Tag: science

Childhood vaccinations in ’20 and ’21 declined the most in 30 years

9:36 am

Surprise! According to WHO data, the number of children receiving effective vaccines for serious known diseases declined in ’20 and ’21, dropping at a rate larger than seen in 30 years.

Data collected by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations children’s charity UNICEF show that the percentage of children who received three doses of the vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (DTP3) decreased by 5 percentage points between 2019 and 2021, to 81% worldwide (see ‘Childhood immunizations decline’). DTP3 is considered to be a marker of vaccine coverage; if children miss these jabs, they’re probably also missing out on crucial vaccinations for many other diseases.

The report found that in 2021, 25 million children missed out on routine immunizations against diseases such as measles — leading to avoidable outbreaks. “If this downward trend continues, we can expect to see more cases, outbreaks and deaths from diseases which are completely preventable,” a WHO spokesperson told Nature.

This article, from the very leftist science journal Nature, notes only that WHO attributes the decline to “supply-chain disruption, diversion of resources and lockdowns.” If fails to mention the loss of faith worldwide in vaccines in general, due to the hard push by WHO and other government health agencies to force the relatively ineffective and possibly harmful COVID shots on everyone.

The vaccines for measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough do work, but by lying about the effectiveness of the COVID shots, health agencies worldwide have lost their credibility. They have successfully convinced millions of parents to fear getting any vaccines, even those that really work and can prevent their children from dying.

Congratulations to WHO, the CDC, and all government agents worldwide! You have helped bring out the death of millions of children. Great work if you can get it.

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The corruption of medical science is surges on

12:32 pm

The modern basis of medical research in the dark age
The modern basis of medical research in the dark age

Three stories this past week clearly illustrate that the field of medical science — based on the philosophy to always seek the truth no matter where it leads — is now teetering on the edge of death, and might already have died.

First we have the revelation that a major 2006 paper on the roots of Alzheimer’s disease is likely fraudulent, its results fabricated.

The investigation uncovered evidence suggesting several instances of image manipulation in the work of Sylvain Lesné, a researcher working at the University of Minnesota and an author of the 2006 study. The paper, which is cited by more than 2,200 academic papers as a reference, launched interest in a specific protein called Aβ*56 [a beta-amyloid] as a promising target for early intervention in Alzheimer’s disease.

…Whistleblower Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, first flagged his concerns about the images to the NIH on January 2022. Science asked two image analysis experts to review Lesné’s published work. They echoed Shrag’s concerns. They identified a total of 20 “suspect papers” authored by Lesné, 10 of which had to do with Aβ*56, per Science.

This discovery might also explain why there has been a 99% failure rate for all Alzheimer drug trials. Most of that work was based on Lesné’s work, specifically on his paper that pointed to amyloids.
» Read more

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Curiosity looks ahead

9:36 am

Curiosity looks ahead
Click for full resolution. For original images go here and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, taken by one of the navigation cameras on the Mars rover Curiosity on July 23, 2022, forms a nice bookend to yesterday’s panorama. Yesterday Curiosity looked back at its past travels. Today it looks forward at where it is almost certainly heading in the days ahead.

On the overview map to the right, the yellow lines indicate the approximate area viewed by the panorama. The large red dotted line marks the rover’s original planned route, abandoned when the science team found the terrain on the Greenheugh Pediment too rough for Curiosity’s wheels. The smaller red dotted line is my present guess as to the rover’s future route to get back on course.

The flat-topped mountain dubbed Kukenán by the science team has probably been one of the prime goals of the entire mission, from the beginning. Its almost vertical face has innumerable layers, all of which record in great detail the geological history of Mars and Gale Crater. As noted by Abigail Fraeman from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on June 30, 2022:

Kukenán’s Earth namesake is a tepui, or distinctive isolated table-top mountain, found in South America. The Martian Kukenán is also somewhat flat topped and an impressive expression in Mt. Sharp’s topography. While it looks like it’s about the same size as the hills that bound it in the above Navcam image (“Deepdale” on the left and the edge of “Bolivar” on the right), this effect is just due to forced perspective. In reality, Kukenán is nearly five times farther away and over three times as tall as Deepdale! Curiosity’s strategic traverse path takes the rover right past Kukenán in about a kilometer or so, so this feature will become a familiar landmark rising in our windshield for months to come.

