Sibylla Bostoniensis

In case you missed it: I have a poll up about experiences with medical care. If you haven't participated, please do: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1902641.html

2026 Aug 6: npj Vaccines [peer-reviewed scientific journal]: "A single-dose amber codon carrying live attenuated vaccine elicits pan-sarbecovirus immunity and blocks SARS-CoV-2 transmission" by Nigeer Te, Jiangchuan Li, Alex Wing Hong Chin, et al. Comes with this banner:

We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.

Emphasis mine:

Abstract

Existing COVID-19 vaccines exhibit clear limitations against the continuous emergence of variants of concern (VoCs), as their efficacy is challenged by the cumulative mutations in the spike or its RBD, which is the primary antigenic target. In addition, the intramuscular route of administration is suboptimal for inducing robust mucosal immunity, which is an important factor for preventing infection and transmission in the respiratory tract. To overcome these hurdles, we developed a live attenuated mucosal vaccine by introducing amber stop codons into the accessory genome of SARS-CoV-2, resulting in a highly attenuated yet immunogenic phenotype. A single intranasal vaccination induced broad-spectrum neutralizing antibodies against diverse VoCs. A single dose of this live attenuated vaccine can confer near-sterile immunity in mice against a greater than tenfold lethal SARS-CoV-2 challenge, eliciting high levels of both mucosal and systemic antibodies. Critically, vaccine-mediated protection also extended to antigenetically distinct VoCs and even SARS-CoV [i.e. original SARS – S.]. Furthermore, vaccinated and subsequently challenged cohorts failed to transmit the virus to naïve animals, demonstrating a complete block of onward transmission. These findings establish our candidate as a true pan-sarbecovirus mucosal vaccine, offering a promising strategy to provide broad immunity and will likely defend against future sarbecovirus-driven pandemics.

THIS IS ONLY IN MICE. But. Yeah, they're claiming they've come up with a nasal spray vaccine for mice that makes them immune to and non-transmitting of all Covid variants.

sarbecovirus == SARS Betacoronavirus, a subgenus of Betacoronavirus, and the one to which the SARS-CoV species belongs, of which SARS-CoV-1 (SARS) and SARS-CoV-2 (Covid) are strains. [W]

intramuscular inoculation not inducing robust mucosal immunity: previously [2021]:

There are, for purposes of this conversation, two antibody responses our immune systems have to infection: making IgA and making IgG.

[...] natural infection induces both mucosal antibody responses (secretory immunoglobulin A (IgA)) and systemic antibody responses (IgG). The upper respiratory tract is thought to be mainly protected by secretory IgA, whereas the lower respiratory tract is thought to be mainly protected by IgG.

This explanation is from Florian Krammer's Sept 23, 2020 Nature article, "SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in development".

This distinction is hugely important, because, for one thing, by "lower respiratory tract", he means lungs. Lungs are protected by IgG.

What that means is that if your body learns to make IgG to fight off an infection, that infection can't take hold in your lungs. Once your IgG antibodies have learned to recognize a pathogen, your lungs are protected from it.

The other reason it's important is

Vaccines that are administered intramuscularly or intradermally induce mainly IgG, and no secretory IgA.

Intramuscularly. You know. Like a shot in the arm.

All injected vaccinations – all – apparently target the IgG immune response. We don't know of any vaccine that provokes the body to make IgA.

You perhaps can see where this is going. The COVID-19 vaccines, like every other vaccination you have gotten in your life, provoke a robust IgG response. They teach your body to make anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies, which will attack any SARS-CoV-2 that gets into your lungs.

It does not, however, do anything to provoke an IgA response, to defend your nose, sinuses, and throat. There was never any reason to think it would, being as it was a intramuscular inoculation, and intramuscular inoculations having never provoked an IgA response before, nobody was expecting it now.

These mice people are now claiming they have a vaccine that is a nasal spray which because it's a nasal spray, provokes an IgA response – in mice.

Here at Casa Sibyllea, we're using a few online tools to navigate The Smog.

