The mysterious coronavirus has a new name (The World Health Organization (WHO) changed it from 2019-nCoV to COVID-19), a new tally of victims (over 63,000 in mainland China at the time of this writing) and a new potential cause. No, the experts haven’t eliminated bats or another animal obtained at a market in Wuhan, or animals like the pangolin which are used in traditional Chinese medicine.
A scientist in England claims that the deadly virus was brought to Earth by a meteorite that crashed in China last year. Viral panspermia?
A suspected falling meteorite was caught on tape in many places in northeast China on October 11. The suspected meteorite fell in just a few seconds and illuminated the night sky:
On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors’ exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6.
But a Canadian health monitoring platform, the Blue Dot, had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31, 2019.
An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus
“The herpes viruses were reactivated in more than half of the crew aboard Space Shuttle and International Space Station (ISS) missions.
“NASA astronauts endure weeks or even months exposed to microgravity and cosmic radiation – not to mention the extreme G forces of take-off and re-entry,” said senior author Dr. Satish K. Mehta of KBR Wyle at the Johnson Space Center.
“This physical challenge is compounded by more familiar stressors like social separation, confinement and an altered sleep-wake cycle.”
Mehta and colleagues monitor the physiological impact of spaceflight by analyzing saliva, blood and urine samples from the astronauts. What they found was problematic.
“During spaceflight there is a rise in secretion of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which are known to suppress the immune system. In keeping with this, we find that astronaut’s immune cells – particularly those that normally suppress and eliminate viruses – become less effective during spaceflight and sometimes for up to 60 days after.”
These circumstances could be further compounded by the stressful environment the astronauts find themselves in.
“To date, 47 out of 89 (53%) astronauts on short space shuttle flights, and 14 out of 23 (61%) on longer ISS missions shed herpes viruses in their saliva or urine samples,” reported Mehta.
“These frequencies – as well as the quantity – of viral shedding are markedly higher than in samples from before or after flight, or from matched healthy controls.”
“Ever since the discovery of the first exoplanet, astronomers have made steady progress towards finding and probing planets in the habitable zone of their host stars, where the conditions could be right for liquid water to form and life to sprawl. Results from the Kepler mission indicate that the occurrence rate of habitable-zone Earths and super-Earths may be as high as 5–20%. Despite this abundance, probing the conditions and atmospheric properties on any of these habitable-zone planets is extremely difficult and has remained elusive to date. Here, we report the detection of water vapor and the likely presence of liquid water clouds in the atmosphere of the 8.6 M⊕ habitable-zone planet K2-18b”.
Sir Fred Hoyle was one of the outstanding astrophysicists of all time. He was the pioneer scientist to initiate the concept of Stellar Nucleosynthesis. He was known for many controversial theories such as Steady-State theory, Quasi Steady-State theory, Panspermia, Molecular Cloud etc.
Later, many of his theories were accepted by a major part of the scientific community among which Panspermia and Molecular Cloud are the most popular ones.
Science Media Centre, IISER Pune has produced this documentary based on Sir Fred Hoyle’s life and work as a tribute to his enormous contribution to cosmology.
Credit: Some of the photographs used in this video were captured by Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe and his family (one in the Lake District, walking in Sri Lanka, at the blackboard etc).
Robert Hooke – https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/images/robert-hooke-2.jpg
I thought my subscribers would like to know that I have been invited to open the new Observatory and Telescope at the Robert Hooke Centre at Westminster School London on 18th January 2019 with an address “Interstellar Spectroscopy and the Dawn of a New Paradigm”
Westminster School London was founded in 1600 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and is arguably the most famous in the Western world. It was founded during the lifetime of Galileo and counts among its past pupils John Locke and Hooke amongst others!
All the best for 2019
Chandra
Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe
Honorary Professor University of Buckingham, Buckingham, UK Honorary Professor University of Ruhuna, Matara, Sri Lanka Honorary Professor Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, Sri Lanka
The full length talk of Dr. Gilbert Levin, lead team member Viking LR 1976 as he discusses how we’ve already detected life on Mars with his experiment. Presented by Exolance an Explore Mars project.
