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At our age it is getting difficult to find good birthday presents for my wife. This year I remembered here great grandfather's garden bench, which was in a sorry state. I promised to restore it for her birthday. Work in progress showing the grit blasted and repainted metalwork, some partly finished extended new oak slats. The finished article reassembled.

It would be trivial to have RNA synthesized, and I am pretty sure that folks are doing it. The big issue though is that it is necessary to test safety or efficacy for the new mRNA. While the process is likely going to be faster, it would still require time and money. Meanwhile, the current vaccine has been surprisingly effective in preventing disease so the incentive to invest that is a bit lower. That being said, there is no fundamental guarantee that an adapted vaccine would be more effective. Predicting what works and what doesn't (or what is safe) is a bit difficult to predict when it comes to the immune system and mostly relies on empirical data. The thought is correct, but based on these and other consideration actually make the spike protein an attractive target. The spike protein (or rather a specific domain of the protein) needs to interact with the human ACE receptor. Thus there is some selective pressure to maintain the receptor binding domain, as larger mutations could weaken the interaction. Of course some mutations could enhance binding, but there is only a limited space where such mutations could occur. Because of the way they work, they are also readily accessible by the immune system and are very immunogenic. The envelope (E) and membrane (M) proteins have been studied on SARS-CoV-1 and have the fundamental problem of being fairly small and only have a relatively small domain exposed to the outside. As a consequence they were found to be only weakly immunogenic. The N protein (part of the nucleocapsid) has a number of other issues comparatively speaking. The biggest during the decision-making process was based on research on SARS-CoV-1, where it was found that using parts of the N protein elicited quite different responses. Some appeared to be protective, but then they also observed ADE (a phenomenon discussed in another thread in this forum). Thus figuring out a safe epitope for SARS-CoV-2 would have been risky. In addition, the N gene has exhibited about 2-3x the number of mutations compared to the S-gene (which was not really known at the time of vaccine development) and together it makes it a rather unattractive target.

You seem to be mixing MO theory with Valence Bond (VB) theory. The concept of hybridisation, e.g. sp3, comes from VB theory, not MO theory. In MO theory, you would represent F2 as shown in this link: https://www.chemtube3d.com/orbitalsfluorine/ Note that each pair of atomic orbitals combines to give a new pair of MOs and that, in most of these pairs, both the bonding and antibonding MOs are populated with electrons, leading to no net bonding. The overall result is equivalent to a single 2-electron sigma bond. (I only found this website today. I think it is quite cool. You can click the buttons to see the shape of the electron cloud due to each MO.🙂)

My glockenspiel has just sprung to life! Some superstrings now: Beauty and the beauty.

I've read a bit about super string theory and its derivities, including M-theory, and while according to the professionals, they are intrinsically beautiful theories, the problem being that the chances of observation and validation at such levels, [quantum/Planck level] and numerous dimensions above the currently known four, are virtually nil, as I believe the case to be with any validated QGT, even with LHC and other such instruments. Is this a reasonable understanding of it? One relevant book was "Hyperspace" by Michio Kaku.

Here's another beauty, a Russian this time, Anna Netbreko, flirting with the orchestra and audience, singing Meine Lippen sie Kussen so heiss, My Lips kiss with such fire!

They are not different; they are on a different category. M-theory is a generalisation of superstring theory; a theory about both the classes of geometries (Calabi-Yau manifolds) and fields (super-symmetric conformal fields) that make the two irreconcilable field theories we know (gravity and so-called Yang-Mills fields) compatible. Once you establish this very general context for field theories, you notice that there is huge freedom in the space of parameters (coupling constants) of the theory, as well as in the way the many dimensions of space-time that this meta-theory[?] suggests compactify (are reduced to tiny curled-up dimensions that we can't see). The multiverse is the proposal of a general context, within this M-theory, of how a universe like ours may have arisen from the enormously big freedom that M-theory allows. So M-theory gives you a plausible context for the physical laws as we know them to have arisen. Multiverse is an idea about how the particular universe that we know may have arisen within that context. I hope that helped. Hopefully also helpful:

Lovely, @Moontanman & @beecee. I've posted --another version of-- this before. For all those coffee lovers out there. J.S. Bach - Ei! Wie schmeckt from the 'Coffee Cantata' BWV 211 performed by Ensemble Échos Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Sweeter than a thousand kisses. You must understand this comes from a time when Europe had just discovered coffee! To all my British friends: I'm working on finding another piece about tea of similar quality.

Love it!!! A song I believe most of us are familiar with would be "Nessun Dorma" Most of us [well at least me] have never heard it sung by a woman just by the likes of Pavarotti, Carreras and Domingo....until now...and brilliantly done by Sarah Brightman.... Another is Granada...this time sung by my all time favourite singer, and the biggest female record seller in the world, Nana Mouskouri....

So does seeing otherwise decent people nonchalantly use as an incentive slur the act of advocating for social justice. No offense intended to my buddy James Clerk M, but anyone who thinks it’s an insult to refer to others as warriors of social justice are to be dismissed as knuckle dragging fools.

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I once heard that the only hard problem in consciousness was in explaining it to Chalmers.

In defence of the medium and big one...I'm pretty sure the little one was the ring leader that put the other two up to it. (How else could one explain the unequal sharing of the viewing supports?) But does your average, run-of-the-mill, SJW notice that? Nope. (takes a trained, somewhat malicious, dyed-in-the-wool-conservative establishmentarian, eye..😜)