By now most people have heard that AstraZeneca, a UK pharmaceutical, working with Oxford University, are one of the major companies developing a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, and also that they have had to pause their Phase 3 clinical trial because a subject came down with an inflammatory disorder. Let’s put this into some important context.

The basic facts are that the AstraZeneca vaccine did very well in Phase 1 and 2 preliminary trials. These are smaller trials mostly about safety, with the Phase 2 trial including some preliminary (usually open label) efficacy data. These trials are basically used to determine if it is safe and worth it to proceed to a huge Phase 3 trial. The Phase 3 trial includes 30,000 subjects. When you increase the number of subjects by orders of magnitude then you are likely to pick up increasingly rare side effects. That is one of the main points of this staged approach to research. Then, of course, a drug or vaccine might be marketed to millions of people, and still more rare side effects will crop up. There is simply no way to avoid this – it’s math. That is why so-called Phase 4 trials follow reported side effects after market.

But also, when you are studying 30,000 subjects all the things that normally happen to people will happen at the background frequency. Some of them will get sick during the trial by chance alone, having nothing to do with the study drug or vaccine. So every potential adverse effect is tracked, determined if it is biologically likely that it is related to the experimental treatment, and then statistically analyzed to see if it is above the background rate.

In this case one subject developed transverse myelitis, which is inflammation in one segment of the spinal cord. This will cause weakness and numbness at that level and below, therefore usually affecting the legs. The background incidence of transverse myelitis is about 1.3-4.6 cases per million people per year (this does not include people known to have an autoimmune disease like MS that causes transverse myelitis). If we take 4 cases per million per year, that translates to 0.033 cases per 33,000 subjects over three months. That is the probability that one of the subjects in that trial would have randomly developed transverse myelitis. That may seem really unlikely, but actually you have to consider the probability of a subject developing any disease, not just transverse myelitis. When you add it all up it’s actually pretty likely that one or several people in the trial would randomly develop a disease not related to the vaccine. In fact, this is the second person in this particular trial to develop a serious potential adverse event resulting in a pause of the trial.

Continue Reading »

I was recently sent this article about a new miscibility gaps alloy (MGA) thermal storage material. The technology is, perhaps, an incremental advance and may be useful for grid storage, but the article itself represents, in my opinion, horrible science communication. It seems like what you get when a general reporter, not trained in science journalism, reports on a complicated science topic. It didn’t give me any of the information I wanted, didn’t put this new technology into meaningful or accurate context, and didn’t explain some basic concepts involved.

Here is the basic story – a University of Newcastle (in Australia) team has developed an MGA material that could potentially be useful in grid storage by serving as a medium for thermal energy storage.  They also describe what an MGA material is by using an analogy to a chocolate chip cookie, where the chocolate chips melt when heated, storing most of the energy, but the rest of the cookie remains solid. That is about all the information you get from this article, stated in two sentences. The chocolate chip cookie analogy is fair, but following up with a slightly more technical definition would have been nice. MGAs are mixed materials where there is a range of temperatures (more specifically a region of the phase diagram that includes both pressure and temperature) where the different materials are in two or more phases. The rest of the article just states over and over again in different ways, like this is a new idea, why grid storage would be useful.

Why are MGAs particularly useful for thermal energy storage? First, the particles that melt store a lot of energy in the phase change while the particles that don’t melt can maintain the solidity of the overall material. But further, because of the liquid components, these materials have great thermal conductivity, so they don’t need infrastructure just to conduct the heat through the material. The Newcastle MGA is supposed to be an innovation because it is made from readily available material that is non-toxic.

I came away from the article with lots of important questions, all unanswered, and had to research them for myself. I was able to find information about MGAs in general, but not the Newcastle MGA specifically.

My first question, which you should ask about any proposed grid storage option, is – what is the round-trip efficiency? There are lots of grid storage options (which I review here), none of which are perfect. We need to know about each – what is the cost, how scalable are they, are they location-specific, what are the environmental effects, what are the energy losses over time, and what is the round-trip efficiency (the loss of energy from converting grid electricity to storage and then back to grid electricity). The best round trip efficiency is from pumped hydro, about 80-90%, but this is very limited by location and has serious environmental implications. Battery storage is not bad, at 60-70% round trip efficiency, but this is still an expensive option with lots of material waste and a limited lifespan.

Continue Reading »

I previously wrote that the flat Earth movement is the mother of all conspiracies – it essentially is the ultimate conspiracy in that, if you believe that the world is actually flat then you also have to believe that there has been a massive conspiracy involving millions of people all of the world over centuries. If “they” can lie to us about the shape of the world, then they can lie to us about anything. Once you have been convinced that the spherical nature of the Earth is a grand conspiracy, then you can believe anything. Facts, expertise, authority all cease to exist. And that, I think, is the point. That is the appeal of flat Eartherism – it gives you permission to believe anything you want, to reject any claim, any fact, out of hand. You have the freedom to construct reality the way you wish, and can dispense with the tedious part of having to deal with actual reality.

