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There are migrating whales. Food in one place, mating and birthing young in another place.

In Europe we see migrating whales from iceland/norway to the south. Sometimes, mostly young whales or old sick ones, get lost by taking ' the wrong exit' and accidentally end up in the shallow north sea between England and The Netherlands. There they go hungry, weak and sometimes beach themselves.

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Totally agree with what you’re saying about better treatment for HIV

I would also add there is better treatment for AIDS as well.

For example. One of the complications of AIDS can be PJP. Basically a weird organism that we generally never see causing a pneumonia elsewhere. If you were in the 80s and came in for a pneumonia. You would probably get something like cefotaxime plus clarithromycin. This wouldn’t treat PJP. Normally we treat PJP with high dose sulfamethoxazole and trimethoprim.

My point here is that even if someone doesn’t get treatment for HIV that when their immune system eventually becomes ravaged we know better what we are treating and how to treat it. At the start of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, we didn’t know what the virus was or what complications it caused. Now we know the pathway of aids and how better to treat it

Tossing my hat into the ring as a negative novice, my guess is that it would have to do with its interactions with other atoms while in various phases. Take an atom floating in space, what is it? Just an atom, until it interacts with a solid or plasma, gas, liquid, etc. Then what it is changes based upon that principle?

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It is not true, has never been true, and probably never will be true that all genders and all sexual orientations are equally at risk from HIV. I don't at all doubt that government health material has emphasized that HIV infection is a risk for everyone, not just for gay men, but I do doubt that it has ever said both sexes and/or all genders and sexual orientations are equally at risk.

Setting aside blood transfusion and related risks (e.g needle sticks, needle sharing) because, although very significant early in the pandemic, they are relatively unimportant as a method of transmission at the moment, one look at the relative risk of sexual behaviors will tell you that there is a certain group of people which is considerably more likely to be infected by HIV if exposed to an HIV positive person.

Taking insertive penile-vaginal intercourse as the index risk, since it's the lowest meaningful transmission risk at 4 infections per 10,000 exposures to a known infected source, relative risks are:

• Insertive Penile-Vaginal Intercourse: RR = 1
• Receptive Penile-Vaginal Intercourse: RR = 2
• Insertive [Penile-]Anal Intercourse: RR = 2.75
• Receptive [Penile-]Anal Intercourse: RR = 34.5

Note that the absolute transmission risk is arguably quite low. Even if you are the receptive partner in penile anal intercourse with a partner who is both HIV positive and not on suppressive drugs, the risk per sexual contact is only about 1.4%. This is, of course, why frequency and diversity of sexual contacts is also a major epidemiological factor.

You can see that there's one specific sexual activity here which is an order of magnitude riskier than the others, which is being the receptive partner in penile-anal intercourse. This activity is much, much more common among men who have sex with men (MSM) than among any other group of people. It's absolutely true that there are both men and women who have contracted, and will continue to contract, HIV from participating exclusively in vaginal sex. But the risk of any given encounter is much lower, and combined with the fact that men who have sex with men tend to have much more frequent sex and much more diversity in sexual partners, it's hard to imagine we will ever live in a world where HIV infection and AIDS diagnosis are not both grossly disproportionately common among MSM.

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You can come up with just so evolutionary stories as to why a particular trait might or might not be adaptive, and therefore might or might not be selected for, for just about anything.

The specific example he gave of rabbit hemorrhagic fever virus is pretty much like a rabbit version of Ebola virus in terms of symptoms.

It was released in Australia in the mid-1990s, and rabbits have been co-evolving with it since then. This study captured wild rabbits in 2007 (meaning their ancestors had been subject to periodic outbreaks for over a decade and therefore could reasonably be anticipated to have evolved some amount of resistance, if resistance is possible), bred them a few times to get 80 rabbits, and then exposed those 80 rabbits to four different variants of the virus: the original isolate released in the mid-90s, and isolates collected in 2006, 2007, and 2009.

What they found was that, in these rabbits, the newest virus samples are considerably more deadly and also killed the rabbits considerably more quickly.

The original virus killed about 70% of all the rabbits they exposed to it, with an average survival time of about 120 +- 20 hours. The 2006 sample killed 85% with a survival time of 80 +- 16 hours, the 2007 killed 100% with a survival time of 45 +- 2.5 hours and the 2009 also killed 100% in 50 +- 3.5 hours.

Compared to the effects of the original virus on the original wild rabbit population, the authors cite an earlier study that found:

>Cooke and Berman (2000) showed that CAPM V-351 killed 22 of 24 unselected, nonresistant Australian wild rabbits, with survival times averaging 72.5 hr for orally inoculated rabbits (and BDC, pers comm.).

It seems clear that the wild rabbits did begin evolving resistance to the original strain of the virus, because although the original strain of the virus is still very deadly among wild rabbits, it's not quite as deadly. But it also seems clear that the viral evolution has caused it to maintain, at the very least, the same level of virulence as it had before it began coevolving, and perhaps an even higher virulence. There is certainly no evidence that after 30+ generations of rabbits the virus has reached a much less deadly equilibrium with the rabbits compared to its original virulence.

