors, modern tires, and cordless devices – all resulted from the investments made during the Space Race.

But since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the world really hasn’t had the kind of “call to arms” that we saw during the Space Race.

Until now…

The next “Space Race” won’t be for dominance in aerospace technology. Instead, we’re witnessing the birth of an all-out race between the world’s two great superpowers to be the dominant player in another breakthrough technology: artificial intelligence.

AI may seem far off in the future but make no mistake – it’s already a pervasive aspect of everyday life.

Anyone that’s used a search engine like Google, spoken to an Amazon Echo, called into a call center, or driven in a Tesla has used artificial intelligence and likely not even known it.

AI is being used for self-driving cars, image recognition, speech recognition, facial recognition, high-frequency trading (used by hedge funds), network optimization, cybersecurity, and on and on.

And not long ago, the world witnessed something extraordinary… Something that marked a watershed moment in the development of artificial intelligence (AI).

Google-owned DeepMind received global attention in May 2017, after its AlphaGo AI – designed to play the Chinese board game Go – easily defeated the world champion Ke Jie.

Go had long been a challenge for AI researchers, due to its complexity. There are more possible positions in Go (10¹⁰⁰) than the number of atoms in the universe. There simply isn’t enough computing power on the planet to calculate every possible outcome. AlphaGo really had to “think” and recognize winning patterns.

AlphaGo’s win was seen as a turning point in AI technology – an event that, for some, came a decade earlier than expected. Some experts didn’t think it was possible at all.

What’s more, the defeat of one of China’s prized champions struck a deep chord with the country.

So much so that, just two months later, the Chinese government rolled out a national policy for AI development – its “New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan.”

The goal of the plan is nothing short of global dominance – to become the global leader in AI by 2030.

And just weeks ago, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that promises to spur U.S. AI development: “The American AI Initiative.”

The president’s executive order included five components:

1. Redirecting existing funding from federal agencies to prioritize AI funding.

2. Sharing federal computing power and data with more AI researchers.

3. Retraining workers to prioritize AI.

4. Creating new standards.

5. Emphasizing international collaboration in artificial intelligence.

Events like AlphaGo’s victory are significant. They may be easy to dismiss or overlook, but they represent key inflection points in technological development.

But what isn’t easy to dismiss, or overlook, is the world’s two biggest superpowers waging a policy war for the future of AI.

But some of us may be wondering, why is being the leader in AI so important?

The New Industrial Revolution

In short, because artificial intelligence is the most disruptive technology of our age… by far. It will remake our society in ways we can’t yet predict.

During the Industrial Revolution, steam power and mechanization automated many of our repetitive, physical tasks.

That led to a dramatic shift in the workplace. Machines took over many of the grueling jobs humans weren’t well-suited for.

But rather than the doom and gloom of mass unemployment that many expected, the opposite happened. There was an explosion of productivity and economic growth that ultimately created far more jobs and opportunities than were lost.

Just as innovations during the Industrial Revolution automated menial physical tasks, AI will automate many of our simple mental tasks.

This will cause another big shift in the workplace. It will lead to another leap in productivity, an improved quality of life, and create entirely new jobs that don’t exist today.

That’s how powerful AI is. And it’s precisely why countries like the United States and China are determined to be the leader in this revolutionary technology.

Friday, February 15, 2019

North isn't quite where it used to be

WASHINGTON (AP) —

Earth's north magnetic pole has been drifting so fast in the last few decades that scientists say that past estimates are no longer accurate enough for precise navigation. On Monday, they released an update of where magnetic north really was, nearly a year ahead of schedule.

The magnetic north pole is wandering about 34 miles (55 kilometers) a year. It crossed the international date line in 2017, and is leaving the Canadian Arctic on its way to Siberia.

The constant shift is a problem for compasses in smartphones and some consumer electronics. Airplanes and boats also rely on magnetic north, usually as backup navigation, said University of Colorado geophysicist Arnaud Chulliat, lead author of the newly issued World Magnetic Model. GPS isn't affected because it's satellite-based.

The military depends on where magnetic north is for navigation and parachute drops, while NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Forest Service also use it. Airport runway names are based on their direction toward magnetic north and their names change when the poles moved. For example, the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska, renamed a runway 1L-19R to 2L-20R in 2009.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and United Kingdom tend to update the location of the magnetic north pole every five years in December, but this update came early because of the pole's faster movement.

The movement of the magnetic north pole "is pretty fast," Chulliat said.

Since 1831 when it was first measured in the Canadian Arctic it has moved about 1,400 miles (2300 kilometers) toward Siberia. Its speed jumped from about 9 miles per year (15 kilometers per year) to 34 miles per year (55 kilometers per year) since 2000.

The reason is turbulence in Earth's liquid outer core. There is a hot liquid ocean of iron and nickel in the planet's core where the motion generates an electric field, said University of Maryland geophysicist Daniel Lathrop, who wasn't part of the team monitoring the magnetic north pole.

"It has changes akin to weather," Lathrop said. "We might just call it magnetic weather."

The magnetic south pole is moving far slower than the north.

In general Earth's magnetic field is getting weaker, leading scientists to say that it will eventually flip, where north and south pole changes polarity, like a bar magnet flipping over. It has happened numerous times in Earth's past, but not in the last 780,000 years.

"It's not a question of if it's going to reverse, the question is when it's going to reverse," Lathrop said.

When it reverses, it won't be like a coin flip, but take 1,000 or more years, experts said.

Lathrop sees a flip coming sooner rather than later because of the weakened magnetic field and an area over the South Atlantic has already reversed beneath Earth's surface.

