Going back to the Black Death in the mid 1300s,  humanity has suffered through a bunch of pandemics. What is the  Black Death ? A bubonic plague pandemic from 1346 to 1353 killed as many as 50 million people, perhaps half the population of Europe. Rats to fleas to the bacterium  Yersinia pestis .  Once affected, this bacterium could also be spread through the air. After 7000 years, there is no consensus of the origin. The most likely first source though was probably Central Asia, more specifically, China over 2600 years ago. There is no direct link yet established, but could a bat have infected a flea to initiate this pandemic? The deadliest recent outbreak struck Madagascar in 2017, killing 170. There are some pandemics that are still here.  For example, malaria has been around throughout history, and this malady had killed perhaps 50-60 BILLION people, about half of humans that have ever lived. COVID-19 has so far killed 7 million , or an average of 1.4 millio...

 This is  Nobel Prize week , and they are into day 4: Physics:  Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Kraausz and Anne L'Huillier for developing a tool for observing electrons within an atom. Chemistry:  Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov, who looked a little larger...quantum dot nanoparticles. Literature:  Jon Fosse, for his innovative plays and prose, giving voice to the unsayable. Physiology/Medicine:   Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman  did the fundamental mRNA research to develop the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines. Note their wearing masks.  15 Craigside now has an outbreak, so even though the pandemic is over, there is still danger today. Working together at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 2000s, they showed it was possible to dampen the body's inflammatory responses to labmade mRNAs by making specific chemical changes to the component bases of the molecules. Said Anthony Fauci,  this is a wonderful choice of Nobel Prize ...

Our journey to Sydney, Australia to catch the Seabourn Odyssey back to Hawaii begins with a Qantas flight.  This will be only my second flight on this airline, but my first one was a doozy.  Papua New Guinea was the 201st country to visit this blog site.    In 2012 I posted on a trip   I had nearly a quarter century before that year.  This adventure was published in   SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity .  Incidentally, if you haven't read this book, here is the back cover. Here is partly what the final chapter reported. I traveled to the Independent State of  Papua New Guinea  ( PNG ) in 1989, no doubt one of the three most stressful experiences of my life. Most of what follows comes from pure memory, although I do keep files of all my trips, and I did obtain a conference proceedings of why I went there, which was because a professor friend from Michigan convinced me that I should give a talk at his energy conference in PNG, where he had temp...