I feel like I remember seeing a few sporadic articles about household pets testing positive for COVID during 2020, though it may have been later. I know the first time I had to quarantine, the telehealth nurse on the phone told me to avoid my pets, if possible, to prevent spreading it to them. Seemed sort of weird at the time, even though I was aware that it’s possible for a virus to jump species easily enough.

We absolutely do have laser diodes that can output green and cyan (520nm green diodes have been around for years, and 488/492nm diodes are newer but also avaliable), but yellow is still in a gap that we don't have any known way of making a diode for at the moment.

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Bathymetric mapping techniques using either sonar or the interesting "rope with a weight on the end" method you mentioned do not capture overhanging features well. You would need to collect 3-D data like with an AUV or ROV to produce a model, and a standard bathymetric projection map would not be able to display it in any case.

I have been in a submersible and encountered large overhangs not shown on maps even in areas that have extensive data. It's unnerving.

Triglycerides consist of a small glycerol backbone with three fatty acids attached. The glycerol can be quite directly derived from sugars, but the fatty acids would require more complicated de novo lipogenesis. Simpler for the adipocytes just to use fatty acids from fat, but it's certainly possible to make fat from sugars.

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Confidence in how it would behave in humans was too high.

It was mostly stable. The problem is that it also seems likely the virus can chronically infect people with a compromised immune system, producing evolution that wouldn't occur going from host to host. That's very likely how Alpha and Omicron came out of nowhere.

Original Omicron isn't competitive evolution gradually picking up changes to evade immunity to the others. It was isolated from the rest of the pandemic and then appeared with a very different spike.

This story was the moment I knew that COVID probably would never go away. I think the first infected deer they found were on Staten Island.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02110-8

One doesn't need lasers for that, as long as the medium is linear the mixing of light is just superposition. It is no different than transmitting multiple RF signals across multiple different channels at once.

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To add:

The quarantine measures taken to combat covid were so effective that the incidence, and particularly mortality, of the various common cold viruses tanked dramatically, I saw figures saying <1% compared to typical. Some variants were reportedly wiped out due to these same measures.

That being said, many of the viruses labeled as the common cold also have the ability to infect animals which makes it highly unlikely that those would be eradicated.

I seem to remember that people were saying that SARS-CoV-2 was not highly mutable and a potential vaccine (at the time they were saying that) would solve the problem. Why did they think that and what changed?

Oddly I’ve experienced this to some degree. I have a scoped air rifle with an illuminated reticle that is capable of red or green crosshair/dot/circle etc. It also has a red laser mounted slightly below the scope. Both are sighted in for 30 yards and when I select the green reticle and turn on the red laser, they do appear almost yellowish when on target at 30 yards. Any closer or father from 30 yards and they diverge, with the red laser dot being above or below the scope reticle. I used to find this frustrating until I realised the amount of divergence actually became a crude range finder of sorts.

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there is myth of similar underwater caves where the "lake monster" lives

I realize "Sue" and "zoo" with slightly different tongue placement (the "s" is just a bit more fronted), which might or might not be distinguishable to a listener. I'd be more convinced if I tested it on someone who had to guess which one I meant without me telling them which I intended, and absent any surrounding context.

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