Most useful so far has been https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current which is an animated map of the continent that shows an hourly prediction of where the smoke will actually be when for the next day or two. We've been using this to time when to open up the windows to get fresh air. This has the advantage of not being American and thus not being subject to the vicissitudes of the US federal government.

Also modestly helpful has been Google Maps, which has a view for air quality and a separate view specific for wildfires. These are under the "Layers" tool (position depends on the platform you're using), and you might have to click the "More" option. Here's screenshots the desktop (Mac + Firefox) and Android app UIs with the Layers tools indicated. They are not predictive, they only show the present or recent past (which is unclear – these would be much more helpful if they had datetime information attached, so the user could tell how fresh it was). In air quality view, you have to click a specific location to get an actual air quality number. Widefire view also shows the rough perimeters of smoke clouds.

Over on https://fire.airnow.gov, you can see a map that has regional textual forecasts and alerts, like a weather report for smoke, and dots that correspond to actual air quality sensors, so you can see where precisely the data is coming from near you. The dots are color-coded to how bad the air quality they are reporting is, so you can see at a glance how the whole map is; when you click on a sensor location, it gives you that sensor's (presumably current) particulate reading (PM2.5), a trend indicator, and a little graph of recent readings. Down in the right lower corner, it tells you how recently the page was refreshed, which is a good thing, but that's not the same as how recently the sensors updated. (I have my own domestic sensor hardware, and have become very aware that the online data they share is not necessarily very fresh; today my air filter started alerting, but the linked app didn't show there was an issue until a half hour later.) I just recently checked this out, so I don't know how useful it will be for me, but looks promising.

AccuWeather, like firesmoke.ca, has an animated forecast map. I can't figure out how to nagivate to it directly in AccuWeather for a specific location – the "air quality" tab only has static images. I found Boston's by Google searching "smoke map today" and letting it geolocate me. You can start there and navigate to wherever. It seems to cover much but not all of North America; it goes as far north as Saskatoon, and it's not clear how far south it goes. This is also new to me, but looks very promising because it's specifically a map of "near surface smoke", as opposed to merely satellite-visible smoke plumes. Intriguingly, it seems to be reporting something other than just particulate matter: it's units are "µg/m3" which it describes as "micrograms of gaseous pollutant per cubic meter of ambient air".

ETA: h/t graydon, this fascinating mashup map at earth.nullschool.net, configured to show "Wind @ Surface + Sulfate Extinction (Aerosol Optical Thickness, 550 nm)". Not sure what "sulfate extinction" means here, but the info shows it refers in some sense to SO4, sulfate ions. Nullschool Earth's main page says, "a visualization of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers updated every three hours".

Meteorology Youtuber Ryan Hall Yall has just issued a severe weather warning alert that is not at all reflected in the weather forecasts from either NOAA or the textual forecast from the Canadian government, but which does match what is in Weather.com's forecast for southern Quebec and does match the thunderstorm outlook map at weather.qc.ca: severe, high-winds storms, possible golf-ball size hail, low but non-zero probability for tornadoes.

2026 July 13: Ryan Hall Y'all: "Something INSANE Is About To Happen...":

Transcript:

Tomorrow, northern New England faces a rare mid July severe weather outbreak that looks eerily like the 1995 derecho (!!!! - S.) [...] There's a severe weather setup taking shape tomorrow across northern New England that we almost never see up here. If you live up here, I need you to take this seriously because this is a level three out of five risk that covers Burlington, Vermont, Platsburg, New York, and it reaches deep into the northern woods of Maine.

And uh here's what makes this one weird, okay? The whole pattern is tilted 90° from what you'd expect. Instead of storms riding along the front from southwest to northeast, these storms are going to fire over the southern Quebec area Tuesday afternoon and spill over top of the ridge and slide down to the east right across the border. And it's going to be like a slip and slide pointed at New England.

Before they hit, it's going to be brutally hot out there. Burlington could tie its all-time July 14th record of 100° with a heat index past 100. That heat loads the atmosphere with storm fuel and uh it's going to be sitting right under a 110 knot jetream that's going to be screaming from the northwest.

