Author: EthanL

Mapping a mice’s brain isn’t much right? Just find a mouse, kill it, and map out the brain! But it’s much harder than it sounds: “‘In the old days, people would define different regions of the brain by eye. As we get more and more data, that manual curation doesn’t scale anymore,’ Lydia Ng, an Allen Institute researcher and senior author of the Cell paper, said.” Allen Institute is a Seattle nonprofit dedicated to neuroscience. Mice are incredibly small, and they do carry diseases. Why can it be such a big discovery, though – I mean, what makes it significant? Well, the brain of a mouse is very similar to the brain of a human: “Their brains have fairly similar structures to humans, they can be trained, they breed easily, and researchers have already developed robust understandings of how their brains work.”

As COVID-19 gets worse and worse, we constantly think about vaccinations and other things to stop COVID-19. There was a vaccination being tested in January, and since then, there are no antidotes to this novel disease. There are, however, steps to improving upon the vaccines.

Now, do vaccines really work for COVID-19? Can we use something else? “A common saying in robotics is that robots are best suited for jobs too dirty, dull, or dangerous for humans.” This has brought scientists to try to use robots to solve this situation. Robots are very powerful tools: “’Instead of manual disinfection, which requires workforce mobilization and increases exposure risk to cleaning personnel, autonomous or remote-controlled disinfection robots could lead to cost-effective, fast, and effective disinfection,’ the researchers wrote. ‘New generations of robots, from macro- to microscale, could be developed to navigate high-risk areas and continually work to sterilize all high-touch surfaces.”

The first robot was Stevie. However, this idea didn’t work: “The Stevie robot already had sensors allowing it to navigate independently and stop when it detects the presence of a person. A directed light source that automatically shut down when it detected motion nearby could be a useful feature. Akara toyed with the idea of putting a disinfectant UV-C feature on Stevie, but eventually dropped it when they couldn’t find a satisfactory way to integrate it into the robot’s design.” There needs to be an improvement: “The team began drawing up plans for a new robot that would combine the navigational features they’d designed for Stevie with a UV-C light. The robot wouldn’t have any anthropomorphic [or having human characteristics] features, but would be designed to work alongside humans. They would call this one Violet.”

“Akara has focused on making Violet portable and compact enough to be able to operate in tight, crowded spaces that are otherwise hard to clean: bathrooms, waiting areas, the nooks and crannies of public transit. It also has a protective shield around the back of the light, and motion-detecting sensors so that people don’t have to vacate the area while it’s at work.” This is a very big improvement. Since Violet covered all the mistakes that Stevie had and it also had the features of Stevie, it should be successful.

In conclusion, I think scientists are too slow on inventing. Maybe the schools don’t allow students to have a lot of creativity, but that is another subject to talk about. I still think that they should be much faster at thinking of how to resolve it. At the time of the article, COVID-19 is almost half a year old (about 5-6 months)!

The short story (Landlady) is about a teenager (Bill) who is London. He wants to stay in lodging this night. When he finds a hotel called Bed and Breakfast, which he thinks is not a bad place to go to (because the owner has pets; he turns out to be wrong; they’re just stuffed animals). The landlady was nice, but a little bit too kind; that’s suspicious. Something that’s also suspicious is the fact that there are only 2 other people here, and that they have been here for years (that’s what the landlady claims).

The theme of this story is that you shouldn’t be too gullible. The reason is that anything may happen no matter what. Even ‘normal’ people are suspicious: this is because the one who is harming others is probably trying to be as normal as possible.

Bill is a cautious person, but he is not cautious enough. Even if the lady has a pet, that doesn’t mean that she is nice and caring. what if the pet is forced to stay there and look like that? Maybe there is a force controlling the pet, or what if it’s a stuffed animal (as in the story)? Bill should still be on his guard. Instead, he is off guard and unaware that anything may happen. Also, he accepts a lot of things, like the tea and the eggs (for breakfast, although he probably never gets it).

Counting the number of COVID-19 deaths is hard. It is also very dangerous. The reason is that if you detect someone with COVID-19, you might get it too. This is not good news, so we try to catch bats. Since COVID-19 comes from bats, we can measure the number of bats and try to find out how many deaths there will be. This is one purpose of catching bats. The other is to not allow the bats to even get to humans. “‘The goal is to prevent the virus from getting into the humans in the first place,’ says Marc Valitutto, lead author of the study and a former wildlife veterinarian with the Global Health Program.” It is not easy to do this: “Searching for new viruses is ‘a grueling job,’ he adds, ‘but this is what’s required if you want to prevent 90,000 deaths, which is what we’re seeing today. So, it’s a small investment monetarily compared to what we’re spending now.’” Also, “Zoonotic pathogens, which spread between animals and humans, have caused almost three[-]quarters[!] of infectious diseases in humans [in only] this century. This interaction happens because of changes in land use and other human behavior.” Bats are not rare though, “One cave that the researchers studied in Myanmar, Linno Cave, had more than half a million bats. Tourists would visit the area to watch the bats leave the cave each night. Caves in Myanmar also serve as religious sites, and local people go there to collect bat droppings for fertilizer.” This may be one of the reasons there are so many COVID-19 cases. “We have been saying within the medical community, ‘An epidemic is coming, it’s coming soon, it’s likely to be one of these three or four viral families, it has the potential to kill a lot of people,’ Murray says. ‘Until it really touches people, it’s hard to recognize how connected we are. And as long as something’s happening across an ocean and far away, sometimes it’s hard to really feel the relevance of it.’ People now realize, she says, that “we’re more connected than we think we are.”

Sleep is a very significant aspect of everybody’s life. We spend about 1/3 of our day sleeping! But why do we sleep so much? And is sleep so important? If not, why do we sleep so much? Sleeping is important. It’s said everywhere: in ads, articles, etc. But why do we sleep about 1/3 of the day? I mean, isn’t that redundant? If you’re an adult, yes. How much you sleep varies depending on how you are biologically hardwired and it also depends on your body’s current needs. So how much should we sleep? “For newborn babies, the ‘may be appropriate’ range is from 11 to 18 hours. For seniors over 65, that range is from five to nine hours.”

Counting COVID deaths are straightforward most times. This is because the lung will have much more weight. The extra weight is a result of fluid and cell detritus from the damaged lung tissues. The other ones are hard: “‘The challenge is knowing who died of COVID-19 versus who died with the virus that causes COVID-19,'” Faust told Live Science.

Is it underreporting or overreporting? Both are not good, but we cannot be perfect. Underreporting is bad because it allows people to be less scared of the virus, while there are many more people with coronavirus. Overreporting is bad because it may allow people to panic. “Both undercounts and overcounts of COVID-19 deaths are possible, Wolfson said, but it’s not yet clear which is more likely, or whether they might simply balance each other out. Fowkes said that based on her experience, it’s more likely that COVID-19 deaths are being missed than overcounted.”