Recent content by Tony1951

The more you go into this stuff the more you think yourself lucky to have had a few years of existence walking about on this planet in an incomprehensibly vast and ancient universe. I was explaining to my grandson this morning that every atom in his body had come from an old star that went off...

God but that is an awful tragic waste. Imagine all the life he would have lived by now - or don't. It is too dreadful to think about. I take the view that our individual, unique consciousness is so absolutely unlikely to have ever happened that we should make the most of life and preserve...

Thanks for the link. I will look at that later. I have all my sons and families coming round soon. Don't see them all at once usually as one of them lives a way off and only comes up occasionally.

That article gave me a headache. I am not sure that it is the actual 'space' that is expanding. It seems to me more logical to think of space as infinite emptiness that happens to be populated by matter. In the context of the discussion of the article about why the stuff that is most distant...

I love my converted specialised bike with its crank motor BBS01. Great assistance to get up the hills around here in the South Tyne Valley and North Pennines. I am a bit inclined to disconnect the thumb throttle to make it more legal. I only use that feature when moving off on hill or to get...

If I had taken that advice in the 1960s and 1970s, my motorbikes would have been a lot more reliable. I was forever taking the engines to bits with my horrible old open ended spanners, ruining bolt heads and nuts and stripping threads that were in aluminium casings . The breakdowns I caused...

Mars lost its atmosphere because it is smaller than earth. It cooled down inside, so unlike earth it no longer had a molten iron core spinning around and generating the magnetism that shields us from the sun's energetic particles and makes pretty purple stripes in the night sky. This left it...

Those loops you can see in the image of the sun are coronal mass ejections throwing out billions of tonnes of the sun's material. The solar wind made up of this material was hitting the earth's magnetic field at 988 kilometers a second on Friday when I took this picture not long before midnight...

It already has done. Just look at this picture taken today:

You gotta love those Raleigh Twenties. I bought an old one for one of my daughter's in law and did it up a bit. It rode well and then I converted the lights to 12 volt LEDs using a voltage doubler circuit from the built in dynamo. Nice and bright, now from very low speed. Sad to say, now she...

Yes on the Chimpanzee /Human point. On the BANAL virus and Sars-Covi02 - we are not quite on the same page, I think. https://www.pasteur.fr/en/research-journal/news/origins-sars-cov-2-search-goes

Yes Peter, 96.2 sounds like it ought to be pretty close, but in virus terms , it means it is pretty far off from any animal virus which is why Alina Chan thought the engineered virus was a very strong possibility. If it was a natural spillover from an animal virus, you would expect it to be much...

The BANAL virus is able to utilise the furin cleavage method of infecting a human cells, but the virus is nothing near Sars-Cov-2 in genetic makeup. It is true and was known that some viruses have this feature in one way or another, but that does not (as the article says) disallow the idea that...

I mentioned them in other posts but I spelled Danszac's name wrongly. Dr Shi produced grant applications referred to in Alina Chan's book where she proposed taking bat corona viruses and modifying them to become human pathogens derived from bat viruses they had in store at Wuhan. I have read...

The disease first appeared in Wuhan.