It feels so weird to me that the small change in degrees might actually kill a virus. I mean, wouldn’t all viruses by now have become accustomed to “warmer climates”?
Or is it a cat / mouse game, our bodies being able to heat up more and them getting more fire resistant by the year. Was a fever less hot a couple of hundred years ago?
I am not an expert but I believe the temp threshold is for when proteins denature due to the ambient heat overcoming the strength of the bonds (mostly h-bonding i believe) that hold the protein in its specific tertiary structure and when you exceed it the proteins unfold/break
I read that this is a common misconception: the high heat is not enough to denature any proteins (else it would kill you too) and, what’s more surprising, it actually makes viruses/bacteria more active. But it also makes your immune system more active, with an overall win in effectiveness over the microbes, which is what makes it useful.
Yep - our bodies turn the thermostat up, increasing metabolism/cellular functions, which increases body temperature. Fatigue slows us down as our bodies redirect resources towards supporting our immune systems and producing cells to fight off the infection, vs spending that energy on being mentally and physically active.
Once our bodies get a handle on things, the fever “breaks” and we start recovery and return to homeostasis.
Viruses do adapt and mutate though. Look at all the various strains of H1N1 and SARS-COV-2.
Just because they don’t reproduce without a host cell doesn’t mean evolution doesn’t happen. If a trait emerges that is beneficial to future generations, viruses carrying that trait can infect more cells and spread further.
Usually it’s evolution itself that people give too much agency to. Mutations are a crapshoot. They can be beneficial or they can cause birth defects, sterility, prevent reaching sexual maturity, or make finding a mate excessively difficult. Or all of the above.
I asked my physics professor if it was even worth learning latex if I don’t want to pursue physics and he told me not to because it would consume so much time. On the bright side, the documents would look very well formated.
I rather prefer latex over word, but I’m a programmer and I like fiddling with things to make it work properly. It’s not just for scientific papers, any pdf file can benefit from latex even if it’s only for the proffessional look.
I don’t fully agree with Latex being time consuming. It may be, at the beginning, but after then it avoids you a lot of annoyances that come with WYSIWYG editors.
Physics professor here. I tell my students that i will give them unlimited help and assistance if they want to learn latex. I find that most students prefer latex once they get the hang of it.
I’m incredibly biased though. There is rarely a situation that I would prefer to use word over latex.
Yeah there’s definitely a learning curve. A little coding experience makes the task easier. I typically give my students a template that they put their own text into that includes a peer-reviewed journal format and an example equation, table, and figure.
There’s still the “not so short introduction to latex” out there that helped me learn the basics back in the day.
Geoscientist here. I concur. The names are punny sometimes (this example in particular), but usually non-descriptive. Exceptions for the super common things (quartz, pyrite) when used in a discussion where the chemistry is irrelevant in that specific context. Conversely, we generally don’t care about the chemistry when talking about “clays” in geophysics, so defining them chemically would become noise to the reader.
Seeing the edit, yes, but that is also wrong. As the first line of the link says, radiation therapy uses ionizing radiation and not microwaves
It is possible to use microwaves for treating cancer (see www.bmc.org/content/microwave-ablation), but the two aforementioned methods do not use them (with the caveat that both “chemotherapy” and “radiation therapy” are very broad categories)
There’s various technicalities of how and where Beyesian statistics apply to the world but I really interpreted it as meaning “if the world is ending then it doesn’t matter and if not then I’m up $50”. The Beyesian is just ruthlessly practical.
That is definitely not the joke. The joke is that the frequentist approach gives you a clearly nonsensical conclusion, because the prior probability of the sun exploding is extremely small.
Not only that, but there’s a higher chance of the detector lying than the Sun supernova-ing, so it’s probably a false positive. Yes I did just read some paragraphs from 3–4 Wikipedia articles.
Missing: any sort of physicist who will tell them both that the forward model says that the sun won’t explode for a few billion years, and so far that model hasn’t been wrong.
Too small to supernova and black hole, yes. But large enough to have a decent boom. Probably at least red giant, then a nova (explosion casting off outer layers) leaving a white dwarf remnant.
If I’m around by then, my model of medical science progress is wrong ;)
E: I’m wrong. That casting off of the outer gas envelope is not a nova. It’s just a death throe of some sort.
Minor correction: in a few billion years our sun will expand into its red giant death phase.
Also: our star can't go nova by our understanding of astrophysics. If it actually can, then we might need to throw out a lot of astrophysics, including predictions on when our star will expand.
Also also: the odds of the dice giving double 6s is MUCH higher than our sun going nova at any point in time even if it could go nova and was overdue.
Ah, gotcha. I tried learning Bayesian probability once and failed utterly. One of the only classes I just barely passed (stat was the other). My brain just barely computes it.
(1) the sun went nova (vanishingly small chance) and machine rolled truth (prob 35/36) – the joint probability of this (the product) is near zero
OR
(2) sun didn’t go nova (prob of basically one) and machine rolled lie (prob 1/36) – joint prob near 1/36
Think of joint probability as the total likelihood. It is much more likely we are in scenario 2 because the total likelihood of that event (just under 1/36) is astronomically higher than the alternative (near zero)
I’m skipping stuff but hopefully my words make clear what they math doesn’t always
I don’t like this comic because the frequentist statistician is operating with an effective n=1. You’d ask the detector 1000 more times, and use those results to get your answer.
The frequentist is unable to insert pre-conceived biases. Both will converge on the real answer if they repeat the experiment enough, but the bias being what it is, the Sun may indeed go nova on the necessary time.
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