#Science Journalism

[thatonebirdwrites]

This dude has been getting the word out about LongCovid. His articles are fantastic and I recommend all of them. His digging into the research is excellent.

This talk is lovely, and he tackles the impact of Covid in an amusing way.

He digs into the anger and guilt. He's done so much for the community, and this talk digs into his work. Digs into the pain and suffering so many turn a blind eye to.

Thank god for him.

I am exhausted, I am isolated, I am often forgotten by community, I cannot get out on my own anymore. I have an energy-limited disease that often leaves me bedridden.

I understand being exhausted by this, but me and tens of millions of others can't escape it. So we talk about it because we need support. We need resources. We need community, and yet society has essentially abandoned us.

I have LongCovid. It is a nightmare. It has destroyed my mobility, destroyed my immune system, and restarted up chronic conditions that had been in remission.

(Yes, Covid hurts the immune system -- see the link at the end with the database of studies, the sources are in there. T-cells in particular are damaged by Covid, and those are crucial for the immune system.)

LongCovid doesn't really go away. I've had it for over three years.

Covid's ability to restart diseases in remission (even cancer!) is not talked about enough.

One of my close friends died because Covid brought her cancer out of remission; she said to remind everyone that if she dies, it was because of LongCovid. (Again see that link to the sources for the research on how covid does this, I do not have the health to input in all the links directly.)

There are tens of millions of children and adults with LongCovid. And yes, children are impacted in harmful ways.

The denial and abandonment has made an entire generation of immuno-compromised kids, and no one knows yet how that will impact their development. What we do know is that Covid and LongCovid does negatively impact children's bodily systems.

Not masking, not vaccinating, not funding research to fight Covid and LongCovid, not crafting more reliable and accurate covid tests -- all of this is killing and disabling entire generations.

Why is this okay?

Surely people are not okay with mass death and disablement? Surely people are not that uncaring and callous?

And yet I have had people try to rip off my mask. Who gleefully tell me they do not mask and do not care to mask. That goes beyond denial. That is violence. Yes, not everyone is that horribly violent, but the alarming amount of people who are? The alarming amount of people in positions of power like that?

It's anger-inducing but also terrifying.

I get how hard it is to face difficult things. But if we do not face the hard things, we cannot move forward and we end up complacent in eugenics and mass death and disablement.

We can't ever build a better world until we care for one another.

But we cannot care for one another unless we engage in pandemic mitigations like masking, vaccination, air filtration, washing hands, and building better and more accurate tests.

Community cannot happen without these layers of protection.

So when people tell me they don't mask, this is what I hear: "I am either in denial or I do not care about those around me or about my own health."

I'd like to believe people care. I'd like to believe people struggle because of fear and denial rather than being heartless and uncaring.

And yet, people and our government doubled down on denial. Where protections were destroyed. Where funding was taken away. Biden had four years to repair and rebuild the Pandemic Mitigations and Task Forces (Obama had bolstered these so we've regressed.) Instead, Biden choose to adopt Trump's strategy of claiming we won against it, that the pandemic was over. He pushed for policies that favor profits over the health of our communities.

The claim the pandemic is over are lies from our government. The pandemic never ended. Covid still evolves and still infects and still damages multiple body systems. The more you get covid, the higher your chance of LongCovid, which is massively harmful, disabling, and sometimes deadly chronic disease.

We could have fixed this. But instead, our government, our so-called society, choose denial. Why? If you examine what the CDC and Biden's office has says over the last four years, you'll notice a callousness toward disabled people. (Ed Young ripped apart these words in many of his articles too. I dropped articles of others doing the same in my database below, which is searchable.)

We've seen this abandonment before with other diseases, especially ones that impacted communities society doesn't like. People have analyzed and compared the response to AIDS to LongCovid, and showed how the abandonment tactics are used in both.

Nowadays, we fought hard to build up resources to those suffering from AIDS. LongCovid sufferers have no resources. Not yet. We need to galvanize community to fight back against that abandonment.

There is no cure for LongCovid. There is no treatment that reliably works. Most of the so-called LongCovid clinics I've researched engage in often out-dated and proven harmful practices that force us to engage in extensive physical therapy.

Except LongCovid is an energy-limited disease. Exertion means collapse. The more we exert, the harder our body has to work to get oxygen to our cells, and studies (and lived experiences) keep showing that extensive physical therapy makes the disease worse.

So no, we have no resources. There often isn't any groups or services in town that help us.

The so-called "disability services" that exist for disabled populations are underfunded, understaffed, and not trained on layers of protection or on energy-limited diseases. So often such services exacerbate the illness rather than assist it. These services are often inaccessible, especially to us bed-ridden with an energy-limited disease. They also do not offer anything that can help manage the disease. At best they might offer help with cleaning or bathing, but that's about it.

