search results matching tag: mosquito

» channel: learn

go advanced with your query
Search took 0.000 seconds

    Videos (114)     Sift Talk (5)     Blogs (16)     Comments (208)   

How to save 51B lives for 68 cents with simple Engineering

dag says...

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

It's from here:
This quote is attributed to Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg. In a late 80s PBS documentary, he said half of all human deaths 'may' have been due to malaria.

While it sounds astounding, it's plausible when you think about it. 93% of all humans ever born are dead. But it's a highly speculative business starting from how many people have ever lived.

Prof Carl Haub has come up with an estimate of 108 billion people since 50,000 BC. And only 6.5% of these are alive today. How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?

So did malaria cause the death of roughly 54 billion people? We can speculate. More than 96 billion of these 108 billion lived between 8000 BC and 1900 AD. For malaria to have caused the death of 54 billion people, it should have kept up a phenomenal rate of 5.4 million deaths per year in the last 10,000 years.

WHO estimates of 650,000 deaths per year now seem wildly off the mark. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded a study to find out how many deaths occur due to malaria in today's day and age. The number was 1.24 million in 2010! http://www.bbc.com/news/health-1...

So it's certainly plausible that malaria could have killed five times as many in an age pre-dating modern medicine when most of the world lived as communes along with their cattle and herds.

Also, the longevity of the parasite plasmodium, which causes malaria. Studies have revealed that it's been around since the time of the dinosaurs. And certainly been around from the beginning of our story. http://www.malaria.com/questions...

Entirely plausible!

https://www.quora.com/The-Human-Race-and-Condition-Is-it-true-that-mosquitoes-have-killed-more-than-half-of-all-the-people-who-have-ever-lived

robdot said:

Why start out with these moronic claims? Half the population has definitely not died from malaria, that's just fucking idiotic, not to mention the 51 billion number....wtf.

CRISPR-Cas9 ("Mr. Sandman" Parody) | A Capella Science

eric3579 says...

CRISPR-Cas9
Bring me a gene
Encoding for a specific protein
Make a few snips at this coded locus
You work so well inside a streptococcus
Cas9
I'm so alone
Without your scissors in my chromosome
Cut me up and do it clean
CRISPR-Cas9 bring me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9
Keep me a gene
A viral sequence you've already seen
Chopped into bits and stored as genomic
With clustered repeats
That are palindromic
Cas9
Bind with this code
Use it to target infections of old
Immunized like a vaccine
CRISPR-Cas9 keep me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9
Cut me a gene
With a precision that I've never seen
Unzip a strand and interrogate it
Seek out your sequence until you locate it
Cas9
Lock into place
And do your job as endonuclease
Chop just like a guillotine
CRISPR-Cas9 cut me a gene

Snip snap!
CRISPR-Cas9
CRISPR-Cas9

CRISPR-Cas9
Bring me a gene
By commandeering my repair routine
A strand to match your severed location
For some homologous recombination
Cas9
Cheap and precise
Rewriting genomes from microbes to mice
And soon the humble human being
CRISPR-Cas9 bring me a gene

CRISPR-Cas9
Give us a gene
Give us a miracle like that one Nazarene
‘Cause giving the lame their legs and the blind their sight is
In view for dystrophy and retinitis
But CRISPR-Cas9
What if you fall
Outside our power and inside us all
That really could incite a scene

When this terrible wonderful power unsettling
Opens the door to unethically meddle
Is ev’ry congenital malady bettered
Sufficient to warrant genetics unfettered
To modify man in the manner of Gattaca
Raise up a mammoth or make a rattata
Dramatical medical means to eradicate aging
Or cancer or make a fanatic
A mass epidemic a weapon nefarious
Single mosquito to wipe out malaria
Send in a viral infection to ferry a
Cure to the cells of an HIV carrier
Freed of disease as we're free to uncover
What nature and accident failed to discover
And free to be other than
All that we ever have been

CRISPR-Cas9
CRISPR-Cas9

Oh CRISPR-Cas9
Bring us a gene
You wondrous ribonucleoprotein
You have the power to vanquish or save us
Who would have thought that the microbe that gave us
Cas9
S. pyogenes
The source of strep and flesh-eating disease
Housed this marvellous machine
Full of uses great and obscene
CRISPR-Cas9 bring us
Please don't sting us
Cas9 bring us a gene

With adenine
And thiamine
Incite a scene
Cas9 bring us a gene!