That could bother some birds that use magnetic fields to navigate. And an overall weakening of the magnetic field isn't good for people and especially satellites and astronauts. The magnetic field shields Earth from some dangerous radiation, Lathrop said.

Sunday, December 30, 2018

Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor

New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.

What is the genetic mutation

"Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Professor Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. "But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a "switch," which literally "turned off" the ability to produce brown eyes." The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to our hair, eyes and skin. The "switch," which is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris -- effectively "diluting" brown eyes to blue. The switch's effect on OCA2 is very specific therefore. If the OCA2 gene had been completely destroyed or turned off, human beings would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin colour -- a condition known as albinism.

Limited genetic variation

Variation in the colour of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes. "From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor," says Professor Eiberg. "They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA." Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production.

Professor Eiberg and his team examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Professor Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being responsible for eye colour.

Nature shuffles our genes

The mutation of brown eyes to blue represents neither a positive nor a negative mutation. It is one of several mutations such as hair colour, baldness, freckles and beauty spots, which neither increases nor reduces a human's chance of survival. As Professor Eiberg says, "it simply shows that nature is constantly shuffling the human genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so."

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Copenhagen. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Hans Eiberg, Jesper Troelsen, Mette Nielsen, Annemette Mikkelsen, Jonas Mengel-From, Klaus W. Kjaer, Lars Hansen. Blue eye color in humans may be caused by a perfectly associated founder mutation in a regulatory element located within the HERC2 gene inhibiting OCA2 expression. Human Genetics, 2008; 123 (2): 177 DOI: 10.1007/s00439-007-0460-x

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Why Is 137 the Most Magical Number?

BY PATRICK J. KIGER NOV 27, 2018

From physics, mathematics and science, to mysticism, occultism, the Kabbalah and the Torah, the number 137 may just be the most magical and important number in the universe. FLICKR (CC BY-2.0)

What's the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe? If you're expecting an incantation in some ancient language, uttered by a holy man sitting cross-legged on a mountaintop, this answer may disappoint you.

It might just be the number 137.

Those three digits, as it turns out, have long been the rare object of fascination that bridges the gulf between science and mysticism.

"137 continues to fire the imagination of everyone from scientists and mystics to occultists and people from the far-flung edges of society," Arthur I. Miller, an emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London and author of the 2009 book "137: Jung, Pauli and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession," says via email.

The Fine-structure Constant

To physicists, 137 is the approximate denominator of the fine-structure constant (1/137.03599913), the measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force that controls how charged elementary particles such as the electron and muon interact with photons of light, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The fine-structure constant is one of the key physical constants of the universe. "This immutable number determines how stars burn, how chemistry happens and even whether atoms exist at all," as Michael Brooks explained in a recent New Scientist article.

The fine-structure constant "characterizes the strength with which matter couples to light, e.g. the probability that an excited atom will decay in a certain time," Paul Davies, Regents Professor of Physics at Arizona State University and a best-selling author of 30 books on science, explains in an email. If the constant was bigger, "atoms would decay faster. It is significant too because it is a pure number – a ratio of quantities with equal units. Unlike, say, the speed of light, which is either 186,000 miles per second or 300,000 kilometers per second, depending on which units you prefer." (Davies wrote this 2016 article on the fine-structure constant for Cosmos.)

In this video, British physicist Laurence Eaves explains that if the fine structure constant was a different value, "physics, chemistry, biochemistry would be totally different – and we might not be around to talk about it."

But practically from the time of its discovery in 1915 by German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who originally rendered it as 0.00729, the fine-structure constant seemed to signify some larger metaphysical truth as well. The fine-structure constant "determines the distance between an atom's spectral lines, which are the atom's DNA," Miller explains. "And so it is one of those numbers that is at the root of the universe. If it were any other value then the structure of matter would be very different, and so us too. People began referring to it as a mystical number."

Miller continues: "The language of the spectra – the spectral lines where Sommerfeld found it – is a true music of the spheres within the atom," he wrote. "People asked why it has this particular value. Physicists could only conclude that it cannot have this value by accident. It is 'out there,' independent of the structure of our minds."

But in 1929, English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington – who played a key role in establishing the validity of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and was an early advocate of the Big Bang theory, among other things – began expressing it as 1/137. He also saw it as having larger, spiritual implications. "Arthur Eddington sought a new mysticism which would emerge from the natural sciences," Miller says. "Perhaps, he thought, the clue lay in numbers, particularly the number 137. Eddington's reputation as one of the great astrophysicists of his day put a great deal of weight on this approach."

Relativity and Quantum Theory

As Miler's book details, Austrian-born quantum physics pioneer Wolfgang Pauli became fascinated with the number as well, since it figured in the mysterious intersection of relativity and quantum theory that he explored with the help of his friend, psychoanalyst Carl Jung. The scientific fixation on the fine-structure constant was such that in 1936, Nature published an article titled "The Mysterious Number 137."

But as Pauli learned in the 1950s from a religious scholar, 137 had another significance. It was the number associated with the Kabbalah, an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism – what Miller calls "an extraordinary link between mysticism and physics."

As this article by Billy Phillips from Kabbalahstudent.com details, the number 137 also appears frequently in the Torah. It's the lifespan in years of figures such as Ishmael and Levi, for example, as well the age of Abraham when he bound his son Isaac to an altar in preparation to sacrifice him. And as Phillips explains, if the number of letters in the Torah — 304,805 — is split into the numerical pairs and reversed, the result is the numbers 50, 84 and 03. Add those together, and you get 137. Beyond that, the relationship of the fine-structure constant to light in physics parallels the Kabbalists' concept of connecting with light, or becoming enlightened by shedding the ego.

"The missing puzzle piece for physics is consciousness," Phillips writes.

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