Dear Anita

Hope you are having a good weekend. It is currently sunny here in New Jersey. I started planting some flowers in the garden and soaking up the positivity of the sunshine. I am adopting to the pace of nature, allowing my inner light to shine like the sun, dancing to the music of my heart like the wind and working on establishing my self-confidence like a tree. Here is something that I found interesting that combines my love for nature and science:

Some interesting things:

The moon has no light of its own, it reflects the sunlight. Sometimes the sunlight is quite strong and as it shines, the moon reflects a yellowish-orange glow. The moon sometimes is in the sky in the early hours of dawn as a small light whitish semicircle before the day breaks and I think that the colors of the sky are the sun rising. As the sun rises, the moon fades away. As the hours of the night pass, the moon seems to become more whiter in its glow, I think when the moon first rises it is faintly yellow-orange because the sun has just recently set and as the night progresses the moon becomes more whiter as the sun sets below the horizon. the moon seems the brightest white in the hours of 12am when the sun is below the horizon and directly shining it’s light that is reflected by the moon. As the sun rises in the sky as the day progresses the moon fades away because it has no light of its own and it is the sunlight that gives the moon the light.

In addition, sunlight is all of the color wavelengths of visible light combined together so it’s actual color is white. If you view the sunlight through a prism, you will see the color wavelengths of the visible spectrum. However, the sun appears yellow because people view it from the Earth and the Earth’s atmosphere reflects some of the color and it is filtered through the lens of the atmosphere so depending on where the sun is throughout the day, we see different colors of yellow, red, or orange.

The Earth’s atmosphere changes the color of the sunlight that people see because it scatters the the light waves of the sun in a process called Rayleigh Scattering. The Earth’s atmosphere scatters the violet and blue light in the visible light spectrum. Violet has the shortest wavelength on the visible light spectrum and it is scattered by the Earth’s atmosphere because the short wavelengths of light do not have much length to travel through Earth’s atmosphere. The blue light is scattered by the Earth’s atmosphere as well and as the blue light is scattered by the molecules of Earth’s atmosphere, this scattering of the blue light gives the sky its blue color.

At sunset and sunrise, the sun appears orange or slightly red because people view the sun through a thick layer of the Earth’s atmosphere which scatters most of the shorter wavelengths of the visible spectrum. Likewise, at midday or noon when the Earth’s atmosphere is the thinnest, the sun appears closest to its actual color which is white and may have a slight yellowish tint.

The moon appears more yellowish-orange when it is closer to the horizon because the moon has no natural light of its own and it reflects the sunlight so when the sun is closer to the horizon such as at sunset and the sun is reddish-orange, it casts its light on the moon making it have that color. However, when the sun sinks below the horizon, the Earth’s atmosphere is thinner and less of the visible light is scattered so the sunlight is white (which combines all the colors of the visible spectrum) and when it casts its light on the moon as the moon rises higher in the sky and the sun sets, the moon appears white.

Hope this makes sense!

Science is fascinating and there’s always something interesting to learn.

Thoughtco.com article “Why the sun looks yellow when it’s not”

Dear Anita

Thank you so much for your advice. I enjoy writing about science articles that I read because it’s fascinating and interesting. I’m more of a creative scientist rather than one who takes research and writes formal lab reports. I like to read science articles about different topics and explore them in more detail and then talk about it with people. I’m going to be taking some writing in the health sciences classes fall semester which will help me build my writing skills so that I can write articles about human health. I am thinking it would be great to work with the CDC or other health organizations to provide knowledge about diseases to people.

Hope you are staying healthy in the midst of the coronavirus and don’t stress yourself too much. I decided to take a break from the coronavirus updates to share some positivity.

Positivity poem

P: Progress may seem slow at times and that’s okay

O: Opportunities will open along your path, have hope and keep going along the way

S: Sometimes you may feel lost in darkness, remember that the stars shine brighter in darkness and that you are a beautiful soul

I: Individuals like you have creative ideas and are in this world for a reason

T: Take time to relax and enjoy the moment, spending time out in nature to relieve stress

I: Inspiration for you is out there in the world, so go out and explore

V: Venture to places that make your heart beat faster and light up your soul

I: Imagine yourself as the person you want to be and have hope that you are walking the path towards your goals

T: Talk to yourself as if you were talking to a friend, treat yourself with care because you are worth so much

Y: Your goals are your own and they should be the ones that make you happy, you are the person living your life and writing the pages so make each day a day of gratitude and keep working on your goals.

Dear Anita

I just plugged the numbers (32,000/3.2 billion) into a scientific calculator and the result is 0.00001. So the coronavirus is 0.00001 times smaller than the human genome.  I hope that a vaccine is developed sooner as well because quarantine is hurting the economy a lot with businesses closing down and stock market declining. Coronaviruses typically affect birds and mammals such as humans (bats are mammals as well) and they can cause diseases ranging from the common cold to the current coronavirus. Coronaviruses often cause illness during winter and early spring months. According to medicalnewstoday.com article, humans who catch a cold due to coronavirus may catch the same one again in four months because coronavirus antibodies (help fight infection in a person’s immune system) do not last for a long time. In addition, the person’s immune system antibodies may be ineffective against a different strain of coronavirus because the coronavirus is a RNA virus that can mutate.  The World Health Organization says that people over the age of sixty and people with weakened immune systems have more likely chance of getting severe symptoms of the current coronavirus.

“What to know about coronaviruses” March 23, 2020; medicalnewstoday.com

The current coronavirus breaks into human cells by using a spike protein (S-protein) that is on the outer membrane of the virus cell and the coronavirus uses the spike protein like a key to fit into a doorknob of the ACE2 receptor in respiratory cells allowing the coronavirus to enter the human body. This was discovered by scientists studying how coronavirus enters the human body, discovery in Feb. 19 and published in March 4th in the journal Science.

