Now that we are on the very last day of 2021, it is not too late to review the positives of the year. I picked four categories (humor, science, society, technology) and shortlisted a tiny subset from many deserving candidates. 1. Humor JP Sears’ satirical youtube channel is excellent. If you have not seen any of his videos, start with - Why Life Jackets Should Be Mandatory!, What Southwest DOESN’T Want You to Know… and Why You Need a Second Life Jacket!. 2. Science I will stick to Covid-related science only, because that has been the center of global attention for the last two years. Here is m ..read more

Climate Change is taking a devastating toll on the lives of people around the world. This week, two students from Anderson High School died in their sleep. The school district canceled the final exams to help the grieving community. Separately, in Europe, three soccer players left game this week because of heart conditions. Also, 33-year old Argentine striker Sergio Aguero playing for Barcelona announced retirement from soccer due to heart condition. In Silicon valley, 43 year old Tyson Clark from Google Ventures and 44 year old Ryan Popple also died in their sleep. In a separate report, Steve ..read more

In NGS experiments, when the researchers encounter issues with genome assembly or analysis, they go back to the raw data composed of sequencing reads. In a latest preprint submitted to zenodo, Steven C. Quay did exactly that for a seminal paper and concluded - “The alternative conclusion is that this sample was not a fecal specimen but was contrived. The data cannot, however, distinguish between a non-fecal specimen that came from true field work on the one hand and a specimen created de novo in the laboratory on the other hand.” This is no simple matter, because the entire world had been runn ..read more

All over the world, people are noticing disturbing rises in heart-related problems among the young and healthy. This year, seventy five prominent athletes died suddenly of heart attack, and many others were sent to hospitals often in the middle of the matches. The problem has become so noticeable that this compiled video of athletes falling on the ground with heart problem went viral. In Australia, a top player with the Adelaide Crows was diagosed with pericarditis. In India, 29 year old former Indian U-19 cricket team captain died after suffering a cardiac arrest and so did 66 year old former ..read more

In early 2020, Prashant Pradhan and collaborators posted a preprint titled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag” in biorxiv. Based on the released emails from NIH under FOIA, we now know that this article and its coverage in zerohedge upset Fauci so much that he immediately convened an urgent meeting of virologists and several health bureaucrats from US, UK and Europe. All details of this meeting had been redacted, but the virologists present in the meeting fast-tracked a Nature Medicine paper claiming the virus definitely came from animal ..read more

An interesting paper came out recently in J. Phys. Chem. Lett.. Based on their analysis of over 2.2 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes, the authors observed - By tracking the evolutionary trajectories of vaccine-resistant mutations in more than 2.2 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes, we reveal that the occurrence and frequency of vaccine-resistant mutations correlate strongly with the vaccination rates in Europe and America. We anticipate that as a complementary transmission pathway, vaccine-breakthrough or antibody-resistant mutations, like those in Omicron, will become a dominating mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 ..read more

A newly leaked classified document revealed that scandal-ridden Francis Collins plans to change his name to continue running the NIH. He got the idea by observing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is rebranding himself to be a reptilian. “If Zuckerberg can turn into a reptile and Joe Biden can become Brandon, why cannot I change my name to ‘Doctor, Honest’ or ‘Nevertell, Allie’?” - Collins asked his sidekick Tony Fauci. Collins had a terrible career at the NIH starting with his top student retracting his PhD thesis, ending with paying for gain-of-function research at Wuhan, and clusterf%$@s of ..read more

While applying to be an immigrant lorry driver in UK, I came across a news story that was at odds with the zeitgeist of the country. It said “Oxford Nanopore announces London IPO after hitting $3.3 bln valuation”. I have not followed this company since Neil Woodford, famously known as UK’s Warren Buffet, blew up his funds. In 2017, I made the forecast that Oxford Nanopore would go out of business by the end of 2017. The argument was simple. Oxford Nanopore had a clever business model of raising and losing more money year after year, and the company had been doing that since Shakespeare wrote A ..read more

US establishment biologists are so tone-deaf that they gave Trevor Bedford both Howard Hughes and MacArthur awards. These same people also scream at the top of their lungs - “Trust the experts”. Here is what I got by trusting “experts” like Trevor Bedford. In early 2020, an electrical engineer collaborator of mine forwarded me an online article and asked my opinion on the origin of the covid virus. I did not have time to analyze the sequences, but soon I came across Kristian Andersen’s article published in Nature. Based on this, I told him that the virus was zoonotic. Two months later, I saw C ..read more

Eighteen months after publishing the infamous letter organized by Peter Daszak, disgraced British rag The Lancet made a U-turn. Now it is making “an appeal for an objective, open, and transparent scientific debate about the origin of SARS-CoV-2”. Talk about shutting the barn door after the horse has reached the other continent. If the biologists are serious about cleaning up the scientific process, they should start with retracting all papers from Zhengli Shi and Peter Daszak. Let me explain why. Why Do Scientists Retract Papers? I closely followed a famous case of a retraction of physics pape ..read more