Treatments that actually work for LongCovid does not exist, not in America, and not in most of the world. So again, no resources.

Support groups for people are mostly nonexistent or they are inaccessible. Those too ill to fight for access are left with nothing.

So many have been left to rot in isolation. Many have died alone.

If we don't care for one another, then how will any of us truly survive the horrors?

With Trump back, we cannot trust our government. I'm not convinced we ever could as me and many disabled people had watched (and Ed Young covers in his articles) the government's slow abandonment of entire communities.

I get it. The work is hard. It's very hard to make sense of all this.

I get that many of us are being gaslit by not only those in denial but even by the President of the USA. It hurts and makes it even more difficult to move forward or know what is truth.

But we do know the truth.

We can find that truth.

Love and care illuminates truth.

And love and care requires us to adjust our behaviors. We cannot care for one another unless we change our behaviors.

If we wish to survive the pandemic and fascism and mass abandonment, we must care for one another, and that means engaging in layers of protection.

Layers of protection includes vaccines, N95 (or better) masks, air filtration, improved tests to be more accurate and reliable, and hygienic practices.

This is something People's CDC builds up (a community-led group that analyzes the research and makes the information accessible to us. Who does what the US's CDC does not do anymore.)

This is the People's CDC's excellent guide to safer gatherings.

Yes, this requires work, but if you do these tasks with other people, where the community shares the burdens of these tasks to spread it out, it becomes easier.

This is what accessibility looks like. This is what care and love looks like. This is how we protect ourselves and our communities.

I simply do not have the spoons to input in the research links for my sources, so here is a link to a database I keep updated of research over the years.

I honestly don't know how to convince people to care for one another.

But that's what we desperately need as a society. To stop living in denial about the pandemic (about climate change and rise of fascism too), and to start caring for one another by getting vaccinated, wearing masks, improving air filtration, etc.

Anyway, that's my thoughts.

Be safe. Care for one another. Protect one another. We only have each other.

Seriously excellent and even uplifting talk by Ed Yong. HIGHLY worth your time!

Yong is a Pulitzer-winning science journalist who's written (among other great things) some of the best, well-informed and empathetic coverage of COVID and Long COVID since 2020.

—

I can't highlight any one part; the whole thing is great. But one thought I had was that he shares this important anger that's often present in empathetic, deeply caring people — Terry Pratchett comes to mind, for example. Sagan, Miyazaki and others, in other ways. It's an anger that's difficult to carry and should not be romanticized. But I feel grateful to people like this, who are able to funnel into work that helps others and enriches all of our lives.

[strangebiology]

This is great journalism on animal welfare!

Germany has now banned "macerating"/grinding up/shredding male baby chicks, who egg farmers typically kill because these "brother roosters" can't lay eggs.

But my first question to that is, "Where will they go instead?"

DW, a German documentary service, looks at the alternatives that people could do, why those options aren't always realized, and they follow the chicks to see where they do tend to end up.

[geekysteven]

oh dang, it's gonna take them even longer to get home in that

[Image description a news screenshot reading "Physicists make tiny model of Star Trek's USS Voyager that's smaller than a human hair"]

[frc-ambaradan]

And nothing... you see Alberto Angela starting a new science tv program which is the direct heir to his father's Quark and suddenly everything is perfectly fine. Piero Angela never died. Quark never stopped. And everything is just the way it should be ❤️❤️

And he called it "Noos" which was the name of the spaceship Piero used to explore the cosmos in "Viaggio nel cosmo" as if that ship never stopped its journey.

Bless you, Alberto! Bless you! 🥺

[bethanythebogwitch]

There should be a law that says if a headline ever says that "a new discovery has completely changed everything we know about some scientific field" that it hasn't actually.

Turns out "new discovery expands our knowledge of this field but does not fundamentally change our understanding of it" isn't as catchy a headline

[dwarvendiaries]

Article with sloppy research "A study by Amazon Web Services (AWS) researchers suggests 57% of content published online is AI-generated or translated using an AI algorithim (via Forbes)."

Which cites, the Forbes article below, "57% of content translated into a different language on the internet has been done so through AI algorithms."(according to the PS added to the articlenthis has since been corrected to make the claim less definitive)

The original research, instead is saying that 57.1% of the text sample 's sentences they used existed in 3 or more languages, and that given that the number of languages a text is translated into on the internet is strongly correlated with lower quality(based on CometQE), and hence prevalence of Machine Translation.

A news site called WindowsCentral just posted a headline: "57% of all content on the web is AI-generated."

They're misquoting a Forbes article that said, "57% of all text-based content on the web is AI-generated."

