danarlow

From the last paragraph of the paper: “The current versions of the Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson SARS-CoV-2 vaccines encode the full-length spike S protein with two mutations (spike S-2P) that stabilize the prefusion conformation and inactivate its fusogenicity (39, 64, 67, 68). We used this same mutant form of spike S-2P as a negative control, demonstrating the complete lack of fusogenicity when two consecutive prolines were added at positions 986 and 987. However, our findings demonstrate that it will be critical to consider the fusogenic potential when designing any future vaccines in which viral fusogens are to be expressed in mammalian cells.”

I still can’t believe that sucralose ever passed a safety trial. When has it ever been sensible to eat chlorocarbons? It’s amazing that it took this long to find some kind of genotoxic effect.

IMO the sugar alcohol allulose[1] has crossed the uncanny valley of sweeteners. It tastes (and cooks!) almost like sucrose and it doesn’t have a weird aftertaste. Like erythritol, it is absorbed and excreted unmodified so it is nearly acaloric and doesn’t cause GI problems in reasonable doses. My only minor complaint is that, like erythritol, it causes a slight cooling sensation, so the best use cases are foods that are served chilled.

It is naturally occurring at trace levels in some fruits and was first isolated in the 1940s but commercially viable manufacturing methods only became available recently. It’s starting to appear in some low-carb bars, cereals, and ice creams, but it’s still quite hard to find in products.

The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed :)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psicose

Erythritol is absorbed by the body before it reaches the large intestine and therefore does not make you farty. (It is subsequently excreted unmodified.)

This. Keto makes fasting shockingly easy.

Keto + no dinner is extremely effective. Being in keto makes it easy to skip dinner because you never get very hungry. Skipping dinner makes it easier to be in keto because you don’t have to as strict about carbs during the rest of the day. Works like magic.

These two articles claim to debunk iron cluster-dependent magnetosensory mechanisms but not the "radical pair" mechanism described by OP.

Once you have a successful PCR, you have billions of copies of your target sequence that are easy to aerosolize and/or transfer by contact onto your pipettes, gloves, and other lab surfaces. When a few of these molecules find their way into a new PCR you just set up, you get a false positive. There are protocols clinical labs employ to avoid this (e.g. never open the cycled PCRs in same room where you set up new PCRs, etc.) but they require strict adherence. (Or you can just give up all your sensitivity and only detect the cases with a huge viral load.)

Before you jump to conclusions, here’s a relevant quote from the article:

“Although almost all coronaviruses isolated from bats have not been able to bind to the key human receptor, SHC014 is not the first that can do so. In 2013, researchers reported this ability for the first time in a different coronavirus isolated from the same bat population.

The findings reinforce suspicions that bat coronaviruses capable of directly infecting humans (rather than first needing to evolve in an intermediate animal host) may be more common than previously thought, the researchers say.”

SARS shares an enzyme that is similar enough to the HIV protease that people tried the HIV protease inhibitors on SARS and they seemed to work. This coronavirus has a very similar enzyme so it’s the same idea

I’d like to discuss! Email in my profile

This is not correct reasoning about genetics. I've seen a lot of comments with this same incorrect claim on HN recently. In a complex trait like IQ, there is no reason to believe that stacking all of the alleles that each are individually associated with small gains in IQ will result in a large cumulative effect on IQ, let alone an additive effect. It could easily result in decreased IQ-- there are plenty of examples of negative epistatic interactions between loci. Even if you had all the individuals in the world in your GWAS, you couldn't estimate all of the possible pairwise interactions between loci, let alone fit the higher-order terms. The only way to really measure the effect of a combination of alleles is to find a subpopulation with that combination. That hasn't stopped people from trying to fit polygenic models for IQ based on all of these tiny effects, and unsurprisingly the best model only explains 10% of the heritability of the trait. I don't think that model has been carefully validated in a new cohort either, so I wouldn't be surprised if the true predictive power was lower.

Contemplate your own mortality

The graduate student is only getting paid $33k/yr. The university is paying for/waiving the student's $50k/yr tuition. Why should the student pay taxes on what the university is paying?

