Neonicotinoids and why they need to stay banned 🐝

#SciComm #ScienceTwitter #SaveTheBees #ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis

Here is another very enjoyable conversation, with @Pandata19’s scientific advisory board member, Dr Jay Bhattacharya. Key ideas in this thread.

We are making world-changing decisions on the basis of evidence that is not very good. Vast scientific evidence tells us that infection fatality rates are much lower than originally expected. A small fraction of people get severe illness. 2/10

The scientific community has been resistant to evidence not supporting the majoritarian view, preferring instead to gin up panic, focusing on the worst case for everything the virus does & the best case for everything lockdowns do, and ignoring the range of uncertainty. 3/10

Academe is a strange place now, with debate stifled. But there's a sense some are opening up to considering opposing views. This is key, since suppression of views stops knowledge from progressing—the end of science. Public health norms of unified messaging complicate this. 4/10

Why did we, from the start, assume we knew nothing about this virus, instead of assuming a reasonable prior? Low susceptibility was evident early on. Assuming any virus is new is hard to square with our deep-time co-evolution with viruses, & their slow evolution. 5/10

Did you know that all the nuclear bombs we exploded in the '40s-50s-60s have permanently contaminated all the steel the world has produced since then? All steel in the world is divided into two categories: pre-1945 non-contaminated steel, and post-1945 contaminated steel.

How?

Nuclear bombs (including the tests) create a lot of radioisotopes that are not found in nature. For example Cobalt-60 (a radioactive version of Cobalt-59). And since the 1945 Trinity test, these have all dispersed in the atmosphere.

What does this have to do with steel?

The process of manufacturing steel uses atmospheric air (or atmospheric oxygen). Some of the radioisotopes like Cobalt-60 get pulled in too, and as a result, any steel produced after 1945 has embedded in it some of these radioisotopes, sitting there emitting gamma rays.

Why do we care about traces of radioisotopes in steel? When making Geiger counters, or medical devices to check for radioactive contamination, or astronomical instruments, the emissions from the contaminated steel would interfere with the measurements.

So we need pre-1945 steel

Pre-1945 non-contaminated steel is called "low background steel". And when we need it, where do we get it from?

We go, find pre-World-War-II sunken shipwrecks, and then salvage the steel (and lead) from those to build our instruments which need heavy radiation shielding.

Today, we are bringing other exciting results involving black holes and AI. We released a new paper:

"Black Hole Weather Forecasting with Deep Learning: A Pilot Study"

Work by Roberta Duarte (@import_robs), Rodrigo Nemmen (@nemmen) and João Paulo Navarro (from @NVIDIABrasil).

The authors used deep learning to simulate the dynamics of gas accreting onto a black hole, i.e., black hole weather forecasting.

They trained the model (U-Net) with frames from numerical solutions of the hydrodynamical equations.

Numerical simulations are time-consuming. A simple simulation can take as long as 7 days to finish. If we go with more complex simulations, this time may increase.

We want to investigate if deep learning can be a new method to simulate accurately in less time!

In the paper, they discussed two examples:

1- The model simulating only one system after learning only from this system
2- The model simulating an unseen system after training with several systems with different initial conditions

In the first example, they trained the model with a single system and analyzed how the model simulates by iterative predictions.

The result is that the model can simulate up to 8e4 gravitational time accurately with a speed-up of 30000x faster!

EXPLANATION OF THE EXISTENCE OF DARK MATTER AND DARK ENERGY !

What Is Dark Energy ?

More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery.

But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.

This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe's birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart as

a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force that is pulling galaxies apart.

WHAT OUR SANATAN DHARMA SAYS IN THIS CONTEXT LET’S TAKE A LOOK

The verses of Taittiriya Aranyaka say that only one pada of the Lord

is this manifested universe and the remaining three padas are outside it.

According to the observations and realizations of ancient seers, nearly eighty percent of this universe is yet of unknown nature which remains inactive during the process of creation (rather, evolution).

1/This is a rant I had with someone while texting, and I thought it would make an interesting thread:

2/ Jim, If you come across any information, I still desire to hear any information on the state of our beleaguered union.