The real danger window here is going to be from 6:00 p.m. to midnight on Tuesday, okay? And the storms are going to cross the border and they're going to cause all kinds of problems starting off as supercells.

And that's actually the scary phase because if you get supercells in this kind of environment, we're talking about golf ball size hail and potentially even a couple of strong tornadoes. There's a low probability that we see some tornadoes in the beginning stages of this storm system tomorrow.

So, if you live in a mobile home anywhere near the Canadian border, know exactly where you're sheltering before the sun goes down tonight. [Promotion for his tornado alert system]

Then later during the day and into the night, those individual storms are going to merge into one solid wall of water and wind. And it's going to sweep to the south and southeast.

And that's when the main threat is obviously going to flip over to 75 mph wind gusts, maybe even higher than that. Fast enough to snap pine trees and knock out power for thousands of people.

Down in Boston and southern New England, the worst of the storms are going to stay north of you, but you'll still bake in that unbearable heat. [...]

So again, this setup looks eerily similar to the uh infamous July 1995 Adirondack derecho just shifted a little bit further northeast this time. So if it verifies, uh a lot of New England is going to wake up Wednesday with a massive cleanup on their hands.

Here's Wikipedia on the The Ontario–Adirondacks Derecho of July 14 and 15:

After crossing the open waters of Lake Huron/Georgian Bay, the storm raced southeastward into central southern Ontario. Several brief tornadoes were reported. An F1 tornado struck the Balsam Lake Trailer Park near Kirkfield, flipping over vehicles, destroying several trailers and sending ten people to hospital with non life-threatening injuries. One trailer was thrown over 250 meters. Across the lake from the trailer park, straightline winds caused extensive damage in the cottage community of Long Point. Further east, near Peterborough, an F2 tornado hit Bridgenorth damaging or destroying 20 homes and a marina with winds estimated upward of 200 km/h (120 mp/h).

[...]

Many thousands of trees were blown down across the province severing power lines, blocking roadways, and damaging homes. One person was killed, and dozens of people were injured. Eight people trapped in a flipped houseboat in Pigeon Lake near Peterborough were rescued hours after the storm. Power was not restored to some affected areas for up to a week after the event. The derecho caused CAN$53 million in damage.

The storm entered New York state at around 4 A.M. The storm slammed into the Adirondacks felling 900,000 acres (3,600 km2) of forest. The value of the loss of timber was estimated at over $200 million (1995 dollars) ($306M in 2014 dollars)

The derecho passed through the Syracuse airport with a 76 mph wind gust. A parked Boeing 727 was blown into another plane. A 77 mph wind gust was recorded at Albany. It moved into New England a little after sunrise producing 70–90 mph wind gusts in several towns in Massachusetts. Fifty people were left homeless after the derecho blew the roof off an apartment building in Holyoke, Massachusetts. [...]

The Ontario–Adirondacks Derecho was [...] among the costliest thunderstorms in US/Canadian history. It caused $500 millions in damage.

Again, there's absolutely nothing about this risk in the NOAA weather alerts at all for the region, and weather.gc.ca has no weather alerts for it either, saying only "60 percent chance of showers in the evening with risk of a thunderstorm", despite the page for Quebec Thunderstorm Outlook Today looking like this:



While Weather.com reports in the forecast for Magog, Quebec:

Day
86°F
precip 65%
wind WSW 15 mph

Rain this morning with strong thunderstorms likely by evening. Damaging winds, large hail and possibly a tornado with some storms. High 86F. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%.

Night
67°F
precip 54%
wind WNW 10 mph

Scattered thunderstorms, some strong this evening, then skies turning partly cloudy after midnight. Damaging winds, large hail and possibly a tornado with some storms. Low 67F. Winds WNW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50%.

So, unfortunately, it dawned on me only about ten hours after getting home from the ED (i.e. after I had slept) that the condition my symptoms most match is a thoracic aortic aneurysm, and in the ED I had been asked none of the relevant diagnostic or risk questions for TAA, nor did I, having not had that realization yet, ask them if the tests they had done were indicative of the state of my upper aorta.

