On the 75th anniversary of the Hindenburg dirigible disaster, a man approached one of the organizers to tell him about a film that his uncle recorded on that day. It turned out to be both genuine and authentic; and aviation historian Dan Grossman believed it would add new information about the crash.

Here’s the teaser:

https://www.pbs.org/video/newly-analyzed-footage-helps-solve-hindenburg-mystery-u573kr/

Here’s a link to an article about the resulting PBS show:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/unearthed-footage-sheds-new-light-hindenburg-disaster-180977773/

I can’t link to the show itself on the PBS website, for either geographic or subscription limitations. But I’ll be tracking it down!

Katalin Karikó emigrated from Hungary to the U.S. in 1985 when her funding dried up. At the University of Pennsylvania, she was mocked and, in 1995, demoted for persisting with RNA research. I read about this when her work at BioNTech made mRNA vaccines possible. The most famous mRNA vaccine protects against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19.

She shares the prize with immunologist Drew Weissman, whom she met over a photocopier machine at the university, and they hold patents together.

Ironically, the mRNA causes a swift and severe immune reaction that keeps it from creating proteins. Karikó and Weissman discovered that mRNA had to be modified by the substitution of a nucleotide base to reduce the immune reaction and let the vaccine work.

She left the university for BioNTech to put her expertise into practice, and the rest is history!

• News story
• Katalin Karikó
• Drew Weissman
• Covid-19 vaccines

Ash tree flowers

Spring, summer, and fall are all allergy season for some unfortunate people who are allergic to pollen. In spring, it’s early-flowering, wind-pollinated trees. They release large amounts of pollen in hopes that a few grains will find their way to a waiting flower. Because they don’t need to attract insects, they are small and inconspicuous. In summer, the grasses take over — and people can be allergic to both grass and trees. In fall, it’s the weeds such as ragweed. Perhaps due to global warming, the ragweed season has lengthened by almost a month in Canada.

You can read about pollen allergies here.

Here’s a brief history: The Flu Pandemic.

The Toronto Star devotes a few thousand words to this story, but I’ll confess I have very little sympathy for the victims. The one most prominently mentioned in the story had 105,000 CAD in free cash to spend on this jaw-droppingly stupid scam. The devil (for whom I’m not really sympathetic either; he deliberately fooled gullible people, preying on their mental weakness—evil) was not Bernie Madoff, preying on friendships and moving money around in a Ponzi scheme; this scam was transparently fake from the first words.

Particularly interesting (to me) is how the writer of the Star article somehow treats the victims’ idiocy as a non-issue.

Will Wilkinson at The Economist parses Dr Paul’s comments, and gives a cogent (IMO) “liberaltarian” defence of (virtually) mandatory vaccination.

So in case you’re wondering what it looks like, the golden image of Immersion (Piss Christ) is here.

Piss Christ by Andres Serrano (1987)

The image is from Wikipedia, which has a discussion of the picture and its provocative title.