Recently another conspiracy has been getting more attention, and may have eclipsed the flat Earth theory as the most extreme conspiracy. This one is more of a politically-based rather than science-based conspiracy, but that is not as critical as you might think. Phenomenologically they are the same, and the subject matter is actually secondary. But in any case, the Q conspiracy holds that Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats are part of a world-wide cabal of Satan-worshiping cannibalistic pedophiles who are trying to secretly take over the world. Further, Trump is actually secretly a genius who is working behind the scenes, with Mueller and in some incarnations with JFK Jr. who is secretly still alive, to uncover this cabal and bring them to justice (an event they call the “Storm”), and when he does he will usher in a golden age.

As with the flat Earth, the first reaction someone might have to hearing these conspiracies is that they are incredibly dumb. They are epically stupid, in a childish way. That may be true, but if you stop there then you miss what is actually going on. Also, it is very tempting to conclude that because the conspiracy theories themselves are mindbogglingly ridiculous, that people who believe them must be themselves “epically stupid”. But I don’t think that’s true, and that conclusion misses the actual phenomenon at work.

Continue Reading »

Of course “impossible” is a relative term here. What is happening is that our knowledge of black holes is greatly expanding because we have a new tool for observing them – gravitational wave detectors. In fact, gravitational wave astronomy is a new science, and we are still on the very steep part of the learning curve.

But let’s back up and give some background. First – what’s a black hole? These are massive objects, mostly stellar remnants. At the end of a star’s life, when it has consumed all the fuel it is capable of fusing, the outward pressure from the fusion is gone and the inward force of gravity prevails. For small suns, like our own, they simply collapse down to a white dwarf, which has, for example, the mass of our sun but the size of the Earth. What keeps a white dwarf from collapsing even further is called degeneracy pressure. The simple (although not complete) explanation for this is the Pauli Exclusion Principle – particles cannot occupy the same state and location at the same time.

Larger stars with larger remnants collapse down even further, overcoming the degeneracy pressure and collapsing down to a neutron star. Again, the simplified version of this is that the electrons and protons merge to form neutrons, so the entire remnant is like one giant neutron. The mass limit for collapsing into a neutron star is about 1.44 solar masses. But also, stars big enough to leave behind a neutron star are also big enough to go supernova. This means the star itself has to be bigger than three solar masses, because much of the mass will be thrown off during the supernova and a smaller remnant will be left behind. Neutron stars are held up by neutron degeneracy pressure.

Even bigger stars that leave behind a stellar remnant of about 3 solar masses or larger, which means the star itself was about 20 solar masses or larger, result in a black hole. The neutron star of 3 M or greater overcomes even neutron degeneracy pressure – in fact, the gravitational force in this situation is greater than any other force we know of in the universe. Nothing can stop that remnant from continuing to collapse, all the way down to a single point in space – a singularity. That is a black hole.

Continue Reading »

A new review of the published literature regarding the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting has, from my perspective, entirely predictable results. By this I mean they are consistent with previous dieting research and there are no surprises. They are also consistent with one of the major themes of this blog – you cannot get away from fundamental realities by making cosmetic changes. You cannot change the laws of physics or the nature of biology. This often translates to the fact that, as a general rule, there are rarely easy or simple answers to complex problems.

When it comes to dieting, researchers generally focus on several basic outcomes – weight maintenance, heart health, and glucose metabolism. You can also look at overall health outcomes, such as the risk of death over time. In terms of weight, there is only one factor that seems to matter – calories in vs calories out. This is the unavoidable reality, and there does not seem to be a way to game the system to significantly alter this equation. Proponents of special diets will argue that varying the proportion of macronutrients (fat, protein, and sugars) can affect metabolism. Some ironically argue that their recommended macronutrient balance will make metabolism “more efficient”. This is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to weight, however. Efficiency could mean getting more use out of fewer calories. If you want to waste energy (i.e. fat) you want to be inefficient.

But the bottom line of decades of research is that any effect of diets that vary macronutrient ratios on metabolism seem to have an insignificant effect on weight. You simply cannot get away from the massive factor of calories in vs calories out by slightly tweaking metabolism.

What does this current review show? Exactly that. First they find, as with most prior research, that the two diets do result in short-term weight loss. Pretty much all diets do. However, they also found that long term research (meaning up to 12 months) show that any short term advantage is lost and not sustainable. Since the goal of weight management is long term control, a short term reversible and small advantage does not contribute to this goal. It may, in fact, backfire. It is a distraction from effective long term behavioral changes. And some studies show that the rebound weight gain is greater. The review also concludes that any short term weight loss may be due to simply reducing calories, not any metabolic change. That is still the overall conclusion of the totality of dieting research – that any observed weight loss is due to reduced calories and not some other factor.

Continue Reading »