Aortic aneurysm is unusual in women under 60, and usually associated with pregnancy. Thoracic aortic aneurysm is the rarer location for an aortic aneurysm, in general.

But the one risk factor other than pregnancy that makes aortic aneurysm much more plausible is a connective tissue disorder.

And here's where the situation gets gnarly: I suspect I have a connective tissue disorder.

I have a lot of reason to think so – I have the kind of injury history that precipitates physicians screening me for EDS. But I don't have EDS. The symptoms I have don't match EDS. I don't stretch, I tear.

But I have multiple medical conditions which are suggestive that there's something wrong with how my body holds itself together. At least one of the conditions I have has been hypothesized to be caused, in some cases like mine, by an as-of-yet undescribed, undiscovered connective tissue disorder.

The thing that triggered the realization that this might be an aortic aneurysm was reviewing the clinical note from the ED visit. They had done a chest X-ray, and there was an incidental finding: I have a very slightly sunken chest, i.e. mild pectus excavatum.

(I kinda always knew there was something slightly non-standard with the shape of my rib cage, from sewing clothes for myself.)

Or more accurately, what triggered the thought was when I looked up what pectus excavatum and its clinical implications were and found out it was a congential condition suggestive of disordered connective tissue, and any of a whole list of known connective tissue disorders.

I of course thought, "Oh, it's not that I'm having a very unlikely (given my age, blood pressure, and blood cholesterol level) cardiac incident, it's that I am very likely having the umpteen-thousandth incident of some connective tissue in my body tearing apart, again. Hmm, let me think, what parts of my body are in the place it hurts which might have given way. ...Oh hell."

So I looked up aortic aneurysm symptoms, and realized somebody at the ED should have asked me if I had had any recent problems with swallowing or history of aneurysms, or, you know, any connective tissue disorders. Because if they had, the answer to all three would have been, "Oh, hey, now that you mention it..."

But none of those things are in my medical record. I have been way too busy with other medical concerns to bring up the swallowing thing – over the last six months or so, I have sometimes had trouble with food getting uncomfortably stuck in my esophagus, apparently hung up on an obstruction. I presented my weird spontaneous bruising to my doctors, but they were unconcerned and mostly dismissive. And I have been trying for over twenty years to get a medical professional to take more than passing clinical interest in the possibility I have a connective tissue disorder, instead of treating every single injury and complication as a separate unrelated condition, and it hasn't happened yet, so there is no connective tissue disorder in my chart.

In the ED, I was asked about my family history of heart disease, but nobody asked me about my family history of connective tissue disorder. My sister has been diagnosed with one. And I have an uncle who needed a heart valve replacement due to a bicuspid aortic valve; there is an association still being explored between bicuspid aortic valves and connective tissue disorder (it is common in Marfan syndrome), so these researchers propose that people found with bicuspid aortas should be screened for connective tissue disorder, and offer a screening scale for doing so. (Disappointingly they based it on Marfan symptoms, which I expect will cause problems down the road.)

The thing is, thoracic aortic aneurysm can be a stable and not particularly concerning. Also it can turn into an thoracic aortic dissection, which is when the largest artery in the body tears. Which is absolutely as catastrophic as it sounds like.

So I emailed my PCPs office to suggest I be seen more quickly (there is a whole story here, and I'm not thrilled how it played out, but maybe later) and they got me in on Wednesday at 4pm by telehealth.

My PCP thinks it's probably just something gastrointestinal (or maybe costochondritis, but my symptoms really don't match). But I point-blank said I was concerned with the possibility it was an aortic aneurysm and asked what was necessary to rule it out. He said a CT with contrast.

So I'm pulling an all-nighter to get to my 9:00 a.m. Sunday morning CT appointment on time.

After about three or four days from the ED visit, the pain started remitting; at this point it's about 95% gone, though something still feels... off.

