MBW - 4/6/2022
Good morning friends. It’s Wednesday and your daily digest is ready. Let’s get to it.
News Briefing
•In a blistering speech to the UN Security Council, Zelenskyy offered harrowing details of the massacre in Bucha. "Civilians were crushed by tanks...they cut off their limbs, slashed their throats, women were raped and killed...their tongues were pulled out," he said. More on this here.
•The Russian Embassy in Ireland is running out of fuel for heating and hot water and is complaining that numerous Irish oil companies have refused to deliver supplies. It has forced the embassy to write a letter to Foreign Affairs Minister department asking the Government to intervene before they run out. More on this here.
•The European Commission proposed broad new sanctions on Russia, including a potential ban on imports of Russian coal and additional measures targeting state-owned businesses and officials and oligarchs in Moscow.
The proposed ban on Russian coal, which must be agreed by all 27 member states, would mark the first time the EU has blocked imports of Russian energy. More on this here.
•In other news, Kim Kardashian spoke out against the execution of Melissa Lucio which is scheduled for April 27 in Texas. She has been on death row for 14 years for causing her two-year-old daughter’s death. Kim posted:
During the case trial a pathologist testified that the child’s autopsy revealed she did not die from falling downstairs and instead her injuries were consistent with a death from blunt-force trauma. Furthermore, court documents state the emergency room doctor that attempted to revive Lucio’s daughter stated it was the worst case of child abuse he had ever seen. More on this here.
•Police have arrested one suspect in connection with a shooting in the centre of Sacramento, California's capital, on Sunday, that left six dead. Dandre Martin, 26, has been charged with assault and illegal firearm possession, police said on Monday. Multiple people are believed to have opened fire in the busy downtown area, close to the state Capitol building.
•Two stolen notebooks written by Charles Darwin were left on library floor in pink gift bag 22 years after they were last seen. The small leather-bound books are worth many millions of pounds and include the scientist's "tree of life" sketch. More on this here.
•A man on a Southwest Airlines flight faces federal charges after allegedly masturbating at least four times during the flight.It happened on a flight from Seattle to Phoenix on April 2, 2022. More on this here.
Origin of Covid-19: The Proximal Origin Letter (part 3)
In mid-January of 2020, Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expressed his concerns in phone conversations with three scientific leaders: Fauci; Jeremy Farrar, the director of the U.K.’s Wellcome Trust; and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO). Redfield’s message, was simple: “We have to take the lab-leak hypothesis with extreme seriousness.”
It is not clear whether Redfield’s concerns are what sparked Fauci’s own. But on Saturday night, February 1, at 12:30 a.m., Fauci emailed the NIAID’s (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the 27 institutes of NIH) principal deputy director, Hugh Auchincloss, under the subject line “IMPORTANT.” He attached the 2015 paper by Shi Zhengli, (the batlady, in which she mixed components of SARS-like viruses from different species, and created a novel chimera that was able to directly infect human cells) and wrote, “Hugh: It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on.” He instructed Auchincloss to read the attached paper and added, “You will have tasks today that must be done.”
February 1 proved to be a critical day. With the death count in China passing 300 and cases popping up in more than a dozen countries, a group of 11 top scientists (including Fauci) across five time zones convened. No one invited Redfield, or even told him it was happening.
In the conference call and emails that followed over the next four days, the scientists parsed the peculiarities of SARS-CoV-2’s genomic sequence, paying special attention to the furin cleavage site.
Dr. Michael Farzan, an immunologist, emailed the group, writing that the anomaly could result from sustained interaction between a chimeric virus and human tissue in a laboratory that lacked appropriate biocontainment protocols.
He was not alone. Virologist Robert Garry wrote of the “stunning” composition of the furin cleavage site: “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to SARS-CoV-2. I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature.”
But within three days, four of the scientists on the call, had shared the draft of a letter arguing the opposite. It was published on March 17 in Nature Medicine. The letter, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, analyzed the genomic sequence and made a seemingly unequivocal statement: “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” How they arrived at such certainty within four days remains unclear.
Why It's Quicker To Fly East Than West
Have you ever wondered why it always takes less to travel from the US to Europe than the other way around? Maybe not, but I have. The intuitive answer would be the Earth rotation. But apparently it is only an indirect factor. The real answer has to do with a concept known as jet streams. They are fast-flowing, narrow air currents in the atmosphere found at high altitudes. These currents are formed due to atmospheric heating from the sun's radiation and the earth's so called Coriolis force. These factors cause combined caused jet streams.
The most prominent jet streams are the polar stream and subtropical streams, located at 60 and 30° north and south of the equator. The former is the stronger stream, causing much faster winds. Jet streams can be as strong as 80 to 140 miles per hour, going all the way up to 275 miles per hour. The first time jet streams came to use in commercial aviation was in 1952 on a flight from Tokyo to Honolulu. Flying along jet streams cut the journey down from 18 hours to a mere 11.5 hours, flying just under 25,000 feet. Airlines quickly realized the value of jet streams and started implementing them while planning routes.
Since the jet streams flow from the west to east, they make one leg of the journey much faster (when flying with the stream) and one slower (against the stream). Returning to the example from New York to London, we see flights may take even a slightly longer route to benefit from the jet stream. This means the journey from JFK to LHR can take around six and a half hours, the flight from LHR to JFK takes seven and a half hours.
While jet streams can speed up flights, they do have a significant drawback: clear air turbulence. Also studies have shown that passengers suffer from more jet lag on eastbound flights, which means shorter flights leave lesser time to adjust and grab some shut-eye on such long-haul routes.
Divorce vs Parental Death: Which Is Worse?
Ample research demonstrates that experiencing parental death or divorce harms children’s educational attainment. A recently published study tries to compare the severity of the two across social contexts. It tries to investigate how family and national contexts moderate the educational consequences of these adverse events. Using data from 17 countries the study found that parental divorce had a larger impact than parental death. Furthermore, the impact of parental divorce was largest for children of higher-educated parents.
The study shows that although both parental death and divorce harm children’s educational attainment, their impacts differ across family and country contexts. The consequences of divorce strongly depend on the resources available in a family, while the effects of parental death are mitigated by educational and welfare policies.
Pics, vids & memes
Parents these days
Can confirm
Manhattan
We are very fond of evolution in this space. Here’s an explanation of iterative evolution in less than one minute:
109 year old Thai monk. Remember when they say may you live to see 100. Yeah, about that, maybe you shouldn’t.
That was it for today folks. Have a great rest of the day. Until tomorrow, peace.