The science team will likely park Curiosity in the saddle of the gap ahead for at least a week and spend a lot of time documenting that cliff face with multiple cameras, since at this location the rover will have an excellent view of that entire face. As it gets closer the angle looking up will get steeper, thus making viewing of the upper layers more difficult.

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Curiosity looks back

11:49 am

Curiosity looks back
Click for full image.

Overview
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! Normally I’d be hiking today, but since it is raining in southern Arizona at every mountain location we might want to go, I am forced to imagine hiking on Mars instead. The photo above, cropped to post here, was part of a mosaic of images taken on July 22, 2022 by the right navigation camera on the rover Curiosity.

Curiosity had just completed several drives that had it skirt around those two boulders visible in the center of the picture, as shown in the inset in the overview map to the right. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the photo. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present location. The larger red dotted line the rover’s original planned route, with the smaller dotted line my guess as to the route the science team now plans to take to return to that course.

The rim of Gale Crater can be seen in the far distance, about 20 to 30 miles away and largely obscured by the winter dust that presently fills the atmosphere.

The science team had hoped to get close enough to these two boulders to touch them with the rover’s instruments, but decided to keep away because of both appeared a bit unstable.

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China releases one photo of Phobos taken by its Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter

3:58 pm

Phobos as seen by Tianwen-1
Click to see original photo.

China today released a single photo of the Martian moon Phobos, taken by its Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter, to mark the second anniversary of the orbiter’s launch.

The English press release at the link conveniently did not provide the image to the non=Chinese world, but the Chinese language release did. That picture is to the right, reduced slightly to post here. Considering its disinterest in making it easy to find this photo for English speakers, it is intriguing that China included the English language name Opik for one crater.

Moreover, this single picture release illustrates the paucity of Tianwen-1 photos made available to the public by China. Very few have been released, and though eventually China has been making its raw data available, it has not been doing so in a manner that makes it easy for outsiders to access it.

Nonetheless, this is one of the best pictures of Phobos I have yet seen.

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Collapsed dunes in Jezero Crater

10:31 am

Collapsed dune on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo above, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on July 20, 2022 by one of high resolution cameras on the rover Perseverance. It shows what appears to be a collapsed dune on the floor of Jezero Crater.

The arrows mark the highest dune ridge line that suddenly ends at a cliff, with the sand that is piled up at its base appearing almost like it flowed like thick mud outward away from that cliff. Apparently, that material broke off in one single event sometime in the past.

Note the many parallel lines pointing outward from the base of the cliff. These lines appear to reflect the internal structure visible in the cliff itself. Somehow, when that sand collapsed, it flowed away while retaining some of that structure.

When this collapse happened is unclear. I don’t think it has happened recently, since Perseverance’s arrival, but I could be wrong.

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Draper wins NASA contract to put a lander on the Moon’s far side

9:28 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday awarded a $73 million contract to the space company Draper to place a lander on the Moon’s far side by 2025.

The lander, called SERIES-2 by Draper, will deliver to Schrödinger Basin three experiments to collect seismic data, measure the heat flow and electrical conductivity of the lunar subsurface and measure electromagnetic phenomena created by the interaction of the solar wind and plasma with the lunar surface.

The mission is the eighth NASA has awarded to date as part of CLPS, but the first to go to the lunar farside. The only mission by any country to land on the far side of the moon is China’s Chang’e-4 mission, which successfully landed in Von Kármán Crater in January 2019 and deployed the Yutu 2 rover that remains operational today.

With this award, there are presently five American companies with contracts to put landers on the Moon, Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic, Firefly, and Masten. Masten however shut down operations recently. This new contract to Draper for almost the exact same amount that had been awarded to Masten appears to replace Masten in the program.

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Using the Wuhan panic to kill children

3:17 pm

Excess mortality by age
The shocking rise of excess mortality since young people
began getting the jab

The evidence continues to pour in: Not only were the authoritarian polices imposed by governments worldwide following the arrival of COVID in 2020 a total failure — doing nothing to prevent the spread of the virus — it now appears the edicts forcing millions to get the COVID jab and wear masks might very well have caused serious harm, even death, to many individuals for whom the virus posed no threat at all.

And it more and more appears that the worst victims of these failed policies were children.

