81–90 of 156 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the geopolitical ramifications if this is indeed a bioweapon?
Maybe this is naive, but I would assume if it was a bio-weapon it would be a lot more deadly.
Good viruses kill after a few days of showing few (if any) symptoms so that they can maximise their spread.
This is the difference between epidemic and pandemic viral contagions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the geopolitical ramifications if this is indeed a bioweapon?
Maybe this is naive, but I would assume if it was a bio-weapon it would be a lot more deadly.
Why was this submission suddenly so heavily penalized by the mod(s)?
I wonder if this could happen because someone with a retrovirus got both infections at once?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the conclusion of this paper is that the odds of this virus coming to be naturally are very small. Which is a very scientific way of saying "we think this was man-made". But, that is what the paper is saying. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence is what I think. I feel the evidence here is quite small, but I'm not a bio-data-scientist.
Is it an extraordinary claim? The sequence matching should be easy to verify as the genome has been published. If the sequences are short or common enough maybe it would be a more likely coincidence. That said: What are the priors on a "natural" virus erupting in the only city in China with a level 4 biohazard facility? Source: http://english.www.gov.cn/state_council/ministries/2018/01/0...
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This has been pointed out in previous threads, but this Twitter is full of alarmist unscientific BS and it appears to be spammed with some regularity on HN recently.
The Twitter user seems legit. The Internet in general is full of BS yet we don't guilt-by-association the entire Internet.
It would seem that there were doubts around the content in the Wikipedia entry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
From 2K followers to 64K+ followers in less than 7 days! https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/drericding
As predicted in Contagion (2011). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film)#Scientif...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it an extraordinary claim? The sequence matching should be easy to verify as the genome has been published. If the sequences are short or common enough maybe it would be a more likely coincidence. That said: What are the priors on a "natural" virus erupting in the only city in China with a level 4 biohazard facility? Source: http://english.www.gov.cn/state_council/ministries/2018/01/0...
So if it's not extraordinary it's still going to require evidence, which without peer review we still pretty much have none.
Just wanted to clarify the language here.
That's very, very disturbing. If this is an engineered virus, why as a race do we keep doing these things to ourselves? Do we _really_ think that weapons of mass destruction won't be turned on us? Is our hubris so high that we think no one else can replicate what we built?
How do we know someone else hasn't already built what we've built? They don't exactly post these things on Facebook...
....which is why we have to build it too.
