Yet another nice example of Betteridge's law of headlines.

It may, or it may not. At least it's being researched now, so we'll know. In the mean time, drink your chloroquine. ;-)

Research has shown that this TB vaccine does help somewhat agains the flu, also a virus. If it kind of helps against corona (and that's a big if now being researched) it wouldn't be a true vaccine or real therapy, but it would give people a better chance of fighting the virus. Lacking anything better, that would at least be something.

Russia's numbers are quite low simply because they are behind on the curve. The first cases where imported weeks later than in most European countries. If they manage to use that time properly to implement social distancing measures etcetera, then that's their luck. If they don't, they'll be in more or less the same situation within a few weeks (and we'll see how they'll report that).

Indeed. It makes more sense to look at the excess mortality. For example, for the Netherlands, you find a nice graph over here that shows that the actual number is probably about twice as high as the officially reported number. For a large part, this is caused by people dying in nursing homes that aren't counted as Covid victims. This is a result of a lack of testing capacity, resulting in the tests only being used in hospitals and for medical care workers, and of only reporting confirmed cases.

The linked article doesn't actually test for this virus but for E. Coli instead, so whether that should be enough is not completely sure. According to this article (in Dutch) using an autoclave at 60 C in combination with using hydrogen peroxide should be enough though.

That was my first thought too. You misspelled Kruger and could have added a link but otherwise, you basically said all there is to say to this.

Maybe he read Paolo Bacigalupi's novel

In retrospect, I agree with you, I shouldn't have phrased it that way. I noticed you used the word 'they' - why is that? AFAIK, it's only one AC asking.

Not sure if that's "don't understand" or "don't want to understand", but I'll assume the first and try to explain as well as I can.

Let's go for the 'stronger muscles', and put some specific evolutional pressure on that. You're right that there is a natural variation in how strong people are. In one generation, picking the stronger people isn't evolution, yet. But let's scale up this petri dish thing to human scale. Let's take an uninhabited Earth-like planet, with several empty islands, all habitable, and an alien scientist that drops a few million people on island #1. It's a nice island, but eventually it gets a bit crowded. If you're a really, really good swimmer, you might make it to the next island, but there's a very strong current in the wrong direction, and the evil alien scientist will prevent you from cheating by building a canoe. As the island gets severely overpopulated, many people desperately attempt to make it to the next island. Most of them drown. But a few hundred years later, island #2 is populated by the descendants of the best swimmers from island #1. Now, the same thing happens - except the current to island #3 is even stronger, and it isn't reachable except for those who have a truly remarkable talent for swimming. Eventually, island #3 is reached by a few people. It gets populated by descendants from a man with Marfan syndrome, and a woman with polydactylism. Unfortunately, both happen to be colourblind too. We're now two islands further. Eventually, a few thousand years in to the future, the last island gets populated. The population consists of people with extremely long and strong arms, on average 6.2 fingers on each hand - often with skin between them - and exceptionally short legs. They're all colourblind and, frankly speaking, usually not too bright. But they sure can swim fast.

Compare the normal people from island #1 with those from the last island. Are they still people? Sure, we'd recognise them as such, and (biological criterium) they could reproduce with normal people. Are they different? That too. A few thousand years of selection for being able to swim against the current surely has had some effects on them.

Evolution doesn't necessarily mean a species transforms into another species. That's a relatively big step and nature takes its time. It does occur occasionally, but you'd probably have to try millions of petri dish experiments over a many years to even see that once.

Exactly who is itching for a fight here? It's not that the NK leadership is exactly peace-loving, but can we blame them for being somewhat suspicious about the US' intentions if this is an accepted way of thinking about foreign policy there?

'Unstable leaders' ... and this is coming from a country where Donald J. Trump could be chosen as the next president?

As a claim, yes, it's false. Which means we don't know whether they actually have those standardized nukes or not.

Yes, indeed, he would.

That has indeed been their peculiar form of diplomacy during some past crises.

Also true, but how far are they on their way by now? They're determined, have been busy for years, have taken several tests, and announced they're done. Hard to verify, but that might actually be the case.