Dr. Carruthers’ apparatus for enlarging bats was created by Hollywood legend Kenneth Strickfaden. Beginning with his effects for Frankenstein (1931) he became Hollywood’s preeminent electrical special effects expert. He created the science fiction apparatus in more than 100 motion picture films and television programs, from the Frankenstein films to The Wizard of Oz and The Mask of Fu Manchu to television’s The Munsters, and his final work, Young Frankenstein (1974).
“Giving Off Sparks: The Movie Machines of Kenneth Strickfaden” (Museum of Modern Art) https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/28 (includes video clips of examples of Strickfaden’s work)
Hundreds of caves are spread throughout the mountains of Enshi prefecture, an agricultural corner of China’s Hubei province. The most majestic, Tenglong, or “flying dragon,” is one of China’s largest karst cave systems, spanning 37 miles of passages that contain numerous bats.
Nearby are small farms that collectively housed hundreds of thousands of wild mammals such as civets, ferret badgers and raccoon dogs before the pandemic, farm licenses show — animals that scientists say can be intermediate hosts for viruses to cross over from bats to humans.
Enshi is six hours’ drive west of Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first detected.
Western Hubei is home to at least seven types of horseshoe bats, according to the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, a research institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. One type, Rhinolophus affinis, has been found farther south in China carrying a virus 96 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-covid-bats-caves-hubei/2021/10/10/082eb8b6-1c32-11ec-bea8-308ea134594f_story.html
“Newly Discovered Bat Viruses Give Hints to Covid’s Origins : Coronaviruses discovered in Laotian bats are surprisingly adept at infecting human cells, showing that such deadly features can indeed evolve outside of a lab.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses-lab-leak.html
“…Three of the Laos coronaviruses were unusual: They carried a molecular hook on their surface that was very similar to the hook on the virus that causes Covid-19, called SARS-CoV-2. Like SARS-CoV-2, their hook allowed them to latch onto human cells.
“It is even better than early strains of SARS-CoV-2,” said Marc Eloit, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who led the study, referring to how well the hook on the Laos coronaviruses binds to human cells. The study was posted online last month and has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
Virus experts are buzzing about the discovery. Some suspect that these SARS-CoV-2-like viruses may already be infecting people from time to time, causing only mild and limited outbreaks. But under the right circumstances, the pathogens could give rise to a Covid-19-like pandemic, they say.”
In Review: “Coronaviruses with a SARS-CoV-2-like receptor-binding domain allowing ACE2-mediated entry into human cells isolated from bats of Indochinese peninsula” https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1
Dr. Carruthers’ apparatus for enlarging bats was created by Hollywood legend Kenneth Strickfaden. Beginning with his effects for Frankenstein (1931) he became Hollywood’s preeminent electrical special effects expert. He created the science fiction apparatus in more than 100 motion picture films and television programs, from the Frankenstein films to The Wizard of Oz and The Mask of Fu Manchu to television’s The Munsters, and his final work, Young Frankenstein (1974).
“Giving Off Sparks: The Movie Machines of Kenneth Strickfaden” (Museum of Modern Art) https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/28 (includes video clips of examples of Strickfaden’s work)
“Like a bat out of hell: Bats roosting in pit-latrine cesspits” (African Journal of Ecology 9/25/21) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/aje.12931 [Additional bat related articles in sidebar]
Hundreds of caves are spread throughout the mountains of Enshi prefecture, an agricultural corner of China’s Hubei province. The most majestic, Tenglong, or “flying dragon,” is one of China’s largest karst cave systems, spanning 37 miles of passages that contain numerous bats.
Nearby are small farms that collectively housed hundreds of thousands of wild mammals such as civets, ferret badgers and raccoon dogs before the pandemic, farm licenses show — animals that scientists say can be intermediate hosts for viruses to cross over from bats to humans.
Enshi is six hours’ drive west of Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first detected.
Western Hubei is home to at least seven types of horseshoe bats, according to the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, a research institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. One type, Rhinolophus affinis, has been found farther south in China carrying a virus 96 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-covid-bats-caves-hubei/2021/10/10/082eb8b6-1c32-11ec-bea8-308ea134594f_story.html
“Newly Discovered Bat Viruses Give Hints to Covid’s Origins : Coronaviruses discovered in Laotian bats are surprisingly adept at infecting human cells, showing that such deadly features can indeed evolve outside of a lab.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-coronaviruses-lab-leak.html
“…Three of the Laos coronaviruses were unusual: They carried a molecular hook on their surface that was very similar to the hook on the virus that causes Covid-19, called SARS-CoV-2. Like SARS-CoV-2, their hook allowed them to latch onto human cells.
“It is even better than early strains of SARS-CoV-2,” said Marc Eloit, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who led the study, referring to how well the hook on the Laos coronaviruses binds to human cells. The study was posted online last month and has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
Virus experts are buzzing about the discovery. Some suspect that these SARS-CoV-2-like viruses may already be infecting people from time to time, causing only mild and limited outbreaks. But under the right circumstances, the pathogens could give rise to a Covid-19-like pandemic, they say.”
In Review: “Coronaviruses with a SARS-CoV-2-like receptor-binding domain allowing ACE2-mediated entry into human cells isolated from bats of Indochinese peninsula” https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1