Which itself was also a misquote of a study saying "57% of all text translations on the web are machine generated."

Figured I should give everyone a heads up

for all the "OMG dead Internet theory is real!" posting coming up.

[viola-sororia]

first class news paleontologists never disappoint

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

SciAm: "What to Know about #Project2025 ’s Dangers to Science

"The [#Project2025] policy handbook is not a light read. It is at turns wonkish, militant and sneering (and sometimes all three at once, such as when it calls for transforming federal institutions into “hard targets” for “woke culture warriors”). It tears down policies to curb climate change, even though a majority of Americans endorse climate action.

“The independence of science is being attacked across the board in this document,” says Rachel Cleetus…"

[homeostasister]

This is an interesting take. I’ve always seen commentary from scientists who aren’t involved in the study being reported on more as a mechanism of independent review rather than a sensationalizing tactic. The people involved in the study only have their own perspective, and of course they would be likely to think their discoveries are real and important. Bringing in others in the field who aren’t directly involved allows you to showcase the perspective of someone who is qualified to assess the importance of the findings, but not so deeply invested in the study that they might be inclined to oversell it. Obviously it’s not a perfect system—I guess reporters could just interview a bunch of biologists until they find one who thinks the study is amazing—but I prefer it to not having that outside perspective at all.

They just discovered a new kind of organism that isn't a virus or bacterium

[pandemic-info]

It’s likely you know someone dealing with long COVID | WBEZ Chicago

Severe fatigue, cognitive impairment and post-exertional malaise are just a few of the many symptoms associated with long COVID. It can last weeks, months and even years. Having this condition is also somewhat common. “It’s generally a minimum of 10% of COVID infections lead to long COVID,” said Hannah Davis, the co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. With COVID hospitalizations on the rise for the first time this year, we speak with Davis and Pulitzer-winning science journalist Ed Yong. They both say that what frustrates a lot of COVID long-haulers is the lack of public knowledge about the condition… and the misconceptions surrounding it. “If you are listening to this and you find yourself thinking, ‘I don’t know anyone with long COVID,’ I guarantee that you do,” Yong said.

[strangebiology]

Storytelling environmental issues through photography

I've been talking with my photo mentor (JenGuyton on IG) to help me get better at photography in the hopes of making a photo book companion to my written book, Carcass.

So I'm trying to learn visual storytelling a little better and considering these three images for my portfolio, but none of them are perfect.

The first shows a field of dead sheep, but the issue is you can only see a few in the foreground and some of the ones in the background if you zoom in. The story is striking, 51 dead sheep in a field, and the experience was striking, but I think I failed to capture an image that demonstrated the scale of the deaths.

The second image is more clearly a sheep. There is black plastic in the sheep's stomach but you can't see until you zoom in.

The third image shows the black plastic better but we're back to a less-readable image. By itself, you probably can't immediately tell what's happening.

I love this image of a dead bird filled with plastic which BBC calls "The Photo that Made the Plastics Crisis Personal." Plastic in a stomach tells a story. My mentor says a photographer doesn't want to rely on a caption to tell a story, the photo should get a lot across. I totally get that, as even though I'm a writer first, I know darn well that images capture attention a lot faster than text.

However, I don't think that there is a good way to show the viewer what likely happened to these sheep, and maybe some stories don't lend themselves visually as well as others. I don't know how to use an image to communicate what I think happened to the sheep because it's so contextual. In short, I think it was a harsh winter. Maybe the one who ate the plastic couldn't get to food and ate plastic instead, however, I don't know how often sheep do that, and I did not investigate all of their stomachs (the pictured one was just that way when I found it.) Based on the conversations I've had with sheep herders and the presence of hay and feces in this field, I think the sheep gathered there to eat supplemental feed, died in higher numbers than usual due to the cold and/or snow covering the grass, and thawed at the same time as the snow melted. Perhaps I should return next winter to photograph carcasses covered in snow (if it's another bad one?). But I think captioning is important as well, as I can't get an interview in a photo, and the meaning of the hay and feces isn't super apparent even if you can see it.

So, it's interesting that the issue of animals eating plastic might get more attention than issues of climate disasters because the plastic in the stomach is easier to communicate photographically.

[geekysteven]

I really had high hopes for this year though

[Image description Newspaper headline "new research jellyfish apocalypse not coming"]

[quantimist]

Ph.D. Researcher in Quantum Technologies and Public Outreach

This opportunity is offered by the chair of Public Policy, Governance and Innovative Technologies at the TUM School of Social Science. As an interdisciplinary, public-interest-minded, and impact-oriented team based at the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, we study, teach, and shape in practice a broad range of policy and governance issues concerning innovative technologies. We work…