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812many t1_j9dtvbw wrote

Reply to comment by barebackguy7 in The case of a patient who had COVID for 318 days helped scientists discover a new route for dangerous coronavirus strain emergence. They found mutations enabling T cell escape. Keeping track of mutations is crucial for understanding, monitoring, and controlling the pandemic by Skoltech_

Well this particular guy in the article died. I’m not sure the one in the radio episode I heard lived, but having Covid and being immunocompromised doesn’t sound all that pleasant.

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812many t1_j9cv2oa wrote

Reply to The case of a patient who had COVID for 318 days helped scientists discover a new route for dangerous coronavirus strain emergence. They found mutations enabling T cell escape. Keeping track of mutations is crucial for understanding, monitoring, and controlling the pandemic by Skoltech_

This sounds familiar, I wonder if it's a more official study published in Nature.

I heard about this on NPR a year or so ago about something similar in a guy in Boston, and they used some great metaphors to help us understand. Link to article similar to what I heard: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/02/05/964447070/where-did-the-coronavirus-variants-come-from

Basically, since the body couldn't fight off the coronavirus, it was allowed to multiply completely freely in this person's body. Then at a certain point, due to being in a kind of "survival of the fittest situation", it was began an evolutionary arms race with itself. Different strains would battle each other for supremacy, and over months the dominant version of the coronavirus would change. Since they were taking blood samples regularly, scientists were able to track this battle as it played out in real time.

One interesting thing that happened is that they could use the rapid evolution in this one guy to partially predict where evolution might take place with the circulating variants.

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812many t1_j8yxgsz wrote

Reply to comment by Negative_Gravitas in Discovery of 4,500-year-old palace in Iraq may hold key to ancient civilisation | Archaeology by JesseBricks

Yeah, this is kinda weird without more context. Who exactly said what and when? Was this before or after the official discovery of the temple last year?

The article very quickly moves past that to the actual findings, which is nice. Kinda like it was written by two people, one with the controversial first paragraph, then the rest as facts and findings.

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812many t1_ivlwitx wrote

Reply to comment by FateEntity in Discovery of bronzes rewrites Italy’s Etruscan-Roman history by VoloNoscere

The pertinent info from the article:

>Jacopo Tabolli, who coordinated the dig for the University for Foreigners in Siena, said the discovery was significant because it sheds new light on the end of the Etruscan civilization and the expansion of the Roman Empire in today’s central Italy between the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C.

>The period was marked by wars and conflicts across what is today’s Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio regions, and yet, the bronze statues show evidence that Etruscan and Roman families prayed together to deities in the sacred sanctuary of the thermal springs. The statues, including depictions of Apollo and Igea, the ancient Greek god and goddess of health, bear both Etruscan and Latin inscriptions.

>“While there were social and civil wars being fought outside the sanctuary ... inside the sanctuary the great elite Etruscan and Roman families prayed together in a context of peace surrounded by conflict,” Tabolli said. “This possibility to rewrite the relationship and dialectic between the Etruscan and Romans is an exceptional opportunity.”

One reason we know so much about the Romans is that they put inscriptions on everything. And wrote it in stone. Very handy for us 2000 years later. For example, gravestones often had short life stories about the person, even if they were just a small shop owner.

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