Did Donald Trump Bribe the Florida Attorney General?

poolcleaner says...

The state seal thing is true. My family comes from the bayou of Florida. What it doesn't show is the alligators who help dispose of the bodies out behind the trailer.

And the mosquitos which torment the body disposers -- which ironically happen to be the state bird! State tree has a rope hangin' from it, just sayin'.

On a less funny note, I think UF's mascot is a hurricane? No, that's UM. UF is the alligators. FSC's mascot is a deadly moccasin...

So pretty much all the scary shit that will fucking kill you if you get near it. State seal might as well have a body being disposed of in a swamp and the state bird might as fucking well be a big blood fat mosquito.

(State bird is actually a mockingbird and a Seminole is on the state seal.)

Climatologist Emotional Over Arctic Methane Hydrate Release

newtboy says...

Solution, no. Semi-mitigation....possibly if it could be done, but there would be tradeoffs, it wouldn't be a simple 'now it's only CO2' solution....as if that was a solution, there's still too much CO2 too.

I'm intrigued by the engineered bacteria idea...at this point it couldn't be much worse than just releasing all the methane (OK, it could), but it's like that one time I went to the lake to bone my girlfriend, but the mosquitos were going crazy and she said there is no way. By the time people decided it was worth the risk and started developing them, it would be too late anyway, but we might mitigate the extinction event for the insects....who knows?

Um....uninhabitable for 100 years? How do you figure? It's likely that when the ocean temps rise enough, and are acidic enough, most sea life dies, sinks, rots, and releases massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide killing anything that's left.
(WIKI-Kump, Pavlov and Arthur (2005) have proposed that during the Permian–Triassic extinction event the warming also upset the oceanic balance between photosynthesising plankton and deep-water sulfate-reducing bacteria, causing massive emissions of hydrogen sulfide which poisoned life on both land and sea and severely weakened the ozone layer, exposing much of the life that still remained to fatal levels of UV radiation.)
Along with all the other damages of climate change, and the apocalypse that >7 billion people will cause on the way out, it's going to be way longer than 100 years before humans can live off nature if ever....way way longer.

We are hard to kill, but we aren't extremophiles. We'll die, or become mole people, but some other life will continue.

greatgooglymoogly said:

So Newtboy, would attempting to burn all this methane as it is released(converting to CO2) be a possible solution, assuming it was possible from an engineering point of view? Apart from that, maybe bioengineered organisms designed to eat the methane could make an impact.

I'm not hopeful, but I'm pretty sure there are enough ultra-rich people with the resources to save a small portion of humanity while the earth in uninhabitable for 100 years, that humans will not die out. Viruses are hard to kill(according to Agent Smith)

ahimsa (Member Profile)

newtboy says...

Absolutely not a straw man when the statement it contradicts was "The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.”
At what point do you decide (for yourself, the only one you get to decide for) 'sentience' exists? Shrimp? Crabs? If so, then logically also mosquitos, gnats, and ticks.
Also, why have YOU decided so capriciously that 'sentience' is the measure of a life's worth? What, if anything, do you base that decision on? Perhaps a sense of biological superiority?

BUT you insist others adopt YOUR definitions of non violence, oppression, exploitation, others, property.

Again, you insist that "every human believes" something you believe. That's absolutely not true of ANYTHING, and totally wrong about this topic...clearly. It clearly doesn't 'when it concerns humans' or we wouldn't be murdering and torturing each other as we are.

We clearly disagree that animal consumption is the MAIN issue globally....just as we clearly disagree that it's even a possibility for humanity to switch to a purely vegetarian diet...pasture land is not the same as farmable land.

There are certainly ecological issues with meat production on the scale and in the manner we do it today...there was no such issue when the population being fed was 1/10 what it is today....no one burned massive portions of the rainforests to raise cattle 150 years ago, they didn't need to.