I hope he's right and this returns nothing of significance, but because there's no official diagnosis of a connective tissue disorder in my chart, I can't just rely on his, or any physician's, professional experience. He tried to push back a bit about the CT, but saw I was adamant and wrote the order. It's one of the reasons I keep him – he's not great, clinically, but he'll write the order.

I am... not pleased with feeling like I have to be my own doctor because actual physicians are caught in a self-sabotaging web epistemological idiocy, where because there's not a specific named syndrome to designate my symptoms, they don't document it, and because they don't document it, it stops being a risk factor when evaluating other, potentially life-threatening, presentations.

Update, 9:50 a.m.: no pathology of the upper aorta! Yay! Going to sleep now.

(h/t conuly)

This longform article is framed as being a "ha ha isn't it wacky NASA hired a lingerie company for the Apollo missions". Ignore that. It turns out to be about an organizational culture clash around documentation and specification requirements that will speak to all the therapists and software developers in the room. Also of interest to fans of the US space program, the history of women in NASA and in tech, and clothing construction.

2023 April 14: Nautilus: "The Bra-and-Girdle Maker That Fashioned the Impossible for NASA" by Nicholas de Monchaux, Head of Architecture, MIT. Adapted from his book, Spacesuit. Recommended.

Polka-dotted extraterrestrials with prehensile toes and monster groove have come to save humankind with virtuoso looped microtonal rock in compound time signatures.

Look, based on that description, I wouldn't have given this the time of day myself either, but there's a reason these maniacs have become an absolute phenomenon.

Gentle readers, Angine de Poitrine.

Absolutely read the comments. As much of a treat as the band.



Like a lot of things that have arrived from space, their initial point of impact on this planet was Québec. Some clever person noticed that their track titles are phonetic spellings of Québécois slang (Joual).

ETA: 2026 Apr 4: David Bruce Composer [YT]: "Angine de Poitrine's Math Rhythms Explained". 2026 Mar 21: David Bennett [YT]: "How Angine de Poitrine use Microtonality ". 2026 Feb 18: Stephen Weigel [YT]: "Sarniezz (Angine de Poitrine) transcription".

The YouTube algorithm pseudorandomly served me this, thereby answering the question I'd had on a distant back burner forever, "Hey, didn't I hear something about colored cotton cultivars once upon a time? Cotton that you didn't need to dye? Like back in the 90s?"

If you are a fellow fiber freak or interested in agriculture or organic crops or the underappreciated problem of sustainable clothing production, you may find this as fascinating as I did:

2026 Mar 7: Good Yarn Bad Knits [goodyarnbadknits YT]: "The Yarn That Almost Saved The World"

I knew that other contemporaneous cultures than those of Europe had unfathomably higher numbers of books than Europeans did, but I didn't know about this in retrospect obvious reason why:

2026 Mar 19: Dwarkesh Patel feat. Ada Palmer [DwarkeshPatel YT]: "Why Medieval Books Cost as Much as a House" (1 min, 7 sec):

Without papyrus, what you're writing on is a dead sheep. And if you think of the price of a head of lettuce and the price of a leather jacket, you're understanding the difference between a sheet of papyrus and writing on a dead sheep. So every page of a medieval book is as expensive as that much of a leather jacket. And a medieval book hand written costs as much as a house.

And so to have a library is to be not just rich but mega rich. So only the wealthiest cities contain anybody who has a library. The great library of the University of Paris, the library from Europe's perspective, has 600 books.

There's definitely more than 600 books in this room. Every kiosk at an airport selling Dan Brown novels has more than 600 books. This is nothing.

And at the same time as that, in the Middle East, sultans have libraries of over a thousand books or 5,000 books. There are libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa with thousands of books.* There are libraries in China with thousands of books. Because they in China have cheap paper and rice paper. The Middle East has papyrus.

Europe, and only Europe, is writing on a leather jacket.

* Three hundred thousand. It's been thirteen years and I am still not remotely over that fact. Every time I encounter it anew, my SCA persona gets acrophobic trying to imagine a library that big and has to sit down and put her head between her knees so she doesn't pass out.