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Basalt rebar is taking up some of that role, higher tensile strength, less corrosion. Cost is still somewhat high though.

Thank you, and with my layman's understanding of the issues, I agree (fwiw). I have to note how sad it seems that your answer requires a bit more honesty than I see around reddit and elsewhere...

Very frustrating how everything gets so polarized these days and often everyone is wrong in large part because they don't have enough humility to recognize what you wrote in your very first paragraph: "understanding that the answers have some amount of uncertainty is the mark of good scientists. "

No. These are probably hazardous fumes. His employer has a duty to his safety. If his employer refuses his duty, further steps must be taken. This is a potential health and safety violation. Any steps must be on the employer. People are more important than profits.

The lethality of COVID in 2020 before much was known (released?) about it would make exposure to even healthy willing volunteers problematic; some young healthy people died from COVID, so a study where one of the reasonably foreseeable outcomes is death for the participant is not ethical.

The death rates FROM COVID in 2023 are now (as best I know, I haven't looked specifically but I do work in an busy emergency department and the last sick person I've seen who was sick from COVID is quite a while ago) much lower as the virus has mutated, so it would probably be reasonable to do actual masking studies with young healthy volunteers. You can approximate the efficacy of masks by using non-infectious particles, like radioactive substances that are the size of the virus and track where they go when someone talks, coughs, etc, but the uncertainty around how infectious that substitute "viral load" would be is pretty high. And all you could really get is a measure of how effective the various masks are at decreasing the exposure rather than decreasing the infection rate.

The choice of mask mandates for children was always farcical on its face. Reasonable data from Sweden, who did not lock down and did not stop in person school, followed shortly thereafter with pretty good data from the US, all pointed to no benefit for masking children (or ending in person school...). But by then the politics had taken over.

If President Trump said XX, the media, CDC, NIH etc said NOT XX. Science was not involved even when scientists were making recommendations. There is no other way to explain the banning of one of the most well-studied and safest medications available to POTENTIALLY treat COVID, namely Ivermectin. The number of medications used in the US off-label is staggering, and the regulation of that phenomenon is generally left to doctors and their patients. That was not the case with Ivermectin despite a fair amount of data that suggests it is better than most of the (poorly studied) anti-virals pushed by the FDA over the course of the height of the pandemic.

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The fumes resin printers (and to a lesser degree FDM) give off are bad for health, I’m sure the good folks at r/3DPrinting would be able provide more details, but contact your osha equivalent ASAP and get that printer in a ventilated enclosure (one that ventilated outside the building) and out of your office

Dead on. Since I know a lot of people who don't speak Science come here to learn, let me phrase it for them, too:

It likely has some effect, but specifically it is not targeted to the H5N1 influenza A virus.

The way vaccines work is by teaching your immune cells to target specific proteins on a virus (viruses are made up of many, many proteins, just like you and me). Now, different proteins have different shapes, so it's important for the vaccine to have the right counter-shape. Think of puzzle pieces. Anyway, if there's enough similarity in the proteins between HxNz and HyNw, then yeah, it'll do something, but it won't be perfect. Otherwise it'll do nothing at all.

Because they are all kinda similar, it probably does something, but not enough to really help. Part of the problem is that if you don't kill enough mean little microbes, it just doesn't matter. Going to Australia and shooting fifteen rabbits is not going to reduce the need for a rabbit-proof fence, right? So you gotta do better or you should've just stayed home.

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I was going to comment that HEPA is for particulate filtration but won't be helpful for chemical vapors. A small amount might adsorb, but a filter designed for vapors (usually with activated charcoal in it) will be much safer.

I hope she had all the proper PPE. Lots of fine particulates I would imagine.

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This is like if you wanted to drink water from a pond so you threw in a big puck of a water purification tablet and then immediately dipped your cup in the pond. The fumes are not forced through the activated charcoal so it wont remove much at all. Maybe it adsorbs a very small percentage of the total contamination in the room. Even if that printer was in an enclosure that forced all the air through the bag of charcoal before it went into the room, it still would likely not remove much of the pollution.

I think the proper way to use this type of printer is inside an industrial fume hood like those used in labs or for solder stations in places that care about safety. Another option is to wear a properly 'fit-tested' respirator that has a filter designed to remove chemicals and harmful fumes from the air. If you do wear the mask, the room the printer is in should not be used without the mask until the room has been adequately vented. Don't let some underqualified person (such as your manager) tell you when the room is vented enough. Do your own research and present the OSHA recommendations for such an environment as well as the manufacturers recommendations. You can also call up the manufacturer and just chat them up to see what they think.

I soldered circuit boards and cables and used lots of heatshrink in a room with absolutely no ventilation for almost 10 years. The only thing I had was a small fan to blow it away from rising into my face. I'm probably f-cked....

This stuff is why they are designing new bunker busters for the military, This stuff is like 10-20x stronger then normal rebar reinforced concrete and actually stop current ones used by the US. .Hopefully we see it used for the beginnings of the foundations of a space elevator or something and not just bunkers.

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This is true. In the 6-week case, the eye has probably been intentionally filled with octafluoropropane (C3F8) to keep the gas from being reabsorbed too quickly…this gives the retina more time to remain dry to allow more healing before the gas is absorbed and replaced by fluid.

If the eye is filled with normal air, the air should be reabsorbed in a much shorter time (2-10 days).

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