(CNN) -- "Today, the Ebola virus spreads only through direct contact with bodily fluids, such as blood and vomit. But some of the nation's top infectious disease experts worry that this deadly virus could mutate and be transmitted just by a cough or a sneeze.
"It's the single greatest concern I've ever had in my 40-year public health career," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "I can't imagine anything in my career -- and this includes HIV -- that would be more devastating to the world than a respiratory transmissible Ebola virus."
Osterholm and other experts couldn't think of another virus that has made the transition from non-airborne to airborne in humans. They say the chances are relatively small that Ebola will make that jump. But as the virus spreads, they warned, the likelihood increases.
Every time a new person gets Ebola, the virus gets another chance to mutate and develop new capabilities. Osterholm calls it "genetic roulette."
As of October 1, there have been more than 7,100 cases of Ebola, with 3,330 deaths, according to the World Health Organization, which has said the virus is spreading at a much faster rate than it was earlier in the outbreak.
Ebola is an RNA virus, which means every time it copies itself, it makes one or two mutations. Many of those mutations mean nothing, but some of them might be able to change the way the virus behaves inside the human body.
"Imagine every time you copy an essay, you change a word or two. Eventually, it's going to change the meaning of the essay," said Dr. C.J. Peters, one of the heroes featured in "The Hot Zone."====http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/12/health/ebola-airborne/
Abdellah Taïa: 'In Arab countries, homosexuality is a crime. This has to change'
"Taïa’s new film, Salvation Army, which follows a young gay man growing up in Morocco, is based on his own difficult upbringing. [...] Does he feel a contradiction between Islam and homosexuality? 'No contradiction. Faith is a personal question,' he said. 'There’s the official version of Islam, promoted by those in power who want to keep us in prison, and there’s the real faith. I am very much attached culturally to Islam, to the magnificent and inspiring poems written by Jalal ad-Din Rumi and Omar Khayyam, attached to Ibn Khaldun, to Averroes, to Islamic architecture.'"
Cheating the Causal Game
A new quantum framework that blurs cause-and-effect at a fundamental level could improve information processing and lead to a theory of quantum gravity. [...] From an early age we take the cause and effect of events happening in time for granted; it’s how we think. Without cause and effect, where would science be? We could not attempt to predict the outcome of experiments to test ideas about the world, or try to formulate such theories of what will happen. Even the math that describes the atomic world—quantum theory—assumes that events take place in time in an ordered and connected fashion. Which makes it all the more strange that some physicists are trying to ditch this neat time-ordering.
This is by no means an obvious strategy to employ, notes Caslav Brukner, at the University of Vienna, Austria, one of the physicists behind the idea. "It’s simply new physics," he says. "We are asking whether space, time and causal order are truly fundamental ingredients of nature." The team hopes that by taking an approach that doesn’t rely on causal structure, it might provide a clue about where causal order comes from. Is it a necessary property of nature or can it be derived from more primitive concepts? [...]
Q&A with Paul Davies: What is Time?
[...] The flow of time is an illusion, and I don’t know very many scientists and philosophers who would disagree with that, to be perfectly honest. The reason that it is an illusion is when you stop to think, what does it even mean that time is flowing? When we say something flows like a river, what you mean is an element of the river at one moment is in a different place of an earlier moment. In other words, it moves with respect to time. But time can’t move with respect to time—time is time. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the claim that time does not flow means that there is no time, that time does not exist. That’s nonsense. Time of course exists. We measure it with clocks. Clocks don’t measure the flow of time, they measure intervals of time. Of course there are intervals of time between different events, that’s what clocks measure. [...]
Dreaming The Dream
[...] What worries cosmologists is not so much the possibility that we might all be Boltzmann brains dreaming unreal dreams about the world around us. Nobody seriously believes that. Cosmologists build theories about the Universe and how it evolves. In other areas of science, when you have come up with a theory (say about the behaviour of mice) you then set up an experiment (observe many mice) to see if your theory fits with observations. If it does, good, if not, you need to improve the theory, or throw it out. But since it's impossible to replicate our Universe in a lab, cosmologists can't do this. They need to come up with other ways of finding out whether a theory is plausible.
This is where Boltzmann brains come in. Once you have constructed a theory about the Universe you can calculate the probability that certain types of observers (including Boltzmann brains) come into existence. If the calculation suggests that we are overwhelmingly likely to be Boltzmann brains, rather than the good and honest observers we know we are, then that's an indication that something about the theory, or the assumptions you made in your probability calculation, is wrong. [...]
