Sergio Parra

In a new study Published in Nature Medicine, researchers have studied four species of these seasonal coronaviruses over the past 35 years and have found that reinfection occurs frequently, about a year after the first episode.

While that doesn't necessarily say anything about the current global pandemic, it is not a good sign for hopes of long-term immunity in a population.

Immunity

Analyzing 513 serum samples collected since the 1980s from 10 healthy men living in Amsterdam, the researchers noted several spikes of antibodies related to coronaviruses. Each of these spikes was interpreted as a reinfection, and for the four seasonal coronaviruses studied, including HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, and HCoV-HKU1, the team found 3 to 17 infections per patient.

Some rare reinfections appeared as early as six months after the initial infection, but more commonly, they returned about a year later, 'indicating that protective immunity is short-lived.' To date, there are few confirmed cases of COVID-19 reinfection, so it is still too early to say how long acquired immunity to SARS-CoV-2 may last.

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The mystery of immune people who do not have antibodies: testing negative in one of these tests does not mean that you do not have immunity

Looking at other coronaviruses is one of our best clues, and unfortunately, this 35-year study suggests that immunity for many coronavirus infections is not only temporary, it's short-lived. Besides, authors say reinfection may be a common feature of all human coronaviruses.

The blood samples, which were collected every 3 months before 1989 and every 6 months after (barring an unexplained six-year gap in the data), show that most coronavirus infections in Amsterdam occurred in winter. With the northern hemisphere now firmly in autumn, that is an extremely worrying result if the new findings are applied to the current global pandemic. A very dark winter may be awaiting us.

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What do we know about cross-immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and the possibility of being immunized without having had the virus

It remains to be seen whether SARS-CoV-2 follows the same trend as other coronaviruses. But it appears that acquiring a lasting immune response from a vaccine could be difficult. We may need to receive regular updates, as we do with the seasonal flu.

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Long-term immunity unlikely: 35 years of infection research suggests so

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When Jared Diamond projected this book, The world until yesterdayr, he did it with a generous dose of ambition, as is usual in his previous books, such as Guns, germs and steel either Collapse.

Here Diamond, no less, addresses all aspects of human culture, of all the peoples of the world, during the last 11,000 years.

Civilizations

But what is the ultimate reason for investigating the ways of living of people of the past? Jared Diamond maintains that, although most of them will not contribute anything to us, because they have already been overcome, some solutions or ways of operating in traditional societies could perhaps be recovered to solve problems that plague us in modern societies.

To do this, Diamond has selected nine areas spread across the eleven chapters in order to illustrate how we can take advantage of our knowledge about traditional societies in different ways: the dangers and raising children, the treatment of the elderly, languages and polyglotism, healthy lifestyles, peaceful conflict resolution, and even issues that have to do with religion and spirituality. Finally, Diamond focuses two chapters on the controversial topic of war, among other things to discover that violence rates are better managed thanks to a modern State.

The world until yesterday: What can we learn from traditional societies? Pulitzer Prize for Weapons (Essay | History)

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To x-ray everything previously stated, Diamond focuses on bands and tribes of small-scale farmers and hunter-gatherers, especially associated with New Guinea and other adjacent islands in the Pacific, which are the ones the author dominates, and because New Guinea offers great cultural diversity: it is the exclusive home of 1,000 of the approximately 7,000 languages that exist in the world, and It also houses the largest number of companies that, even today, remain outside the control of state governments.

Thus, guided by Diamond's erudite prose, we will discover how the Dani, the Fayu, the Daribi, the Enga, the Fore, the Hinihon, the Kaulong live, but also Australian tribes such as the Yolngu, the Kunai or the Wiil, to Eurasian tribes such as the Agta, the Aino and the Nganasan, and African tribes such as the Hadza, the Ikung or the Turkana.

The world until yesterday, then, is monumental, both in number of pages and in topics covered, although issues such as art, cognition, cooperative behavior, gender relations, marriage or sexual practices are missed (perhaps for a second delivery?). And, in addition, a greater development of the chapter dedicated to linguistics and, above all, to the analysis of the progressive decline in the diversity of languages, which has long seemed to me to be the weakest in the volume.

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Books that inspire us: 'The World Until Yesterday' by Jared Diamond

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Made from a blend of two safe components that forms a thin film that is tasteless, colorless and odorless, completely biodegradable and non-toxic, this new biodegradable antibacterial wrap further protects food, between 2.5 and 8 times that of conventional conservation plastic, and has been developed by chemists from RUDN University.

Chemists at RUDN University developed the antibacterial films based on chitosan, a polysaccharide obtained from the shells of crabs or lower fungi.