When I see a video like this that highlights people being kind to animalS (the dog AND the bird) it's disturbing that people are so disconnected with normalcy that they see a connection with murder and torture....or that they see murder and torture where it doesn't exist, and disturbing that they feel the need to shit on the happy video comments with a 'but you're all murdering bastards...feel bad and capitulate'.

Yeah, again, I don't click random links, and I don't get science from the internet, no need to read any vegan propaganda. Thanks

Ask 10 people on the street if they think it's OK to humanely raise animals for consumption, 9.95 of them will say "yes".
Now you are equating intentional harm with unintentional harm, equating intentional frivolous casual injuring and killing for pleasure with occasional unintentional injuring and killing for an essential purpose.

ahimsa said:

not really-life = sentient life is the only assertion which i clarified and this assumption was stated from the beginning so was implied. the suggestion that this changes everything is a classic straw man fallacy.

the imperatives which i am espousing on are merely non-violence and a rejection of oppression, exploitation and using others as property and economic commodities which almost every human believes when it concerns humans and perhaps a few other species. it is only the others whom should be considered under the umbrella of moral concern which is the key point of the issue for most people.

as far as the population, the main reason WHY the human population IS such an issue is due to the consumption of animal products. along with the obvious moral and ethical issues of murdering other sentient beings, the production of animal based foods requires many times the resources to produce an equivalent calorie compared to plant based food which drives things like climate change, resource depletion, water scarcity, biodiversity, species extinction and other aspects of environmental devastation.

when a video such as this one comes up which highlights people being kind to an animal, it is disturbing that people are so disconnected that they do not make the connection between the animals in the video whom they feel good about being rescued and the countless others which are being tortured and murdered for their dinner plate. this is exactly what the short article i posed above articulates so well.

“Ask ten people on the street if they think it’s wrong to injure or kill animals for one’s amusement or pleasure, and nine or ten will say yes, of course. Chances are all ten of those people freely consume animal products, simply because they like to and they’re used to doing it." - Karen Manfrede

ahimsa (Member Profile)

newtboy says...

First, since this is your SOLE focus, and so you inappropriately insert it into every conversation you participate in, you are preaching about it. No one likes to be preached at, and that methodology always ends with the preached at becoming opposition to the preachers. That means that the way you go about trying to convince people of your point is working against your goal and is creating adversaries rather than cohorts.
Second, most people strongly disagree with your base premise, that all life is equal. Have you ever taken medicine or other steps to get rid of a disease? Ever slapped a mosquito? If so, you are an uncaring, hypocritical, torturous and murdering bastard! You killed billions of living micro organisms, and likely thousands of macro organisms. If all life is equal and it's cruelty to kill, period, then all life is evil because it's impossible to live without killing.

That some people can't see that their pet cause is not the most important issue facing the planet and/or that their viewpoint on a particular topic might not be rational is the root of all that's wrong with the world.

ahimsa said:

that is my focus because this is where all the harm is taking place. as Paul Farmer said, "The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.”

the video is about being a man being kind to a dog and a bird-i was merely pointing out the hypocrisy of being kind to these animals while paying others to murder cows, pigs and chickens who are not at all different from the dog or the hummingbird.

"In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people." — Ruth Harrison

The Mosquito Killer Billboard

AeroMechanical says...

I'm fairly certain that attempting to kill the adult mosquitos (short of major DDT fumigating, which is frowned upon except in extreme situations) isn't considered very effective. It's the larvae you need to get, mostly by cleaning urban areas of old tires and other places where water collects unnecessarily.

cricket (Member Profile)

Stunning Time-Lapse of a Dragonfly Growing Wings

newtboy says...

Nice. I might have to stock my new pond with them to keep mosquitos from developing into a problem. I have mosquito fish and gold fish in there already, but more=better.
Why do you think it's not good to release them? We have dragonflies here, but are you thinking an invasive sub-species might harm the natives?

entr0py said:

You can actually buy live dragonfly nymphs online. It's probably not a good idea to release them into the wild, but you could watch them kick ass around your aquarium.

https://wardsci.com/store/catalog/product.jsp?catalog_number=876142

Stunning Time-Lapse of a Dragonfly Growing Wings

Payback says...

