{"id":1674,"date":"2007-11-27T20:17:59","date_gmt":"2007-11-28T00:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1674"},"modified":"2007-12-15T19:59:36","modified_gmt":"2007-12-15T23:59:36","slug":"pray-tell-rain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1674","title":{"rendered":"Pray, tell, rain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcap\">I<\/span> read that <a href=\".\/wp-content\/misc\/corona_virus.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"float:right;margin:5px\" alt=\"sm_corona_virus.jpg\" src=\".\/wp-content\/misc\/sm_corona_virus.jpg\" width=\"50\" height=\"74\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a>the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/europe\/7114722.stm\">Orthodox Church of Cypres has ordered priests to pray for rain on December the 2nd of this year<\/a>. It appears that this is a routine that has been done before, most recently when a comparable drought struck the island 9 years ago.\n<\/p>\n<p>BBC also reports that scientists have <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/science\/nature\/7115012.stm\">created a detailed map of Antartica<\/a>. The images come (primarily) from the Landsat spacecraft and there are plans to make the data available for use in software like &#8216;Virtual Earth&#8217; and &#8216;Google Earth&#8217;. You may want to view the <a href=\"http:\/\/lima.usgs.gov\/\">results right at LIMA<\/a>, that is, if you can get through the bottleneck (yeah, yeah, it&#8217;s a popular site this week).\n<\/p>\n<p>And last but not least, an excellent (long) article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/reporting\/2007\/12\/03\/071203fa_fact_specter\">about retrovirusses at The Newyorker<\/a>. The article discusses the influence virusses had (and have) on our body&#8217;s immune system and cancer, and (particularly) about how retrovirusses have become part of our DNA. There&#8217;s some interesting commentary about new approaches to tackle HIV (a retrovirus), for example, by accelerating its life cycle (the faster a cell reproduces the more errors it makes, eventually passing non-threatening DNA to future generated cells.). Mind-blowing read. You can read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.metafilter.com\/66924\/Why-are-evolutionary-biologists-bringing-back-extinct-deadly-viruses\">the follow-up discussing over at MetaFilter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read that the Orthodox Church of Cypres has ordered priests to pray for rain on December the 2nd of this year. It appears that this is a routine that has been done before, most recently when a comparable drought &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1674\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[223,120,47,235,202],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1674"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1674\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}