Month: September 2020

The Rationale Why Pharmaceutical Organizations are Not Incentivized to Develop Antibiotics and Why This is Dangerous for the Worlds Next Pandemic

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Within 5 short years of release, approximatly 20% of antibiotics become subject to resistance from bacterial pathogens which means that antibiotic proliferation is chronologically limited within its life expectancy. Coupled with this, if an antibiotic is highly effective, the scientific and medical community often rally against its usage so that such a tool can be saved in reserve for a global bacterial pandemic. In either scenario, return upon investment is less than what it would be with a different class of medication (e.g. selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor, statin, hypnotic etc.) which is why pharmaceutical organizations are less interested in research and development dedicated to antibiotic medicine in favor of other, more profitable medication categories. This lack of investment however is myopic and will inevitably backfire upon the pharmaceutical industry as a whole if new antibiotics are not developed because medications used to treat cancer will become less in demand due to the fact that cancer patients are highly likely to acquire an infection during treatment when their immune system is comprised, with this infection often killing the patient if antibiotic solutions are not available. This would expectedly lead to a sharp decline in cancer medication treatment and subsequently pharmaceutical sales of related medications as patients would be likely to adopt living the rest of their life as fully as possible and forgoing treatment as they would be damned if they accept the cancer treatment and develop an infection which kills them but also damned if they don’t accept the treatment and let the cancer run its course which is almost always fatal. To provide comparison of the research, development, and manufacturing contrast between oncology medications and antibiotics, as of 2020, there are currently 800 medications in development for cancer and hypertension whilst only 28 antibiotic medications undergoing that same research phase and development process, with 2 of these antibiotics expected to become fully developed and able to reach the market and patients. The last new antibiotic class, lipopeptides, were introduced in 1984 with a gap referred to as an “antibiotic void” occurring during the 1990’s, 2000’s, 2010’s, and now moving into the 2020’s. The urgency of this threat is projected to become dire within the coming decades, with scientists predicting that by 2050, medicine could potentially come full circle to the pre-antibiotic era, with microbes which are completely and totally resistant to every antibiotic known to medicine

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s Racist Remarks

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Winston Churchill once said, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion”. This is of course not true in the slightest, and was a marked example of prejudice and racism. Up to 3,000,000 (3 million) people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies into India as Churchill bluntly refused. Churchill raged that it was the Indian populations own fault for “breeding like rabbits”. Churchill was known for being blunt, once stating that the “bubonic plague was merrily culling the population”

The Christian Adaptation of the Pagan Ostara Festival Which Became Easter

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Just as Christmas replaced the pagan holiday of Saturnalia, Easter replaced the pagan holiday of Ostara, a festival celebrating the pagan goddess of spring, a time of renewal, fertility, and birth. The Catholic Church strategically adopted the pagan seasonal calendar to fit its own narrative, rebranding the winter season of scarcity with a time of purification for Christians, entitling this period as “Lent”

The Mathematics Behind Why Rockets Can Escape The Gravitational Pull of the Earth

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Robert Goddard’s liquid rocket never reached the 3 kilometer mark because of Tsiolkovsky’s Rocket Equation named after Soviet scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (pronounced “con-stan-tyin tsel-kov-skee”). This equation states that as fuel increases for faster and further voyages, so too does the weight, becoming increasingly heavy as more and more fuel is added. Tsiolkovsky took into account the velocity of a rocket alongside its mass of payload, mass of fuel, and the mass of the rocket itself. The longer the engine burns, the more velocity the rocket will have, however longer burning means more fuel which adds weight and makes it more difficult to push upwards. To travel fast enough to deliver a rocket to space, most of the craft must be fuel. Scientists have battled with this question for decades and although mathematical constructs have been developed to explain the relationship between weight and thrust, no one has yet to develop an idea to get around this problem with currently available technologies. The equation developed to explain this limitation of space travel is △V^R = V^E x log^e (M^P + M^F + M^R / M^P + M^R). This effectively states that only a tiny portion of a rocket can be used to deliver payload, with notable cases being the Apollo missions which employed enormous rockets to carry just a few small astronauts and the things they needed into space. Tsiolkovsky theorized this in the beginning of the 20th century as his calculations demonstrated that kerosine wouldn’t be enough to go from the Earth to the moon with a single craft

The Reason Carbonated Drinks Become Flat

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Carbonated drinks are in a state of super saturation in respect to how much carbon dioxide they contain. Once a solution has reached complete saturation, it won’t allow any more of whatever substance is saturating it. If salt is added to a glass of water, eventually it will reach a point in which the salt just falls to the bottom rather than being dissolved in the water due to over saturation. If a solution is heated, it will be able to tolerate higher levels of saturation, and if it is cooled it is able to tolerate lesser levels of saturation. Carbonated drinks are water saturated with carbon dioxide, and this carbon dioxide is always looking for a method to escape which is why all carbonated drinks eventually turn flat provided enough time has passed. When sugar is added to a carbonated drink, the sugar nucleates the drink in that it provides a method of escape for the carbon dioxide present. Sugar, Mentos, and other various substances have a large surface area which allows a lot of carbon dioxide to become attached to it resulting in a rapid escape

European Neolithic Mining Practices

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During the Neolithic period, flint was as prized as gold was to the Hindus, Christians, and Buddhists. 4500 years ago, flint miners dug shafts up to 12 meters deep in search of more flint. Ladders and wooden platforms made extracting the ore easier. This task was Herculean as the only picks available were reindeer antler. When a mine was exhausted, a new hole would be dug and the rubble from that hole would be used to back fill the previous mine. Most flint can be found above ground and most of the flint found at Neolithic sites is indeed surface flint so it is unclear why such a massive undertaking was performed as much more readily available sources were freely available. Flint is black in color with a shiny, glass like appearance similar to obsidian. Flint chips easily and is fairly simple to make incredibly sharp by simply cracking off a piece with a harder rock. It’s possible that mine shafts were dug as a ceremonial coming of age tradition in that a prepubescent adolescent would enter into the mine, dig into the depths of the Earth, and then emerge back out as an adult. This theory is backed up by the fact that the majority of miners left their picks in the mine, possibly signifying that they had reached adulthood. It is unclear if these picks were left because they were considered to be spiritually polluted or if they offered their pick as an offering to the Earth itself in exchange for what has been brought to the surface. There is a site in Britain at which over 400 of these mines were dug a few meters from eachother giving the landscape a cratered appearance