Neonicotinoids and why they need to stay banned 🐝

#SciComm #ScienceTwitter #SaveTheBees #ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis

Neonicotinoids were banned by the EU in 2018 following multiple scientific studies which proved their severe detrimental impact on pollinators. Effects from neonics include reduced immune function, reduced foraging capabilities, and impaired cognition in bees.

The government has approved neonics for emergency use as a seed treatment on sugar beet. Yields have been impacted by beet yellows, transmitted by aphids. They argue that, because sugar beet does not flower and will not attract pollinators, the risk from neonics is acceptable.

Since the ban on neonics in 2018, the infection rate of beet yellows has increased year on year. Aphid populations have been proliferating due to mild winters, with no agrochemicals to solve the problem.

Sounds like a good case for neonics, right?

But this is the start of a vicious cycle. Climate change isn't going away. Winters will continue to get milder, resulting in the need for more and more pesticides to combat growing pest problems. Inevitably, this won't be the last time neonics are authorised for emergency use.

THREAD
The world is littered with hacks and quick fixes.

Magic routines, butter in our coffee, special supplements, exotic foods. All promising to transform our lives.

Nearly all of it is BS. Here are 12 science-backed "hacks" that actually work.

Read a Book.

An expert in their field has taken their vast knowledge and distilled it to what's most important. Writing forces you to make difficult decisions on what's important and what's not. Writing demands clarity. You're getting an expert's lifetime of work for $15.

Talk to people who know more.

The best way to "hack" knowledge? Have a conversation with those who are informed. They've done the hard part of figuring out of sorting through the mess of information AND making sense of it. Having a conversation brings clarity for application.

Show up, no matter what.

Day after day. Sit down to write. Get out to exercise. Whatever the task you're trying to master, just keep showing up.

If you show up enough, you'll get better.

Sleep.

Just getting your 8+ hours has enormous benefits from the psychological to physical. Sleep is when your body restores & grows with its highest output of growth hormones, & when your mind processes and coalesces information. Translating knowledge from superficial to deep

Ct values can be used to estimate epidemic dynamics UPDATE! Ct values are expected to change depending on whether the epidemic is growing or declining, and we harness this to estimate the epidemic trajectory. Lots of cool new analyses and methods!

Highlights:
- Cts from symptom-based surveillance change over time, but the effect is weaker
- Methods to infer incidence using single cross-sections of Cts
- Unbiased by changing testing coverage
- Gaussian process (wiggly line) model for incidence tracking using Ct values
2/12

This work is *JOINTLY led* with @LeekShaffer and PI’d by @michaelmina_lab. Thank you also to the ever insightful @mlipsitch and to coauthors @SanjatKanjilal @gabriel_stacey and @nialljlennon. 3/12

Premise: times since infection depend on the epidemic trajectory. Distributions of randomly sampled viral loads proxy times since infection. With calibration, Ct values can estimate growth rate. We focus on qPCR in SARS-CoV-2, but the principle applies to any outbreak. 4/12

Result 1: viral loads are shifted higher (Cts lower) during epidemic growth and lower (Cts higher) during decline when individuals are sampled *based on the onset of symptoms*. We simulated linelist data under symptom-based surveillance and looked at TSI and Cts over time. 5/12

"We have purposely avoided directly confronting the issue of masks because it is such an emotional and political issue. Like waving a red flag in front of a bull, the topic elicits strong emotions which overwhelms

We wear a mask in the hospital and don a N95 mask, gown and gloves when we see a patient known to have COVID-19. Masks are used for source control when patients are admitted with various types of infectious respiratory diseases

2/

After the visit, we dispense of the gown, gloves and change into our regular surgical mask to continue patient rounds. In public, we wear a cloth mask to comply with executive orders and as a courtesy to others who feel afraid and uncomfortable.
3/

Like most of you, we rarely wash the mask, we stick it in our pockets, pick it out of the glove compartment or off the floorboard when we need it.

In truth, we wish masks worked. If they did, it would be a cheap, and easy way to control the spread of Covid.

4/

The idea that they protect not only their wearer, but also those people around them seems noble. We wished masks worked because citizens are spending billions of dollars on them.

5/

Today we report the use of base editing in patient-derived cells and in mice to correct the most common cause of progeria, the devastating rapid aging disease. Progeria is typically caused by a dominant negative C•G-to-T•A point mutation in LMNA. 1/11 https://t.co/O7dkEYpndg

The mutation (discovered by @NIHDirector’s lab in 2003) results in progerin, a toxic protein that damages nuclei. So providing more healthy LMNA is not a solution, and cutting the mutated gene with nucleases is also challenging due to indel mixtures & similarity with wt LMNA.2/11

We used an adenine base editor to convert the T•A that causes progeria back to C•G at the key position in LMNA. Base editing in cells from progeria children corrected the mutation efficiently (~90%) with minimal indels or off-target edits, and restored nuclear morphology. 3/11

We then performed in vivo base editing of a mouse model of human progeria developed by @NIHDirector’s lab. These mice have two copies of the mutated human LMNA gene, and develop heart disease, age rapidly, & die early (~7 mo.), resembling symptoms of the disease in children. 4/11

A single injection of AAV9 (10^11-10^12 total vg) encoding the base editor into the circulatory system of these mice resulted in ~10-60% correction of the mutation in various organs, corrected the RNA missplicing of LMNA, and reduced progerin protein levels in tissues. 5/11

1~Consider the gnosis within this thread.