Yea, we're looking at a horrible mosquito year unless we can stop the retard next door from nuking his pond again. We got him to stop last year and you wouldn't believe the size of the dragon flies. Mosquitoes were decimated. Ironically, he was doing it to kill the mosquitoes... We proved to him that DFs need the pond to develop, whereas any puddle or bucket of water is enough for mosquitoes.

Gosh, I love DFs. They're like the A10 Warthogs of the fight against getting bit to death...

PlayhousePals said:

By far my favorite insect! Am waiting for them to emerge for the summer here. *quality design

What If We Killed All the Mosquitoes?

Could we, should we annihilate Zika mosquitoes?

newtboy says...

Whenever there's a mosquito vectored disease, people talk about eradicating mosquitos, but never consider their role in the food chain, and it is not a small role.
They also never consider the effects of the eradication methods, which are often poison sprayed into the air or onto ponds. Decades ago, a 12 year old boy designed and made a device for eradicating mosquitos in water using sound waves for a science project, and it worked. He tuned his device to resonate at the same frequency as the gas bladder in mosquito larva, popping it and killing the mosquitos without effecting anything else, and leaving no residue. For some reason, I never hear about that method being used, but instead often see people dosing small ponds with poison, oil, or bacteria, all of which harm other organisms.
Targeting single strains of mosquito with genetics may be a good way to deal with disease issues, but will certainly also have unexpected unpredictable consequences. I hope they remember the fiasco caused by creating killer bees and study the issue from all sides thoroughly before releasing them into the wild.

Pro-lifers not so pro-life after all?

RFlagg says...

I'll cover IUD's first. While there is some evidence that the older style copper ParaGard might have a slightly increase in preventing a fertilized egg from implanting, the evidence for the Mirena. Here are two medical journals documenting as such:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4018277
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/13625180903519885
If those are too much reading, they are summarized in http://videosift.com/video/Myths-About-IUDs

Remember Google gives personalized search results. No two people get the same results, even when signed out of Google... More details at http://videosift.com/video/There-are-no-regular-results-on-Google-anymore

I'd also agree that there are many things America gets right. Overall it's a good country.

And I think I started out by pointing out it isn't about guns, or just about guns.

Now I'm not sure what you mean assigning attributes to the right. I was pointing out policies that are consistent with the conservative right, Republican platform positions that are not pro-life.

The Death Penalty. This is a typically Republican strong stance position. And has been at various times part of the party's official platform. The Democrat party official position supports the death penalty too, after a DNA testing and post-conviction review. The point isn't wither or not the Death Penalty is right or wrong, I'd personally argue it's wrong, it's the claim of being pro-life while supporting the death penalty. There can be no way to reconcile those two positions.

One needs only to look at how Bush and the present day regime of Republicans in Washington think of handling issues in the Middle East to see what that they support a strong military and an interventionist doctrine (http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Republican_Party_War_+_Peace.htm). One of the key factors of the Bush Doctrine is preemptive strikes. While one normally wouldn't cite Wikipedia, I'll let their page on the Bush Doctrine and their references clear things up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_Doctrine. Heck Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize largely just because he wasn't Bush... sadly he did little to lower US involvement in the Middle East, a situation we should have left alone ages ago. Again the Democrats aren't as peace loving as they should be, and generally the most peace loving people in Congress tend to be Libertarians (who object more to the expense of war than war itself, and love pointing out how the war in Iraq from 2001 to 2011 cost more than NASA's entire history to that point, even after adjusting for inflation (https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)) and Libertarian leaning Republicans like Ron Paul, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/). Again, war isn't pro-life, it is perhaps one of the most anti-life things one can support short of supporting murder itself.

It's also Republicans, aka the right, that are trying to undo the Affordable Health Care Act, a program that ironically enough is modeled after the ones they tried to pass twice under Bush Sr and once under Clinton as to oppose Democrat plans to push for a Single Payer system. Prior to the passing of Obamacare, the US was spending nearly twice as much on healthcare as a percentage of it's GDP than the next nation, and getting only the 37th best results . Just listen to the crowd at the September 12 2008 Republican debate that chant over and over "let him die" as a solution to a guy who needs medical care but elected not to buy private insurance. These same people are the one's who claim to be pro-life. Affordable health care should be a right, as it is in every civilized nation but the US. Obamacare is far from ideal, but much better than the previous policy of only those with good jobs could afford health care everyone else, die or go bankrupt, driving the costs of healthcare up more. One can't say they are pro-life and oppose affordable healthcare, including for services you don't support such as IUDs (it doesn't matter that I object to our overly huge military budget that is much bigger than the next several nations combined, so it shouldn't matter if some medical services such as IUDs are supported), as quality of life matters as much as being alive.