The following stories, all published since my last Wuhan panic update on June 30th, point specifically to the failure of the jab:

These new research confirms many previous studies. For example, in 2021 the American Heart Association issued its own warning about mRNA vaccines, stating that this drug could “dramatically increase risk of developing heart disease.” Other earlier research can be found at my own reports on February 14th, March 23rd, March 30th, May 11th, May 13th, and June 30th. The data increasingly demonstrates that the COVID shots not only accomplished practically nothing in stopping the virus, those shots had side effects that have unnecessarily harmed possibly millions.

Similarly, studies continue to confirm what a hundred years of past research had found, that masks are essentially useless in stopping the spread of a virus such as COVID, and can actually increase your chances of getting this or other diseases.
» Read more

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Perseverance spots a string on Mars!

10:54 am

A piece of string on Mars
Click for full image.

According to the Perseverance science team, they believe the strange spaghetti-like object to the right, taken by one of the rover’s hazard avoidance camera’s on July 12, 2022, is actually a piece of string that fell here during the rover’s landing in February 2021.

The string could be from the rover or its descent stage, a component similar to a rocket-powered jet pack used to safely lower the rover to the planet’s surface, according to a spokesperson for the Perseverance mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Perseverance had not previously been in the area where the string was found, so it’s likely the wind blew it there, the spokesperson said.

The string, which appears to be a few inches across, was apparently gone four days later, when another hazard avoidance picture was taken of the same spot

An official description from the scientists is expected in a week or so.

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The earliest galaxy so far seen?

10:37 am

Earliest galaxy?

Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope now think they have identified a galaxy formed only 330 million years after the Big Bang.

The red smudge in the centre of this image [to the right] is thought to be a galaxy with a redshift of around z=13, as seen by the NIRCam instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. This redshift estimate is based on photometry so the object remains a candidate rather than a confirmed high-redshift galaxy, but if confirmed spectroscopically this would be the highest-redshift galaxy yet observed.

You can read the research paper itself here [pdf]. The galaxy is actually very young, and its nature, along with a second also described by the research, appears to contradict expectations. From the paper’s abstract:

These sources, if confirmed, join GNz11 in defying number density forecasts for luminous galaxies based on Schechter UV luminosity functions, which require a survey area > 10× larger than we have
studied here to find such luminous sources at such high redshifts. They extend evidence from lower redshifts for little or no evolution in the bright end of the UV luminosity function into the cosmic dawn epoch, with implications for just how early these galaxies began forming. This, in turn, suggests that future deep JWST observations may identify relatively bright galaxies to much earlier epochs than might have been anticipated. [emphasis mine]

In other words, this early data from Webb suggests that galaxies formed much faster than expected after the Big Bang. This either means all the theories describing the Bang are wrong, or that it might not have even happened.

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Martian terraces

12:51 pm

Overview map
Glacier country on Mars

Martian terraces
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 17, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists have labeled “Dipping layers against mound in Deuteronilus Mensae.”

Deuteronilus is the westernmost mensae region in the 2,000-mile-long strip of heavy glaciers found in the northern mid-latitudes that I dub glacier country. This photo, the location of which is marked by the white cross on the overview map above, is another example, though somewhat strange and puzzling. Normally the layers will dip away from the high point. Here, the layers dip towards the mound. I can think of only one explanation, that of prevailing winds causing the erosion in this unusual manner, but I also find that explanation very unsatisfactory.

The layers themselves illustrate the cycles that have shaped Martian geology, caused by the wide swings in the planet’s rotational tilt, from 11 to 60 degrees. When that tilt is high, the poles are warmer than the mid-latitudes, and water ice migrates from the poles towards the equator. When the tilt is low, the mid-latitudes are warmer, and the water ice heads back towards the poles. Thus, the many many layers the orbiters and rovers are now finding everywhere on Mars.

Right now scientists think, because Mars’ tilt is in the middle of these swings at 25 degrees, the planet is in equilibrium, with the water at the poles and mid-latitudes essentially going no where. This conclusion however is not yet confirmed.

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Ispace now aiming for a November ’22 launch of its lunar lander

9:14 am

Capitalism in space: The private Japanese company Ispace today announced that it is targeting November 2022 for the launch of its Hakuto-R lunar lander, carrying commercial as well as governmental payloads.

The launch will be on a Falcon 9 rocket. The payload includes two small rovers, one built by Ispace and a second, Rashid, built by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Rashid has already been delivered to SpaceX. This announcement indicates that Hakuto-R is on schedule for delivery in time for that November launch.

Both rovers are engineering tests, and will are expected to only function on the Moon for one lunar day.

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