2~

3~

4~From the Flat Earth Podcast App.
See where the Sun is on the hour hand?
Wherever it is at is 12 noon with Sun overhead!
Sun laps Moon every 28 cycles (days).
That's how Moon changes Zodiac Signs
every 28 cycles (days).
I LOVE THIS PLAGAMO!!!

5~More supporting evidence.

Science asked me to -briefly- reflect on what happened in 2020. So, a thread on this year in science, the breakthroughs and breakdowns and where my head is at at the end of this difficult year.

Story is here:
https://t.co/48EDZj4tbk

First, read @sciencecohen's beautiful, personal story on the vaccines:

“I can stop worrying about my mom dying alone in an intensive care unit, away from all who love her. And she can stop asking whether I’ll let her play mahjong with the

The rapid development of efficacious #covid19 vaccines was clearly the science breakthrough of the year. But what about all the rest that went on in #covid19 science? My story is labeled “breakdown”, but the picture is complicated.

Little of what scientists did to respond to #COVID19 was really new. As @florian_krammer told me “We took out all our fancy tools and applied them to this virus”.
What was new was not WHAT scientists did, but HOW they did it: Research was faster, more collaborative, more open.

@florian_krammer The early diagnostic test from @c_drosten's lab, the @WHO mission report from China showing the virus could indeed be beaten, the collaboration behind the UK’s Recovery trial and the WHO’s Solidarity trial, the preprints being analysed in real time on twitter, ...

“Time is a flat circle,” Rust Cohle famously opined. I’ve always taken that as another form of the biblical proclamation that there’s nothing new under the sun. I think about that on New Year’s Day, as we unite in contrived joy at the rolling over of our astronomical odometer.

Declaring today to be no different than yesterday because of an arbitrary date change is neither novel nor insightful. But it might be worth considering in a year when we were once again reminded how craven and unreliable humanity really is—especially in the western world.

One of the great things about education is that it forces you to think about uncomfortable truths—in this case, the classic “trilemma” and the Westphalian model of statehood. Or in layman’s terms...is democracy all it’s cracked up to be? Has our focus on the individual doomed us?

It strikes me that one of our great failings as humans is that of imagination—rather, our consistent inability to imagine the comfortable, constant structures of our personal worlds crumbling. We are prisoners of the present in that way.

If I could back to 2000 and tell you that in 20 years the Twin Towers would be gone, we’d be embroiled in two decades of war, we’d have a President who supports groups that claim “6MWE” and Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island would be one of 250k+ Americans who died of a plague...

#SackWhitty seems to be trending. It's time to remind you that Whitty has been both working on the wards and leading the UK science response alongside SAGE. It's not his fault that politicians have gotten in the way. Blaming him allows the government to get away with negligence

Like any healthcare professional, I have been quizzical over certain decisions, but I doubt that Whitty has been the problem. We are led by science, but politics delays the response. We should have locked down earlier, opened later, and been more restrictive.

The #eatouttohelpout campaign was a political exercise that led to disaster. The Tier system was recognised early as a bad idea. The push from scientists and medical teams has always been to lock down earlier, restrict more. This is not nice, but nescessary.

It has been Johnson and Co who have delayed everything, tried to have their cake and eat it, sold PPI contracts and track and trace to cronies and friends. It has been certain pundits and commentators that have denied the outbreaks and slowed responses and sowed doubt.

The government will look for a scapegoat, and now they don't have the EU they will blame the 'experts' as per the brexit scheme, no blame can reflect on themselves. Note how this works, if they can't blame Whitty they will blame immigrants and mental health.

Best visual demonstration of God’s source code in action

A joint investigation between Bellingcat and The Insider, in cooperation with Der Spiegel and CNN, has discovered voluminous telecom and travel data that implicates Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in the poisoning of Alexey Navalny.

The August 2020 poisoning in the Siberian city of Tomsk appears to have happened after years of surveillance, which began in 2017 shortly after Navalny first announced his intention to run for president of Russia.

Data shows that operatives from a clandestine FSB unit, specialized in working with poisonous substances, shadowed Navalny during his trips across Russia in 2017, 2019 and 2020, traveling alongside him on more than 30 overlapping flights to the same destinations.

Navalny also believes he was victim of previous poisoning attempts, including one in the Western Russian city of Kaliningrad only a month before the near-fatal Novichok poisoning in Siberia.

Our investigation identified three FSB operatives from this clandestine unit who traveled alongside Navalny to Novosibirsk and then followed him to the city of Tomsk where he was ultimately poisoned.

Voice To Skull / Voice Of God
War Tech Goes Mainstream

Futuristic device from Israeli puts music in your head, without headphones

Sound beaming’ 3-D technology from Noveto Systems tracks ear and sends it audio using ultrasonic waves, personal