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Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.  Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S. This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”

Continue Reading.

#bioscience #clinical studies #scientific method #vaccines

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Final report of the commercial starship Nostromo, third officer reporting. The other members of the crew - Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash, and Captain Dallas - are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up. This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.

ALIEN 1979 dir. Ridley Scott

#alien #alien (1979) #gifsets #alien day

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"I miss when movies weren't political-"

ALIEN is about a megacorporation coercing some salvagers into transporting a dangerous creature without telling them what it is, all because the creature could be a great bioweapon for them. When a survivor of this failed transport mission wants reparations, they screw her over to avoid a scandal.

ROBOCOP is about another mega-corporation experimenting with a cop's body and declaring him their property, trying to reduce him to an obedient killing machine who can maintain the status quo for them.

JURASSIC PARK is about a rich billionaire going all out to make a dinosaur-themed amusement park, not caring about the real-world implications of resurrecting giant lizards. He also underpays ONE guy to maintain the entire park's security systems so predictably, that one guy betrays him at a crucial moment.

The best movies weave their politics with plot & character, so you can enjoy them as entertainment but can also notice the themes. Movies without themes wind up being all spectacle and no substance, just noise and color like Michael Bay's Transformers franchise. Yeah, they make money, but they'll be forgotten in 2 generations.

#science fiction #subversive literature

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The Sun on April 23, 2024 // Steven Christensen

#the Sun #astronomy #astrophotography

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Voyager 1 Approaches Jupiter (1979)

This gif records the Voyager 1 spacecraft's Jupiter approach from January to February, 1979.

Notice the difference in speed and direction of the various atmospheric zones and bands. Their interaction creates vast storms in the dynamic Jovian atmosphere.

NASA created this time-lapse sequence from 66 images, each taken once per Jupiter rotation (about 10-hour days) - every time Jupiter longitude 68W passed under the spacecraft. The planet grows larger as Voyager approaches from 58 million kilometers to 31 million kilometers away.

Good news: Our intrepid little explorer - now interstellar! - has resumed sending and receiving messages!

#Voyager 1 #voyager spacecraft #NASA #Jupiter #space exploration

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To the Stars Through Stories

We're now @adastra-sf here on Tumblr - follow our new blog for daily posts about SF, writing, science, and other cool stuff.

Check out our website at AdAstra-SF.com

We're also on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube

Want to learn to write publishable fiction?

We're currently taking applications for our Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop, which runs June 16 - 29, 2024. Apply now to make your writing soar!

#writing workshops #writing tips #science fiction #speculative fiction #there's still time!

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SOUNDS OF THE UNIVERSE

Oppenheimer (2023) // Scientific American x // Britannica x // Saturn Sounds x // The Realm of Daphnis x // Youtube x // Scientific American x // Musica Universalis x

#music of the spheres #physics is magic #sonification #astronomy #everything sings

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Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.  Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S. This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”

Continue Reading.

#vaccines #good news #public health #biotech #biotechnology

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Happy Earth Day from the Moon

comic by zen pencils: "Neil Armstrong: A giant among men"

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."

- Neil Armstrong

#neil armstrong #earth from space #apollo program #quotes #earth day #comics

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Many screenwriters assemble a fantasy cast as they write the script. It can help to bring characters alive, and Neil is no exception. In the case of Good Omens, pursuing a vision in memory of the novel's co-writer, he set out to turn the dream into a reality.

'I had Michael Sheen and David Tennant in mind when I was writing,' he says. 'I was half way through Episode Three, scripting the scene in the church, and I suddenly decided that I wanted David. And I wrote it as if I was going to get David. It was a combination of the physicality of the character and knowing he could land every line. You write different kinds of dialogue for different kinds of actors,' he continues, 'and there's a specific kind of dialogue that you write when you know they're going to land it. You can be more playful, for example. So I hoped I'd get David when I wrote Crowley going, "Ow ow ow!" as he walked down the church aisle, and then delivering this entire speech wile having to hop from foot to foot. That's not the kind of thing you'd give most actors unless you know they were good enough to do it. - Neil Gaiman, as quoted in The Nice and Accurate Good Omens TV Companion

#writing tips #characters #writing process #good omens #imagine the actor you want in the role

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Another related concept appears before many of these in Ray Bradbury's story, "The Exiles" (originally published in Maclean's, Sept 1949, as "The Mad Wizards of Mars").

The central idea is that fictional characters, who live on Mars, are dying as they're no longer being read (there's a book-burning movement back on Earth).

You can find it reprinted (and revised) in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Jan 1950) and A Pleasure to Burn (2010), then under the new title in The Illustrated Man (1951), R Is for Rocket (1962), Bradbury Stories (2003), and A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (2005).

Wonderful story!

Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?

I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.

Thank you!

That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.

Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!

(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)

#Ray Bradbury #power of belief #science fantasy #literary history #religion #modern mythology

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Happy Earth Day from Mars!

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this image of the Earth-Moon system as seen from Mars - 88 million miles away!

#earth day #earth moon system #earth from space #space exploration #Mars #mars reconnaissance orbiter

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Holy shit, they got Voyager 1 working again!

15 billion miles away and NASA was able to tweak code packages on one of the onboard computers and it worked and Voyager 1 is sending signals back to earth for the first time since November.

Incredible!

#voyager spacecraft #space exploration #good news

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Happy Earth Day!

Enjoy a bunch of gorgeous NASA Earth Day posters:

Find more on their Earth Day page: X

#earth day #NASA #science art #posters #international earth day

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iterative study and practice and critique and revision and study and experiment and practice and critique and revision (etc.) makes perfect

Grumble grumble…

#art muse #comics #writing tips

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from inside a cave in the Ozarks in totality

l Joshua Kwekel l Ozark National Forest

#solar eclipse #caves #astrophotography

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Fogbows are like rainbows without color. Also known as white rainbows, you can only see them in the fog if the sun is at your back. Though rare, they occur when water droplets that would normally form a rainbow are too small to reflect the light wavelengths that create colors. Source Source 2 Source 3

#vision #light #optics #fogbows