Author: Buka

Unlike the previous entry, it was fairly easy to find the the original article, as the news article author kindly included links to the document as citations. With this I imagined the article to be at least mostly factual with respect to the research paper. However, int he research paper there is no clear or obvious abstract so I had to regard the first paragraph as the abstract. From reading the abstract alone, the article seems to be way off. One main difference is that while the news article uses this article to prove that clocks run at different speeds closer to high-gravity bodies, the paper (at least the abstract) does not discuss effects of gravitational bodies but how they were able to make atomic clocks more efficient and precise. Comparing the article to the rest of the paper, I don’t see much of what the news author said in her article in the research paper. The paper uses very specialized and difficult diction, physics is very complex after all, but in general the new author, Emily Conover, points out some of the research team’s accomplishments, but it wasn’t clear when the reseachers added those statistics into the paper. For example, Conover point out that there was a precisiion to “0.76 millionths of a trillionth of a percent, but I don’t remember seeing a similar number, even after reskimming the paper. Also, an interesting sidenote is that this is the most precise frequency recorded to date, but I am not sure how true this is.

I first found an interesting article about how llamas might be the secret to producing a COVID vaccine, but after searching for the original study the article refers to, I concluded that the research paper was either taken down or not available to the public. After searching for a new topic, I came across an article titled “Saline Spray Could Slow COVID’s Spread in the Lungs: Study”. The news article and the abstract are somewhat similar. Being made for a general public audience, the news article goes into significantly less detail on the results. For example, the news article says that the solution containing 1.1% NaCl reduced replication by 88% in lung cells, but leaves out the fact that 1.2% NaCl reduced by 90% and also spares details on “membrane depolarization”. Comparing the article and the whole research paper, the article completely discards the rest of the article. Instead of echoing the process of arriving at their results and conclusion, it relied on a direct interaction with one of the authors, where it seemed much more general questions were asked. The only reference to the paper was the aforementioned line about NaCl ratios. I feel like many readers including myself would like to have read about this process, in simpler terms. Another detail I found weird was that the paper discusses efficacy in both lung and kidney cells, but the article only points out effectiveness in lung cells.

Link to article: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-09-24/saline-spray-could-slow-covids-spread-in-the-lungs-study
Link to paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsptsci.1c00080