Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell" channel.

  1. Phage research is moving up, globally and in the US. Antibiotic resistance is really starting to get them worried. Phage resistance happens, but it's brief as the phage quickly evolves. Been a half dozen reports in the past two weeks on the PROMED mailing list on phage research in multiple countries, including the US. Was a bit puzzled though about the time needed, as either way you're waiting for a bacterial culture to grow. Then, see if an antibiotic halts growth or if a phage halts growth. Although, if I was going to go for research, I'd probably be engineering phages, first remove toxins, then adding a major reproductive advantage while inside of a host, while narrowing species specificity. Most don't have all that many excess genes to begin with, so shouldn't be the hardest thing around. Not like oh, engineering a new antibiotic...
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  2. Only one problem, the project was canned because it was found to be impractical at all. When the fireball escapes the atmosphere, well, once it's cleared the atmosphere, its effects disappear. Had the Tsar Bomba device been constructed for its full 100 megaton yield, its fireball would've escaped the atmosphere with no additional effects on the ground and with only a modest part of that 100 megatons being felt on the earth. Simply put, gigaton devices just won't be all that destructive, as the weapons effects don't scale once the fireball escapes the atmosphere and there's nothing to transmit the heat. Teller did go on to hawk gigaton devices for asteroid ablation for any problematic enough to be in an impact trajectory, but nobody was interested. Especially given more sane yield devices would effectively do the same thing without requiring an absurdity of a launch platform. He then went on with some schemes for the SDI, aka "Star Wars", getting Reagan to buy in on magical x-ray lasers that never worked and never could work - it's one thing to have weak x-ray lase activity inside of a bomb casing during detonation, aiming it outside of the casing and having even 1% efficiency, just ain't in the physics. Eventually, even Reagan caught on and barred him from the White House, Teller's career sank swiftly after that and the knowledge of some extremely liberally interpreted research that basically was fraud did the rest to torpedo his reputation. And it didn't help that he was as popular in his field as the Black Death after his backstabbing Oppenheimer... We also don't have even 10% of the warheads left intact as is claimed in the video, courtesy of the START treaties. Basically, we've got enough to destroy Russia and the US as nations, with the Russians having nowhere as many warheads as we've got cities and towns, whereas the US has a bit more warheads than Russia has cities and towns, but military targets requiring multiple devices chews that excess up, taking a half dozen or so just to destroy one military airfield, worse for depots and large assembly areas on large bases. Products of the insanity factory, they're basically the least useful devices in the history of humanity.
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  3. Some bacteria have a coating that prevents the spider type of phage from infecting them. But, as simple as they are, phages are clever and some evolved into thread like phages, which connect to the bacteria's pilus. Bacteria keep that part, as they use it when they conjugate to share helpful new genetic tricks with other colony members. The phage connects to that and injects and does its thing. Phages aren't exactly a new discovery though, a submicroscopic agent that killed bacteria was first observed in 1896 and its size determined by filters, since the electron microscope hadn't been invented yet. Antibiotics back burnered phage research once they were discovered, putting the first clinical usage of a phage in 1922 on the back page until 1969. Research has been increasing ever since - especially now, with antibiotic resistance becoming so common.
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