Science
The Geometric Mean
Nightingale Diagrams – Numberphile
Professor Mike Merrifield discusses diagrams popularized by Florence Nightingale.
Trust science, not scientists ⚗️
Trust science, not scientists ⚗️
Often I hear people say that they trust the science. Which is a fine and reasonable thing to say but often science and politics get mixed up as scientists want to draw conclusions based on their value system and ideological priorities rather than what research says. Fear of being labeled callous causes people to shy away from science and not being true their values. I believe in science but evidence needs to be taken in conjunction with our values and priorities.
Strange ripples on swirling hills seen in Landsat-8 images leave NASA perplexed- Technology News, Firstpost
Researchers looking for mRNA were ridiculed by colleagues. Luckily, that didn’t stop them. – Macleans.ca
But these fastest vaccines in history have been decades in the making. They’re the product of generations of scientists who built on one idea after another, and kept at it despite failed experiments, rejections, threats of deportation, a lack of funding and skepticism from contemporaries. They were inspired by the discovery of DNA: in 1951, a young English physical chemist named Rosalind Franklin took X-ray photographs that captured DNA’s helical shape; two years later, James Watson and Francis Crick of Cambridge University published the first report describing DNA’s double helix, for which they received the Nobel Prize. (Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958; her contributions were largely overlooked in her lifetime.) And they were driven not by a race to halt a raging pathogen or by the chance to patent a multi-billion-dollar drug, but by one big, irresistible question: What makes life?
What does 95% efficacy actually mean? | Live Science
You have likely heard that Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine efficacy is 95%, Moderna's is 94% and Johnson & Johnson's is 66%. But what do these numbers actually mean?
It's not just an academic question. How people understand these numbers affects how they think about the vaccine, whether they get it and how they behave after getting it, all of which have implications for the pandemic on a larger scale.
So how should people interpret these numbers?
That makes the vaccine "one of the most effective vaccines that we have," Barker told Live Science. For comparison, the two-dose measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The seasonal flu vaccine is between 40% and 60% effective (it varies from year to year, depending on that year's vaccine and flu strains), but it still prevented an estimated 7.5 million cases of the flu in the U.S. during the 2019-2020 flu season, according to the CDC.