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A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

nytimes.com

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Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#111

Post by Y_Y »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #90
breck wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the source code, AFAICT: https://github.com/DavidPierreEnard/Gene_Set_Enrichment_Pipe... I've been involved in GWAS before, so have an inkling of what's going on. I love the creativity in this paper. The stuff is super fascinating, but the pipelines are still very primitive—so I encourage programmers to get involved in bioinformatics if you like this stuff! In the future I expect we see work like this accompa…

It's written in Perl.

Perl is (amazingly) still a thing in 2021 in quantitative biology, at least in big national labs I'm familiar with.

See e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Perl-Bioinformatics-James-T...

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#112

Post by Sebb767 »

outside1234 wrote: post #73
luhn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL you can likely survive a landing at terminal velocity just by orienting yourself feet-first and bending your knees.

And probably ending up being unable to walk. That's what the OP is getting at.

Well, to be fair, you'll be unable to walk either way.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#113

Post by LocalPCGuy »

lamontcg wrote: post #104
LocalPCGuy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree with you (minus the rage) and agree re: being vaccinated at this point means it's pretty much over for individuals and their associates who are also vaccinated. The only quibble I take is that, while it's likely you (and by proxy, the experts you cite) are correct that we won't go back to square one, it is still a (low) possibility. Probably low enough that it isn't worth concerning yourself with, e…

> it is still a (low) possibility. It really isn't. An escape mutation which completely evaded T-cells would write a whole new chapter in immunology. It on par with worrying about a jet engine falling on my head right now. There's risks that are low enough that they aren't worth worrying about or particularly acknowledging.

From what I've read, the possibility is higher than some other random virus popping up at this moment in time. That's all I'm saying. That could be on par with the jet engine example, but if so, then all the people saying we need to learn from Covid and adjust our immunology strategies are worrying about low possibility items also.

Anyways, I'll defer to you on this, I'm definitely not an expert, and you were willing to post sources and I'm not gonna try to dredge up the information I'm basing these comments on. Plus I haven't had the time to digest the sources. So add one more chink in my wall of being back to "normalcy" :P

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#114

Post by wutbrodo »

avs733 wrote: post #23
autokad wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, this is where hackernews has come. All the user stated was "its hard to take the article seriously with such an obvious agenda", something along those lines. and the community thought that was flaggable? this is where we come? welcome to the great censorship. Believe in all that is holy from a political left, and disbelievers shall be punished and removed from conversation. If you can't see agenda painting in th…

calling out stupidity is not censorship. Removing stupidity from a conversation on a private website is not censorship. discussing 'agenda' is not a neutral comment or a meaningful contribution to discourse on this topic, it is stupidity.

> Removing stupidity from a conversation on a private website is not censorship.

Is this not censorship? It sounds like you're assuming that "censorship" is by definition illegitimate or morally wrong, but I don't think this is inherent to the word (except to the extent that we still live in a generally liberal, pro-speech society). HN removing opinions from its boards seems like it clearly qualifies as censorship, even if you agree with the removal.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#115

Post by newacct583 »

viach wrote: post #53

Is it a best practice nowadays to use word "coronavirus" for all the viruses with the particular molecular structure pattern instead of word "flu"?

It's absolutely not appropriate to call these "flu". That is a contraction of "influenza", which is an entirely different family of viruses.

And yes, the family is named "coronavirus". The one we're dealing with now is a strain properly calls SARS-Cov-2, which causes a disease officially termed COVID-19.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#116

Post by idiotsecant »

wahern wrote: post #76
whimsicalism wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am generally surprised by the inability of journalists to grok research papers, but I think the age thing goes the other direction than what you suggest. General scientific/numeric literacy among people who don't work in science seems higher in the younger generation than the older to me.

Younger people will remember their college education better, which will also happen to be more up-to-date with contemporary perspectives and techniques. But that's knowledge, not a skill. Good journalists rely on experts, and better journalists rely on multiple experts (for a topic, but also over time) to derive a sense of what's unknown and uncertain in a field. On social media nothing is ever unknown because there'…

Boy you sure linked some concepts here.

The news isn't more partisan because young reporters are introducing some kind of hyper-partisanship. Young reporters are not in charge. Old money people are. Old money people see that hyper-partisanship makes money because old people with money enjoy consuming it.

Young people are much, much less partisan on average than older media consumers and that isn't something new. The older you get the more entrenched, generally, you get in your views.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#117

Post by newacct583 »

usefulcat wrote: post #102

"Studies on each of these coronaviruses indicate that they jumped into our species from bats or other mammals." Has this been proven for covid 19? I thought it was still a theory at best.

It remains a "theory" in all cases, except ones where we've managed to actually observe the jump.

But yes: consensus among experts remains that this is a natural virus, precisely because (as per e.g. the linked article!) such pandemics are literally as old as life. We knew a big human pandemic was going to show up sooner or later, because it happens to some species or another every year or two.

It's true we can't rule out the lab theory as much as we'd like to. There was a good WSJ article a few weeks back claiming that western intelligence sources knew about a disease cluster among staff at the lab which would be consistent with the start of the pandemic. That at least is something to hang the more conspiratorial hats on.

But really, no one serious was "surprised" by covid in any meaningful way. It was going to happen.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#118

Post by murgindrag »

jacquesm wrote: post #94
UncleOxidant wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I didn't quite understand why it should make us worry. We do have a lot more tools at our disposal than people had 20,000 years ago - vaccines, antivirals (in a few years), knowing to social distance, etc.

Population density, commercial air travel. Social distancing is something that people even now are loathe to engage in, fortunately more and more people 'get it' but there are still plenty that do not. Arguably that's Darwin at work, but still.

Population is the big one. 7 billion people today means we have many times more opportunities for viruses to come up, combine, and mutate than we once did. I'm not sure which is the bigger phenomenon.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#119

Post by cyberlurker »

tablespoon wrote: post #39
HarryHirsch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They absolutely did but how frequently? The first villages in China are attested 7500 BCE, that's 10 kyr later, if the dating is correct.

> They absolutely did but how frequently? The first villages in China are attested 7500 BCE, that's 10 kyr later, if the dating is correct. There were obviously viruses before urbanization (especially given there are viruses that spread in wild animal populations), they probably just spread more slowly. At the minimum, there was probably regular deliberate contact/mixing between adjacent groups to avoid too much inbr…

Nitpicking here, but there probably wasn’t anything we would define as “marriage”. That Wikipedia article says “copulate” instead. Now I want to go down the wiki rabbit hole about the history of human marriage.

Also, I’d imagine there were at least far fewer viruses before urbanization. My understanding is early civilization was really good for diseases.

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