Biodegradable antibacterial wrap

To check the properties of the substance, lChemists from RUDN University covered bananas with plastic film for 10 days. The fruits that were under the plastic film lost 3 times less weight and 8 times less vitamin C than those that were without it. Furthermore, after use, the film will degrade without causing harm to the environment.

The new film is produced from natural macromolecules, that is, polysaccharides, which are the "building material" of living organisms. Two substances derived from chitosan were used: the sodium salt of succinyl chitosan (SC-Na) and a triazole, betaine and chitosan compound (TBQ), which has antibacterial properties comparable to those of modern antibiotics.

In Xataka Science

It is estimated that plastic did not take as long to degrade as was believed: from thousands of years to decades

As explained Andrey Kiritchenko, assistant of the Department of Inorganic Chemistry of RUDN University:

We have obtained non-toxic chitosan derivatives with exceptional antibacterial activity similar to that of commercial antibiotics, and for this reason we hypothesized that the film resistance and antibacterial activity would increase significantly. As a base, we decided to use SC-Na salt, which has a high film-forming capacity. In addition, it is non-toxic and acts as an antioxidant, which is important to prolong the shelf life of perishable foods. By changing the TBC:SC-Na ratio, we have developed multifunctional plastic films with improved antibacterial, barrier and mechanical properties.

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This new packaging extends its conservation between 2.5 and 8 times compared to conventional conservation plastic.

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Epistemic longing or, more prosaically, curiosity to know is what one of the latest books by the prolific author is about. Philip Ball. About why we are curious, about why we are interested in, potentially, everything. The title under which Ball has collected his thick essay could not be any other: Curiosity.

Episteme

In Curiosity, Ball also covers the milestones of astronomers, chemists or physicists who, in a world where curiosity was frowned upon in the wake of the original sin committed by the biblical Eve, chose to remove the shadows, ask the why of things, replace the magic and sophistry by evidence.

Curiosity. Why everything interests us (Noema)

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They were heroes because some pioneers in the Middle Ages paid, sometimes with their lives, for an excess of curiosity.. For example, the story of Kepler, who by persevering revealed the structure of the movements of the planets, moving the Earth away from the center of the Universe. Or the odyssey of Galileo, who confronted the Church after seeing with his own eyes, thanks to a modest telescope, what the Moon and some planets were like.

The life of Robert Hooke will reveal to us how a person with hardly any resources can become a relevant person in science, using their innate curiosity as the only driving force.

Ball describes in detail the shine in the eyes of these characters, and he does it with closeness and rigor. Not in vain, Ball belongs to this lineage of men: he is a chemist and a doctor in Physics from the University of Bristol. Editor of Nature magazine, he regularly contributes to New Scientist and other scientific publications. He is also a member of the Chemistry department at University College London.

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Books that inspire us: 'Curiosity: Why everything interests us' by Philip Ball

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We had already been pleasantly surprised by reading The periodic table, of Hugh Aldersey-Williams, that we reviewed here a while ago, and which became one of the best chemistry popular books we had read, so now it was time to dive into another book by the same author, Anatomies, dedicated to the human body and each of its most intimate parts.

Definitely, Hugh Aldersey-Williams is one of the writers who best manages the marriage between science and literature, like a contemporary, totally alphanumeric Renaissance man.

The human body

As if he were one of the characters from the 1966 movie amazing trip, the author seems to miniaturize himself to travel inside a man's body with the purpose of revealing each of the details. Also reflecting how science has been advancing, taking possession of those newly discovered lands, dividing them into parts, proclaiming sovereignty over them in the name of new specialized disciplines.

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[Books that inspire us] 'The Periodic Table' by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

And all of this intersected with the influence that each of those parts of the body has produced in art, literature, society, prejudices, politics, everything. Just because, The resolution of the human eye is approximately two tenths of a millimeter, which is approximately the diameter of the point that ends this sentence. But the eye was also one of the academic obsessions of the French philosopher Rene Descartes, of which we all know its Cogito ergo sum, but few know that he also wrote an essay titled The Diopter (The dioptric).

An x-ray that has been taken under the Renaissance prism on 650 muscles and 206 bones, 3 million hairs, 200,000 kilometers of veins, 440,000 million cells, a heart that beats 75 times per minute. 4,500 times per hour. 108,000 times a day. 2.8 billion times in a lifetime.

Anatomies: The human body, its parts and the stories they tell (Ariel)

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That's how immense, and much more, the human body is. And thanks to the compass-like pen of Aldersey-Williams, We will know how to orient ourselves better than ever in this new geography..

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Books that inspire us: 'Anatomies' by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

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Through a recently launched website called Planet Patrol, NASA calls on astronomy fans to find exoplanets.

The objective is to review a collection of images marked with stars compiled by the Transiting exoplanet reconnaissance satellite (TESS) from NASA.