As far as just so stories go, I don't find any story that HIV would certainly naturally tend to become less virulent to be convincing. Even in completely untreated HIV, the latency time between infection and observable, behaviorally affecting significant illness is months to years.

So you have a disease that without modern medicine, looks like many other apparently random diseases that just occasionally kill people. After all, it isn't HIV that kills. It's opportunistic infections associated with AIDS. We have been able to identify a relatively small number of characteristic illnesses that pop up in modern society almost entirely among those who are immunosuppressed because of HIV, but that doesn't mean those illnesses would also be characteristic in a pre-modern society, and it doesn't mean anybody would have the widespread health surveillance to identify them.

In addition to that, the most common transmission method of an HIV infection is sex, and (both currently and historically) sex is something that humans like to engage in, and engage in quite frequently on average.

The point of all that is that, if you think HIV would evolve to become less virulent because virulence impedes transmission, you should consider that, other than the terminal phase, it doesn't impede transmission, and the number of possible transmission events between infection and symptomatic illness is, for many people, in the dozens to hundreds, or more. That means that even if it kills 100% of people in 5 years, it's never going to run out of people to kill until everybody's dead -- unless you have modern epidemiology that can identify there's some kind of infection and what the method of transmission is and what effective preventive methods are, and/or you can at least identify HIV infection as a specific illness and have effective medication to treat it.

The physical behavior you call "phase" is that of the group or bulk mass. You have the correct understanding that the individual atom has no definite state of matter, because the state of matter is not a characteristic of the individual. The same atom can be in differ phase or state because it depends on what everything else is doing and how the one atom interacts with its neighbors.

Often, the physical state (whether sold, liquid, gas) concerns compounds rather than single atoms, so not only is the single atom part of a particular compound, it is that that compound which displays a particular state of matter that depends on its conditions and what else is present and interacting with the compound.

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No, it can't. Phases of matter are a description of some emerging properties derived by the collective behaviour of a large ensamble of atoms (or, more in general, particles). By definition such properties have no meaning in describing a single (or a few) particles.

To familiarise with the concept of collective behaviour think about yourself: you too are a collection of cells that have some emerging properties that no one single part of yourself have. For example, you can be "hungry", "tired" or "sad"; although there is no meaning in asking if any particular cell of your body is "hungry", "tired" or "sad".

The same is true for a collection of atoms. A crystal is solid, but there is no sense in calling every single atom in the crystal solid or not. A single uranium atom in a liquid is neither liquid nor solid: it is part of a liquid.

Talking about the plasma, that's a fun topic: in a sense, there are multiple orders of state of matter, describing different type of particles describing collecting behaviours. The three "canonical" state of matter (solid, liquid and gas) describe the behaviour of ensables of atoms. You can extend the logic to subatomic particles, though, obtaining that neutral atoms are the analogue to solid while plasma is the analogue of gas; or even to macroscopic scale, obtaining that "sand" is a macroscopic state of an ensable of pebbles which has a viscosity and the ability to occupy any volume, as opposed to "crystal", which is impenetrable and rigid. I suggest you the video from PBS Space Time "How Many States Of Matter Are There?" that you can find on youtube. It's really enlighting about the matter, ;)

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>The “Hype” over HIV and its prevalence in the news of the 80’s was simply that it was newly detected, spreading expediently, had no treatment and nobody knew the scale of how big the “underlying threat” was already hidden in society.

Pretty sure that the fact that HIV was associated with promiscuous sex, gay relationships and drug abuse had at least as much to do with the "hype factor".

Edit: I mean in terms how the press was eager to pay attention to it. That kind of "hype".

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Hey dude. You are correct that the phase of matter (solid, liquid, or gas) is largely determined by how the atoms or molecules interact with one another as a group. The interactions are driven by factors such as temperature, pressure, and intermolecular forces.

When considering a single atom of uranium suspended in water, the concept of phases is not applicable in the same way as it would be for a macroscopic sample of uranium. This is because phases are macroscopic properties that emerge from the collective behavior of a large number of atoms or molecules. A single atom does not exhibit a phase by itself, as the phase is a result of interactions between atoms or molecules.

To answer your second question, the difference between a single uranium atom suspended in water and a single uranium atom in space would be their surrounding environment and how they interact with it. In water, the uranium atom would interact with the water molecules and any other impurities present. In space, it might interact with cosmic rays, other atoms, or molecules depending on its location. However, neither of these situations would qualify the uranium atom to be classified as a solid, liquid, or gas, as these phases emerge from the collective behavior of many atoms or molecules.

Plasma, as you mentioned, is another state of matter in which atoms are ionized, meaning their electrons are stripped away, and this occurs at high temperatures or under intense electromagnetic fields. This state is distinct from solids, liquids, or gases, which involve neutral atoms or molecules.

So, phases (solid, liquid, or gas) are macroscopic properties that arise from the collective behavior and interactions of a large number of atoms or molecules. A single atom does not exhibit a phase on its own.

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