That is why the new drug APNO1 that Chinese scientists are working on may be helpful with combatting the coronavirus since the APNO1 drug may help block the virus from getting to the ACE2 receptors in the respiratory cells and make the virus less virulent.

“Scientists figure out how new coronavirus breaks into human cells” livescience.com

Dear Anita

Thank you so much for your encouragement and for your time. I find studying how diseases occur and human health very interesting. I was reading an article titled “What can genomics tell us about the coronavirus?” (From the Genomics Education Programme research in England) that says Chinese scientists were the first to sequence the genome of the current coronavirus and they discovered that the coronavirus has 26-32 thousand base pairs.  The article also mentions that the scientists compared nine samples of the coronavirus taken from patients who had been infected and they discovered that the current coronavirus shares similarities with a bat strain rather than to other human coronaviruses so they think that the current coronavirus likely evolved from mutations of a coronavirus that had originally been affecting the bat population, but they are still figuring out if there was an intermediary host that caused the spread to humans. The scientists say that the Sars disease that is closely related to the current coronavirus came from a different bat strain and there was an intermediary host that caused the spread to humans, so they think that it is possible that the current coronavirus originated from the bat population.

So, the scientists decided to do more research and looked for differences in coronavirus samples taken from different human patients and they found many similarities in the people who were infected and they discovered that the coronavirus that started to become widespread in the world due to human to human contact is the result of a single strain of coronavirus. Since the coronavirus genome sequence was similar in all the samples taken from the nine patients, the scientists think that the coronavirus had a single origin likely from the bat population.

“What can genomics tell us about the coronavirus?” Feb. 11, 2020

The scientists have decided to use pcr (polymerase chain reaction) to sequence the genome of the coronavirus so that scientists can better understand it and work on developing treatments for it. PCR can sequence the genome of the coronavirus samples taken from patients in 4-6 hours ( Genomics: combating coronavirus article). Oslo, Norway is currently working on a vaccine that they think will take six-eight months before it is safe to release for public use.

Since scientists already have a decent understanding of the coronavirus genome, they have two drugs (remdesivir and chloroquine) that have been helpful for people with mild coronavirus symptoms. For more severe symptoms, Chinese scientists are still working on APNO1 drug that can help if the coronavirus spreads to the lungs. (Healthline.com article about current coronavirus treatments).

Looking at Healthline.com article “Treatment for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)” this is quite interesting:

Chinese scientists have a drug called APNO1 which may help with the coronavirus but the FDA hasn’t approved of its use yet because it hasn’t passed enough clinical trials. APNO1 is supposed to help coronavirus patients who have had the virus affect their lungs and made it difficult to breathe by alleviating the symptoms. Since the virus uses a protein called ACE-2 to affect cells, that drug (APNO1) seeks to block some protein receptors in the body so that the virus is limited to getting into the cells and affecting them. But it’s still in clinical trials and currently there isn’t a vaccine or treatment for coronavirus yet.

The coronavirus is an interesting virus to study and there’s something new to learn each day. The official name of the virus is SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes is Covid-19 (coronavirus). Coronavirus are quite common, but they recently came to the attention of the general population because of the current coronavirus outbreak that is going on in the world. Like you mentioned, there are different types of coronaviruses and some of them cause diseases like the common cold. According to the article, “2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Update: Uncoating the Virus” from the American Society for Microbiology, the first human coronavirus was discovered in the 1960s. The American Society for Microbiology says there are four types of coronavirus: “alpha, beta, delta and gamma. Only alpha and beta coronaviruses are known to infect humans .”  Coronaviruses are the second most common viruses for the common cold next to rhinoviruses and both viruses have effects on the  upper respiratory system. There are seven human coronaviruses that have been discovered that you listed above (thank you for sharing) and six of them are common widespread human pathogens (agents that cause disease). The seventh one SARS-CoV-2 ( current coronavirus) is recent and starting to become widespread though.

SARS-COV-1 (sars disease) and MERS-CoV (middle east respiratory syndrome) spread between people who are in close contact. These two coronaviruses are widespread, but the “MERS-CoV was more deadly claiming 30% of the victims that were infected as opposed to the SARS-CoV-1 which killed nearly 10% of the 8, 096 people infected” ( American Society for Microbiology article).

Coronaviruses are quite fascinating to study and they have the largest known single-stranded RNA genome and they can mutate or change their structure which makes it difficult for one vaccine to treat coronavirus diseases. The information about viruses is fascinating and learning new things with more I read, thank you Anita for your insight as well. It was inspirational reading about things.

Viruses use genetic material (either DNA or RNA) which makes them difficult to treat because our body’s own cells contain DNA and RNA to make proteins which is why viruses when they enter into the body can replicate so quickly. They can also change their protein markers on their outer coat with time making them have a different structure which makes it difficult for one vaccine to combat a virus. The flu virus has a new vaccine each year because there are new strains of the flu each year since the virus can change the protein markers on its outer protein coat. The coronavirus might be the same way because it is similar to the sars disease in 2004. It may be likely that the outer protein markers on the virus changed making the virus structure different and it being the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) rather than sars disease (SARS-CoV-1 ) but the behavior of the two viruses have similar effects on the body even though the coronavirus has been more widespread.

There are currently no vaccines for coronavirus but researchers think that perhaps in a year or 18 months there might be more knowledge on both the sars disease and coronavirus so that a vaccine can be developed

Treatment for Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) March 12, 2020 healthline.com

Studying how diseases occur due to viruses, bacteria or aging (cancers) is fascinating.