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They go wherever they can. A lot of time that is digging a den under tree roots or something.

Another key fact is that bears don't actually truly hibernate. They go into what is called "torpor". It's a similar state with lowered metabolism, heart rate, breathing, etc. Except, they aren't fully sleeping that whole time. They do frequently get up, move around, forage for food, drink water, etc.

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/2/129/5661110

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for anthropology:

is there a current evolutionary trait that's been selected for in humans?

for any:

how do I explain evolution to a new learner as succinctly as possible?

The tape itself has NEC standards regarding when it melts and burns, and is designed primarily to melt unless exposed to really extreme temperatures. There’s usually a rubberized or vinyl part of the tape that can turn it into a sticky mess. Good electrical tape shouldn’t have problems at “normal” temps, but on a hot day in the south/southwest a car can get upwards of 150 degrees F, which is pushing it even for the good stuff.

Humidity also doesn’t help and can cause some glues to break down faster.

How has the worldwide move towards western liberalism, dissemination of English, export of American culture, and liberal economics affected each other? Is there a causal relationship between some of these phenomena or do they come as a packaged deal?

For Political Science: how do you manage the feeling of endless dread from seeing not very smart people elected into offices that lead to them enacting changes that should not happen?

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What kinds of things can we put in place so that a future random species can understand who we were and what we did better than we understand the dinosaurs? Are we already doing them?

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Why can't the alternator of an electronic car just charge its own battery while the car is in motion?

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What kind of toilet or bathroom sistem did the sumerians have back in the day?

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Is it true that pay transparency laws reduce wages?

Here's the Economist article that makes this claim: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/01/05/pay-transparency-laws-do-not-work-as-advertised

Relevant parts:

>Labour advocates champion pay-transparency laws on the grounds that they will narrow pay disparities. But research suggests that this is achieved not by boosting the wages of lower-paid workers but by curbing the wages of higher-paid ones. A forthcoming paper by economists at the University of Toronto and Princeton University estimates that Canadian salary-disclosure laws implemented between 1996 and 2016 narrowed the gender pay gap of university professors by 20-30%. But there is also evidence that they lower salaries, on average. Another paper by professors at INSEAD, UNC Chapel Hill, Cornell and Columbia University found that a Danish pay-transparency law adopted in 2006 shrank the gender pay gap by 13%, but only because it curbed the wages of male employees. Studies of Britain’s gender-pay-gap law, which was implemented in 2018, have reached similar conclusions.

>[...] the effects of 13 state laws passed between 2004 and 2016 that were designed to protect the right of workers to ask about the salaries of their co-workers. The authors found that the laws were associated with a 2% drop in wages, an outcome which the authors attribute to reduced bargaining power. “Although the idea of pay transparency is to give workers the ability to renegotiate away pay discrepancies, it actually shifts the bargaining power from the workers to the employer,” says Mr Pakzad-Hurson. “So wages are more equal,” explains Ms Cullen, “but they’re also lower.”

Is this viewpoint mainstream, or the article cherry-picks studies that support their claim? Or something in between? If true, do we understand the mechanism of these results?

HIV is like a rootkit on the software of your immune system: it destroys the very cells that would be sent to destroy it. That's why it's so hard to vaccinate against. Fortunately, we have very effective treatments to suppress it and we can, if we deploy these widely enough, expect to suppress it out of transmission in the foreseeable future. HIV isn't very easy to transmit so if you suppress it in the people who have it, it should die out when the oldest person with HIV dies of other causes, after spending their life with suppressed HIV.

Herpes is a sneaky bastard that hides out in nerve cells, out of the way of the immune system. The immune system can deal with it if it can find it, so that's why it hides.

Note that the work to be able to create a Covid vaccine has been in progress for decades. BioNTech (the actual inventors of the "Pfizer Covid vaccine") was founded 15 years ago and the more fundamental research on mRNA vaccines was done before the company was founded.

A huge amount of this understanding of viruses comes from the ability to sequence genomes. This is almost magical - it really is science fiction come to life. It's as magical as the "Star Trek communicator" becoming "cellphone in your pocket, works worldwide". The Human Genome Project required rooms full of thousands of expensive machines working for several years to sequence one genome. Today, you can do a full sequence of a human-size genome in less than a day (current record: 5 hours 22 minutes!). You can grab a random virus or bacterium and sequence it overnight, just to see what's interesting in its genome. If you find another one tomorrow, you can compare them over the weekend. This is a huge change for all life sciences.

It was sheer luck that mRNA technology was almost advanced enough to make vaccines for coronaviruses when SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) showed up. A lot of researchers worked a lot of overtime to turn "almost" into "actual" in an amazingly short time.

We also have a lot of experience making vaccines to viruses that the immune system can handle when suitably primed (i.e. NOT retroviruses like HIV, but most others) in other ways - using similar virus strains, culturing viruses and inactivating them, weakened live viruses, and so on. These methods had been used to produce vaccines for the SARS virus (the vaccines were not widely tested because by the time they were ready, there were too few cases to test and no need for them). The same techniques were also used to produce SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

We can expect a lot more vaccines for diseases previously considered impossible to vaccinate against, using mRNA technology.

Aside from mRNA tech, research continues on other diseases. RSV (Respiratory syncitial virus) is a serious disease for infants, but attempts to make vaccines were disastrous in the past and the reason why the first attempts failed has only recently been understood after 30 years of work. This work doesn't even use mRNA knowledge, it's completely separate innovation.

Virology and immunology are both extremely complex topics which we have, across the world, not nearly mastered. We do not understand either, not even nearly, so the rate of advance of knowledge is rapid in both. When they intersect, they are both even more complicated. You have to see the current state of vaccines as a work in progress, where some problems have been solved and others have not, depending on random chance and whatever seems most important at the time.

I'm nearly 50 years old. In my lifetime, we have gone from commonplace vaccines for only a few things - polio, etc - to vaccines for a whole array of nasty diseases (measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria, typhoid, tetanus, pertussis, pneumococcus, influenza (moving target, alas), etc).

I expect in 50 more years, we'll have zapped most of them.

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Whether the immune system can beat it by itself if you survive it.

All the diseases we aren't to create a vaccine for (HIV, herpes, etc.) are diseases that your immune system is unable to beat.

For covid-19, your immune system will learn to beat it in a few weeks without a vaccine if you survive it. For those other diseases, if you have them, your immune system will never remove them from your body even if it has years to do so.

If a disease cannot be beaten with years of trying to learn how to beat it, it's unlikely than giving it a preview (which a vaccine is) will help.

It's because the viruses mutate fast and can hide from the immune system. For herpes, it hides inside neurons. For HIV, it hides inside CD4 T cells. The immune system isn't good at targeting neurons and T cells.

It's not because HIV attacks the immune system. It takes more than 10 years for HIV to destroy the immune system without treatment and it never does with treatment. The immune system is unable to beat it even when it's working well.

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