Related to guns however is the Republican stance on stand your ground. Watch Fox News and how they defend the use of guns, or how mass shootings would be avoided if people were carrying concealed weapons and could stop the shooters... again escalating things to a death penalty. Now in the case of a mass shooter, ideally you want to take them down alive, but if death is the only option, then I personally don't object. However stand your ground typically expands to home invasion, where criminals typically aren't looking kill, just rob the place. Here they defend the homeowner's right to shoot to kill (I've been in firearm safety classes, generally the aim is to aim for the center of mass, which will likely result in death, but the odds of making a shot at the legs to impede the crooks is very low, so if you shoot you have to assume it is to kill). This position is contrary to the pro-life stance. All life is equal... which could get into a whole other argument about how they don't value immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, people who just want to improve their lives by moving to what they hope is a better country that will allow for a better opportunity for them and their families, but the Republicans are fighting hard to stop them from improving their lives here just because an accident of birth made them born in another country than the US... heck just look at the way Republicans lined the buses of refugee children fleeing war and gang torn areas of Latin America and they shouted at the children.... children... to go home that nobody wanted them. That isn't a pro-life statement, to tell a child that nobody wants them. The pro-life position would be to want to nurture and protect the children fleeing a dangerous area... We should be moving to a world without borders, as that is the pro-life position, to realize we are all humans, and that we all must share this world, and that we should do all we can to protect one another and this world and all that inhabits it (except mosquitoes, roaches, most parasites, etc... lol)

As to high poverty rates, the Republican policy of trickle down economics helps drive that. Helps spread the ever growing income and wealth gaps in the US. The Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 40% of the US population (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/). Now true, some could argue it isn't trickle down economic that is causing the growing wealth and income gaps, but the correlation is very strong, and one is hard pressed to find any other causative points beyond the rich paying less and less to their workers while taking more and more for themselves while the government eases the tax burden on the rich more and more.

Overall I think it's clear that the people who vote Republican because they are "pro-life" are hypocrites given the party's positions in key issues that aren't pro-life. I'm sure many, especially those on the right would disagree. They'd argue the death penalty is needed to discourage others from killing and therefore protects life, and that preemptive strikes ala the Bush Doctrine keep another 9/11 from happening (although the counter to that is fairly easily that we make more extremist the more we use those strikes). So one's mileage may very. For me, I think they are hypocritical saying they are pro-life if they don't value that life as much as their own after they are born.

harlequinn said:

Unless you have data supporting your claims, blanket assigning attributes to "the right" isn't good.

From an outside view (I'm not American) the issue isn't guns. It's that Americans see using guns as a solution to problems that they probably shouldn't be a solution for.

This partly stems from historical and cultural factors but also high poverty rates, a mediocre health care system, a mediocre mental health care system, etc.

FYI, there is evidence that IUDs stop the implantation of the blastocyst - just a google search away.

Side note: there are some things America gets so right. Like various freedoms enshrined in your constitution. And how the country tends to self-correct towards liberty (over the long run).

Dog Rescue-Why You Should Not Use Rat Poison

AeroMechanical says...

Putting rat poison outside is especially silly. There are an unlimited number of rats outdoors. It's like thinking your bug zapper is going to somehow kill all the mosquitoes. If that's a problem, get some cats to piss on things and kill the rats.

Where are the aliens? KurzGesagt

Payback says...

Mosquitos aren't a secret, but I'm disinclined to either try to chat with them, nor will I bother to cross the street to swat one...

shinyblurry said:

If there are any advanced civilizations that have been around for millions or even billions of years they would have already mastered the technology to explore the entire Universe. If there are such civilizations out there, our existence certainly is not a secret.



Send this Article to a Friend



Separate multiple emails with a comma (,); limit 5 recipients






Your email has been sent successfully!

Manage this Video in Your Playlists

Beggar's Canyon