TESS

While computers are effective at studying these data sets, they are far from perfect. Even the most carefully crafted algorithms can fail when a planet's signal is weak. And that's where the competition of the human mind comes in..

The volunteers of Planet Patrol They will help discover such worlds and help scientists understand how planetary systems form and evolve throughout the universe.

To do this, volunteers They must answer a set of questions for each of the images, such as whether it contains multiple bright sources or whether it resembles stray light, rather than starlight.

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NASA calls on astronomy fans to find exoplanets

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Located 70 million light years away, images from the Hubble telescope have been gathered in a starburst movie that disappears in the spiral galaxy NGC 2525. Specifically, supernova SN 2018gv.

Hubble astronomers were using the supernova as part of a program to precisely measure the expansion rate of the universe.

SN 2018gv

Over the past 30 years, Hubble has helped dramatically improve the accuracy of the universe's expansion rate, and can also provide us with spectacular images.

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The ninth brightest star in the sky: it could be preparing to explode in a supernova

The time-lapse that you can see below covers almost a year. According to the Nobel Prize Adam Riess from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland:

No terrestrial fireworks display can compete with this supernova, captured in its faded glory by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The type of supernova seen in this sequence originated from a consumed star, a white dwarf located in a nearby binary system.

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This spectacular 'time-lapse' of a supernova exists thanks to Hubble

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Sir Francis Bacon He once said, “Some books must be tasted, some must be swallowed, and some must be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others are to be read, but not with curiosity, and a few are to be read in their entirety, and with diligence and attention.

Many popular science books, however, should not only be read with "diligence and attention," but with devotion, cas if you tried to memorize each of its passages (It wouldn't even hurt to take notes of the new ideas that arise in our minds). Because if the book is interesting, it can allow us to reach ends of knowledge that we thought were impossible.

Advantages

There are matters that require reading books of three or four hundred pages. Even those books, which have been written for months or years, which are corrected and polished line by line, usually make calls to an extensive bibliography made up of other books or articles that, in turn, have also been written in the same way.

They are popular science books. And we should read them often. If possible, one a week.

In Xataka Science

The time when people began to read more than ever (especially gossip)

While about a book a week may seem overwhelming, it's probably doable even for the busiest people. The writer Stephanie Huston He says that thinking he didn't have enough time turned out to be a lame excuse. One day he set the goal of reading 50 books in a year, and to do so he only had to divert a little of his wasted time with his mobile phone, or take advantage of the time on trains, during lunch breaks or while waiting in the supermarket line.

Let's think that a typical essay has 50,000 words and that we can read between 200 and 400 words per minute. That means we can read 100 essays in just over 200 hours a year.. A ridiculous figure if we compare it with the time we spend on social networks (600) or on television (2000).

It may also be that the book chosen does not meet our expectations. Then we can proceed as explained Peter Bregman, that This is how he reads one essay a week having a busy life:

Read the title and anywhere from the first paragraphs to the first pages of the chapter to discover how the author is using this chapter and where it fits into the book's argument. Then review the headings and subheadings (if any) to get an idea of the flow. Read the first sentence of each paragraph and the last. If you understand the meaning, move on. Otherwise, you may want to read the entire paragraph. Once you have understood the chapter, you may be able to flip through entire pages as the plot may be clear to you and may also be repeated.

Some recommendations

Reading a book that pushes you to contemplate the horizon of human knowledge also allows you to discover how sterile it often is to fraternize with some people. And one ends up evoking this sensation described by Schopenhauer in On the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason: «Sometimes I talk to men like a child with his dolls; Even knowing that dolls cannot understand, through pleasant methodical self-deception the joy of communication is achieved.

If you want to start with some really powerful ones, the kind that make you love your solitude, then some of the books that I list below are the ones that have changed the coordinates of my mind the most. Those that have influenced me the most intellectually, but also emotionally. Those who have allowed me to see the world with greater perspective. Also those who have shown me, in an almost physical way, how complex everything is and how little I knew.

They are books that have functioned almost like compasses in the middle of the desert, microscopes to see the smallest things, telescopes to see the furthest things.

1. Behave, by Robert Sapolsky

We are facing a 984-page tome. But each of its pages is worth its weight in gold. I think this is the book with the most ideas that one should print on a T-shirt per square centimeter that I have ever read.

Behave: The biology behind our best and worst comps (ESSAY)

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2. Consilience: the unity of knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson

There is a chapter dedicated to explaining in 30 pages how science works and why it is the most effective intellectual tool we know that almost made me cry with emotion.

Consilience: the unity of knowledge (Essay)

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3. Cognitive Surplus, by Clay Shirky

The paradigmatic example of this new generation of people who are beginning to spend more time on YouTube and less on television is Wikipedia. A free, collaborative encyclopedia that does not pay its collaborators, which has become a tough competitor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. The most exciting thing is that to write Wikipedia, only 1 % of the hours American viewers spend watching television in a year. That is to say: with the time that American viewers spend in front of the television during a year, thousands of Wikipedias, or equivalents, could be conceived.

