Being concerned is not the same as taking action

I’ve ranted before about how the news is really not a very good use of one’s time. It’s the IMMINENT CRISIS SHOW all the time. And when they get their teeth into a legitimate crisis, it’s really hard to discern the right level of concern and the right modes of action.

The Poor and Marginalized Will Be the Hardest Hit by Coronavirus

Coronavirus is a great case in point. It’s about 10 times worse than the flu and spreads much more effectively. So we should be careful because the flu is already pretty bad for vulnerable people.  Is it EbolAIDS? No. Will it disrupt essential services? Almost certainly not. Will it overcrowd a medical system where excess capacity (i.e., inefficiency) has been cut at every opportunity? Possibly. What can everyone actually do? Wash hands, social distancing.

Proof of Concept of an Iron-Iron(III)Oxide Hydroxide Battery Working at Neutral PH.

Awesome! These folks did a battery very similar to the Allen lab’s, but our current performance is considerably better. Cool.

Could curly straws hold the existentialist meaning of life? Only if you are a glass of lemonade.

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Better virus questions and cat hamster wheels

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Coronavirus: Do face masks work? And how to stop it from spreading?

Facemasks might prevent inhaling infectious aerosols, but that’s not how most people catch the virus[edit: It looks like that is a common route of infection. New data, new policy. There are enough masks now. It’s time to mask up. Still, wash your hands]. If you get the virus on your hands and then touch your face, the facemask won’t do anything.

WHO-recommended handrub formulations – WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care – NCBI Bookshelf

Soap and water are the best tools to fight viruses. If a sink and soap are unavailable, then an alcohol-based hand sanitizer is an OK substitute. So I gather they are entirely sold out now. Of course. So here’s the recipe: 1 tablespoon glycerol, 3 tablespoons drug store (3%) hydrogen peroxide, and  3 2/3 cups 96% ethanol (192 proof Everclear alcohol).

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It’s easy to obsess about the coronavirus, but at least I’m reading science?

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It’s hard not to think about the Coronavirus. The first links are relevant to that. At the end, there’s more funny stuff. I want more people to be scientists and doctors. It’s important. Economically, our society can afford more doctors and scientists (as well as musicians, artists, etc.). We can afford to maintain a reserve army of competent people in case of a crisis. I wish we were thinking of things in terms of cost-benefit to society.

Coronavirus: US government test kits are faulty and ‘cannot be relied upon’  The Independent

We are not doing well in this fight so far. Based on the fact that they are using primers, the test is still based on the virus’s genome (rather than on the coat proteins). They say that one of the three primer sets is not performing as well as they want. The NEJM article I read only lists two primer sets. With a long infectious incubation, a good diagnostic test is important.

Structure of novel coronavirus spike protein solved in just weeks

Solving the structure of a virus and its proteins is the first step to doing lots of drug development. A structure lets medicinal chemists try to design small-molecule drugs to interfere with its function. Right now the cutting edge is to design antibodies in software to interfere with the virus, but that needs a structure to work with, too. It’s great that scientists can get to a structure so quickly.

IUB EMCenter – Electron Tomography

One of the relatively new methods for solving this kind of structures is to use electron tomography. The idea is to take images from a bunch of different angles and then use software to put all of the images together into a 3D picture. This link has some great animations of the image stack and how it looks three-dimensional to our brains.

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Killifish, aging, and carbon-silicon composite batteries

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Genetic study uncovers clues to explain how killifish stop aging during diapause

Killifish are really interesting organisms for scientific experiments. They are vertebrates, so they are closer to us genetically than insects or worms. But they are a lot easier to grow and care for then mice or rats. Some killifish have life spans of only three months. This makes them very attractive as aging model animals. If treatment extends their lifespan, you only have to wait 3 months to find out. With mice, you have to wait for several years.  This paper discusses another cool feature of the killifish model animal. Some kinds of killifish can go into a kind of suspended animation. I did not know that and it is fascinating.

Nano/Microstructured Silicon–Carbon Hybrid Composite Particles Fabricated with Corn Starch Biowaste as Anode Materials for Li-Ion Batteries | Nano Letters

Researchers develop high-capacity EV battery materials that double driving range

This article discusses a new composite silicon/carbon material for hosting lithium ions. Cramming lithium ions into a silicon matrix makes for an even higher energy battery than a standard lithium-ion battery. unfortunately, silicon expands under these conditions and can destroy the battery. By incorporating the silicon into a carbon matrix, these researchers increase the conductivity and the resilience of the battery to multiple charger Cycles. The result was a very nice paper. I love that they tried to make their composite material from readily available substances.

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RNA, Protein design, and the Sunday Scaries

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Step aside CRISPR, RNA editing is taking off

Although gene editing is flashy, there are advantages to a more temporary solution. Gene editing needs to be done perfectly the first time or it causes bad permanent consequences. RNA editing can have a dose-dependent, time-limited effect. If bad things start to happen, doses can be removed and the effects reversed. Not so much for DNA editing. The downside is that the RNA to be edited needs to be present in the first place. If a gene is underexpressed or absent, RNA editing won’t help.

Incorporating an allosteric regulatory site in an antibody through backbone design

Protein design has come a long way. Here’s a paper that takes an antibody and redesigns the antibody gene to make it into a sensor for Zinc ions. Basically, nature made this antibody to be an always-on grabber for a molecule called fluorescein. These folks made it grab fluorescein only if there is a bunch of Zinc present. Designing that kind of function with accurate software was a dream 20 years ago.

Poorly Drawn Lines:

Modeling Peptide-Protein Structure and Binding Using Monte Carlo Sampling Approaches: Rosetta FlexPepDock and FlexPepBind.
Imagine you want to cure a viral infection. To do that, you could make a new molecule that binds to a virus coat protein and keeps it out of human cells. But all you have is the virus’s DNA sequence. How do you do it? First, you need to be able to predict what the virus’s coat protein looks like (you can use Rosetta, a computer program for protein structure prediction). Then you need to design a binding molecule (use Rosetta some more, see the paper above). There are other strategies, of course, but this is an interesting one. And I think it’s one that will get better and faster with time.

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