I’ve always liked this one. I’m not sure where I saw if first, but this image is from Reddit. The buckets sitting on the table are holding it up.
Edit 10/29/21. I’m taking the advice of one commenter and adding that the buckets are not bolted to the table. Sorry, table top. But I’d also like to add that this is not my picture. And, for everyone that wants to comment or has commented something along the lines of “this is not impossible” or similar. I never said it was impossible, not everyone has a strong grasp of physics (I’d venture to say very few people do), and the question asked about what SEEMED impossible. Not what IS impossible. Don’t chastise me on physics comprehension and I won’t chastise you on reading comprehension.
The Mpemba Effect is a classic example.
In 1963, a Tanzanian schoolboy Erasto Bartholomeo Mpemba was doing a simple school physics experiment and discovered that hot water freezes faster than cold water.
This seems impossible because logically you’d say that as the hot water cools, it would take some amount of time to reach the same temperature as the cold water – and from that moment, take the same time as the cold water did. Therefore, you’d argue, there is no way for the hot water to freeze faster.
But Mpemba very definitely found that hot water freezes faster than cold water IN SOME CIRCUMSTANCES.
His odd finding was initially ignored – but a few years later, Mpemba asked a visiting physicist (Dr Denis Osborne) in question time after a lecture – and while everyone (students and teachers) in the classroom laughed at him, Osborne actually took him seriously – tried to repeat the experiment and found that Mpemba was correct!
Osborne and Mpemba collaborated to write a paper – which was published in Physics Education, Volume 4, Issue 3, pp. 172-175 (1969). The paper goes a little deeper into the problem and eliminates the two most common explanations (dissolved air and evaporation).
It turns out that there are a huge range of subtle effects going on here – and it’s not ALWAYS the case that the hot water freezes first – it’s sensitive to initial conditions…but if you follow the steps in the paper, it is quite repeatable.
However, the reason for this weird behavior had sparked off complicated discussions and there are at least ten alternative explanations – and to this day, no single one of those possible explanations are the single, widely accepted, cause.
There is a related paradoxical claim – the “inverse Mpemba” in which heating warm water to a specific temperature can take more time than heating cold water to that exact same temperature.
Vaccination does not prevent infection.
If this had been more widely understood two years ago, who knows how much better off we might have been?
A Cell-Based Capture Assay for Rapid Virus Detection
Routine methods for virus detection in clinical specimens rely on a variety of sensitive methods, such as genetic, cell culture and immuno-based assays. It is imperative that the detection assays would be reliable, reproducible, sensitive and rapid. Isolation of viruses from clinical samples is crucial for deeper virus identification and analysis. Here we introduce a rapid cell-based assay for isolation and detection of viruses. As a proof of concept several model viruses including West Nile Virus (WNV), Modified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA) and Adenovirus were chosen. Suspended Vero cells were employed to capture the viruses following specific antibody labeling which enables their detection by flow cytometry and immuno-fluorescence microscopy assays. Using flow cytometry, a dose response analysis was performed in which 3.6e4 pfu/mL and 1e6 pfu/mL of MVA and WNV could be detected within two hours, respectively. When spiked to commercial pooled human serum, detection sensitivity was slightly reduced to 3e6 pfu/mL for WNV, but remained essentially the same for MVA. In conclusion, the study demonstrates a robust and rapid methodology for virus detection using flow cytometry and fluorescence microscopy. We propose that this proof of concept may prove useful in identifying future pathogens.
Infections are defined by entry of pathogens into tissues. Such tissue invasion may or may not elicit a significant response from the immune system. Here, for example, is Helicobacter Pylori sitting relatively happily in gastric mucosa. See how small they are compared to the human cells?
Similarly, we have a large number of viruses that are regular residents in our bodies. Some (like Human Papilloma Viruses) make significant changes to our own cellular DNA as they integrate into our chromosomes. Here is an HPV strain taken from a patient with the warts it causes. Some strains cause squamous cell carcinomas in sites like the cervix. Modern cervical cancer screening involves a PCR test for such strains.
So, for any defensive immune response in any tissue to be elicited, a pathogen must already have invaded. This is my first and most important point. The only things that genuinely prevent infection are things that prevent exposure. We have many barriers in our body that serve this purpose. Skin oils are my favourite, and here are some staphylococci stuck on human keratinocytes. This represents colonisation, not necessarily infection, and effectively all of us will have these on us right now.
So, hopefully I’ve made it clear that not only are our bodies constantly in relationships with invading organisms, but many of these organisms are very much part of us such that our immune systems must develop well-adapted responses to maintain various balances.
So, if vaccination does not prevent infection (because it does not produce a physical barrier – at least not in the way we would usually think of that) then what does it do?
When we are exposed to pathogens our immune systems progress from non-specific (‘innate’) defences to fine-tuned ‘adaptive’ responses. In the paper above, there are some nice descriptions of the sorts of ways those systems respond to SARS-CoV2.
Because viruses are intracellular pathogens (meaning they operate inside, not outside cells) our immune systems do not recognise completely new types of them until they have entered cells and sections of them are being displayed on infected cell surfaces. This is not the case with larger pathogens like bacteria or protozoa, but one must remember how genuinely tiny most viruses are (even smaller than those H. Pylori bacteria!).
So, for the immune system to respond then the pathogen must already be inside, and for the response to be well-trained that infection must have resulted in a large number of infected cells ‘teaching’ the immune system what they’re infected with.
This is where we come to the part about vaccines being fake.
Vaccination produces a ‘fake infection’. In the example of the mRNA (Pfizer/Moderna) and DNA-type (AstraZeneca/J&J) vaccines, what is being introduced into cells are cut-down segments of SARS-CoV. The mRNA vaccines are introduced via a ‘lipid nanoparticle’ (an oil globule) that sticks onto cells like a virion (a virus in its ‘coat’) would. The DNA types use a different virus (an adenovirus, quite like ones we’ve all had before) to introduce the S1 (spike protein) section of the SARS-CoV2 genome.
So, the difference between the vaccinations and wild-type SARS-CoV2 is that the wild type has all the rest of its genome, and can replicate. In Hamster brains, such replication has been shown to produce amyloid proteins and what looks like an infectious version of Alzheimer’s. This doesn’t happen with the vaccines, because the genes for those proteins were cut out, and there’s no replication.
So, vaccination doesn’t prevent infection, but rather it produces a more efficient immune response that deals with infection better, such that minimal illness occurs. In some cases (like polio) the response is so effective that re-infection produces no detectable signs, because the virus hardly replicates at all.
As an analogy, without vaccination our bodies are like Ukraine in 2014 – unprepared. Once a significant invasion begins, it can be very difficult to gather and train an army while that invader is progressing. In contrast, vaccination produces trained and ready air defense (antibodies) and ground troops (t-cells) such that invaders can be neutralised before they gain any meaningful ground.