Cognitive surplus: Creativity and generosity in the connected age (No collection)

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4. Abundance, by Peter H Diamandis

Whether or not you share the enthusiasm of the main message, it is impossible not to be contaminated by the technological optimism that the book gives off, and above all to be fascinated by the number of characters in the world who are truly changing the lives of not just thousands, but millions of people. .

Abundance. The Future Is Better Than You Think

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5. The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker

Basically, we are faced with an artifact to dissolve three intertwined dogmas: the "blank slate" (the mind has no innate characteristics), the "noble savage" (the person is born good and society corrupts him) and the "ghost in the machine." (we all have a soul that makes decisions without depending on biology).

The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature (Contexts)

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6. Beyond intellectual impostures, by Alan Sokal

Epistemology is a philosophically dry topic, it takes years of reading to understand all its aspects, but this book is an excellent summary of all its approaches.

Beyond intellectual impostures: Science, philosophy and culture (Transitions)

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Do you want more recommendations? Below, 30 books added to those already mentioned to superfeed your mind (prize for those who have read them all, and encouragement for those who are willing to read them all... you will not regret it):

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The 36 best science books to change the way you see the world

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United Arab Emirates (USA) plans to land unmanned spacecraft on the Moon in 2024. including an exploration rover. Recently, the US launched a probe into Mars orbit, so We must not underestimate their objectives.

Israel also tried it in 2019, without success, so if the US succeeded it would become the fourth country to do so, after the United States, the Soviet Union and China.

The mission

The lunar rover will be called "Rashid", in honor of one of the founders of the United Arab Emirates. The explorer will be designed and built in the United Arab Emirates by an Emirati 100% team of engineers, experts and researchers.

A team of Emirati engineers, researchers and experts from the MBRSC is working to complete the Lunar Rover design by 2021. The rover will be manufactured in 2022, while preliminary experiments and testing of the prototype are expected to begin in 2023. The Center aims to launch the Lunar Rover by 2024, setting another record in its growing list of achievements in the space sector.

The Emirati lunar rover will land on an area of the Moon's surface that has not been explored by any of the previous lunar exploration missions. The Lunar Rover will be equipped with cutting-edge technology which includes a 3D camera, an advanced motion system, sensors, a communication system and will be powered by solar panels.

In Xataka Science

There is much more metal on the Moon than we thought

The explorer will also include an advanced movement system to improve the efficiency of wheel movement of the Lunar Rover on the Moon.

The mission will consist of a series of measurements and tests that will expand human understanding of lunar plasma, photoelectrons and dust particles located on the illuminated part of the lunar surface.

In Xataka Science

The real Cyrano was a lover of men and obsessed with outer space

A variety of materials will also be tested and their interaction with the Moon studied.

The Moon is considered an ideal platform for testing new technologies and equipment that can be used in future space exploration missions, including Mars. Landing on the Moon also allows for long-term exposure of sensors and other technologies to the space environment.

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In 2024, a fourth country wants to explore the Moon: United Arab Emirates

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Researchers at Cornell University They have analyzed 38 million articles about the coronavirus pandemic in English-language media around the world.

Mentions to the president donald trump They accounted for nearly 38% of overall misinformation, making the president the largest driver of pandemic-related falsehoods.

Fake News

Researchers sought to identify all mentions of misinformation in 'mainstream media'. They included fact-checking articles that corrected misinformation in their total count.

The study identified 11 topics of misinformation, including several conspiracy theories, such as one that emerged in January suggesting the pandemic was manufactured by Democrats to coincide with Trump's impeachment, and another that sought to trace the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China, to people who ate soup of bat.

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Coronavirus can be found in semen, according to new research

But by far the most prevalent topic of misinformation was 'miracle cures', including Trump's promotion of anti-malaria drugs and disinfectants as potential treatments for Covid-19. That represented more misinformation than the other 10 topics combined.

For example, on April 24, a day after Trump floated the idea that disinfectants and ultraviolet light could treat Covid-19, there were more than 30,000 items in the 'miracle cures' category, compared to less than 10,000 just days before. According to the study researchers, this growth of misinformation was due to Trump.

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Pandemic conspiracy theory has killed hundreds of people, study finds

The Cornell Alliance for Science, which led the study, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using science to improve food security and environmental sustainability. One of its goals is to promote science-based decision making. With Trump, it seems, they are going to have a lot of work ahead of them.

The study also found that conspiracy theories, when grouped together, accounted for 46 % of mentions of misinformation.

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The “most important factor” of misinformation in English about the coronavirus is Donald Trump

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