Science and art came together at Del Mar City Hall on Jan. 18 for “Science Meets Art in Del Mar: Visualizing the Beauty and Complexity of the Living Cell.”
Biologists try to understand complex sub-molecular processes by creating movies in their heads. They're getting more help with that these days from Janet Iwasa, a biochemist at the University of Utah who uses 3-D animation software to visualize how cells and proteins work.
A University of Utah Health-led multi-institutional research center that studies the inner workings and vulnerabilities of HIV, the human immunodeficieny virus that causes AIDS, recently received a five-year, $28 million grant renewal from the National Institutes of Health.
Jew’s great-grandfather, M.Y. Lee, played a key role in American history, helping to build the transcontinental railroad. To unite the eastern and western sections of the railroad, Central Pacific hired roughly 15,000 Chinese laborers who each shoveled 20 pounds of rock over 400 times a day to complete the Summit Tunnel at Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Despite their backbreaking labor, when the two great railroads were united at Promontory Point, Utah, M.Y. Lee and his compatriots were excluded from the historic ceremony commemorating the union of East and West.
When Jew witnessed the U.S. Bicentennial celebrations of 1976, she identified a lack of recognition for Asian and Pacific Islander Americans. She believes that not only should these communities understand their own heritage, but that all Americans should have an awareness of their contributions and histories in the U.S. Signed into law in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, the commemorative month honors the arrival of the first known Japanese immigrant to the U.S. on May 7, 1843, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869.
Scientific American
Pandemic highlights for the week
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In a 2/19/21 newsletter for The New York Times, David Leonhardt writes that some cautionary public health messages about COVID-19 vaccines, such as messages about risks, uncertainties, caveats and side effects — all of which he calls “vaccine alarmism” — are “fundamentally misleading.” Some researchers and journalists are “instinctively skeptical and cautious,” he writes, which has led to public health messages that “emphasize uncertainty and potential future bad news.” For example, the risk of a vaccinated person becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 and passing it on to someone else who then got severe COVID-19 is very small, evidence suggests, Leonhardt writes. “You wouldn’t know that from much of the public discussion,” he writes. Ambiguity like that and all the news about variants has fueled vaccine hesitancy, according to Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, a public health researcher at the University, Leonhardt writes. The public health messages about COVID-19 vaccines instead should be: “They’re safe. They’re highly effective against serious disease. And the emerging evidence about infectiousness looks really good,” a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist is quoted as saying.
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Here’s the best chart I’ve found so far to compare the effectiveness of the Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Janssen (Johnson & Johnson), and Novavax vaccines against COVID-19 (last updated 1/31/21). The chart is published at the site “Your Local Epidemiologist,” by epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina. Other factors compared in the table: effectiveness of each vaccine against the variant first identified in the UK and the one first identified in South Africa, where known; effectiveness against severe COVID-19; status of each vaccine in the U.S. (such good news in this line of the table); status of experiments/trials in children; and the vaccine makers’ plan for addressing new viral variants. As I read in a December 2020 story at Business Insider, it can be complex to compare effectiveness and other results across these vaccine studies, because they were done differently.
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