High ambient humidity means no net evaporation of your sweat so no cooling effect of sweating. If the ambient temperature is above body temperature and humidity is high, you won't be able to cool yourself and will quickly overheat (keep in mind that you already generate 100 W resting). Your experience in the hot desert was different because it was very dry.

There several manufacturers of YBCO wire now, e.g. http://www.superpower-inc.com/content/2g-hts-wire

Hey, I've done some (supervised) teaching in Culadasa's method and I've done three retreats with him. We've got a Google Hangout every Tuesday where we discuss our practice and help people out who are stuck, and I think we have a great track record of getting people quickly un-stuck. Hit me up (email in my profile) if you're interested! @aaimnr you too, I'd love to hear your perspective.

True, but it pretty definitively refutes the hypothesis that raising the minimum wage to $15 would dramatically increase unemployment in any reasonable setting. That is an important result. Now can have a discussion about the costs and benefits without the fear mongering.

Also, here's the full article this blog is quoting: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-21/doomsayer...

"Density Functional Theory" and "Quantum Monte Carlo", two ways of calculating electronic structures (the former tends to be more approximate and the latter tends to be more computationally expensive)

Electron multiplying CCD cameras can respond to single photons with > 90% quantum efficiency [1] -- that's better than rhodopsin. (I use one on a semi-daily basis.) To take advantage of that sensitivity you need to cool the sensor to -80°C so that thermal noise doesn't swamp your signal, but obviously you can't do that with your eyes.

[1] http://www.andor.com/learning-academy/ccd,-emccd-and-iccd-co...

Yes, this reasoning is correct. Same principle applies to combination therapies for HIV, malaria, etc., where you're at risk of developing a resistant strain within the patient. Not sure why it isn't more common among cancer therapies. Maybe not enough unique targets?

ahem... just because sucralose is not super reactive does not mean that it is not harmful. some evidence suggests it can screw up your gut microbiome: http://www.nature.com/news/sugar-substitutes-linked-to-obesi...

Definitely can't remotely operate a 40 ton truck. Wireless network latency is a bit high even under ideal conditions, and latency spikes could easily cause disastrous accidents.

And why exactly should we assume the "additivity of small effects" assumption holds far from the center of the current g distribution?? Stack up enough of these variants and you're into unknown territory, including possibly inviable embryos.

Many plant-derived chemicals that are called "antioxidants" by the popular press (e.g. catechins [1], anthocyanins [2], retinoids [3], etc.) have been shown to kill some types of cancer cells in vitro and in animal models, but not because they function as antioxidants per se. Instead, it seems that they modulate particular cell signalling pathways that regulate cell growth and survival just like other targeted cancer drugs [4]. In other words, the fact that these molecules can neutralize free radicals in vitro is irrelevant to their mechanism of action. Treating all of these diverse chemicals as one class, "antioxidants", just muddies the waters.

In fact, there are even some cases where an "antioxidant" molecule selectively killed a type of cancer cell by increasing oxidative stress inside cells, the opposite of what you'd expect from the blanket label. For example, it was recently shown that high doses of vitamin C selectively kill a type of colorectal cancer cell, but the mechanism of action was actually that the cells take up the oxidized form of vitamin C via a sugar transporter that tends to be upregulated in cancer cells, and the vitamin C-derrived pro-oxidant caused an oxidative stress signalling cascade that led to cell death [5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catechin

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthocyanin

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinoid

[4] A corollary is that, like other drugs, each of these chemicals that is effective against some type of cancer probably won't necessarily work against other types.

[5] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/11/04/scien...

high current/field applications: magnetic energy storage, magnetic plasma confinement for fusion, particle accelerators, rail guns, magnetic levitation/bearings

extreme sensitivity applications: portable NMR spectrometers/MRI scanners, practical quantum computing, very fast and sensitive microwave processing, easy access to large scale fermion condensates for scientific research

The big application for superconductors is wire, and it's much harder to compress a wire to a million atm than it is to cool it to -70 C. However, this result is important (if independently replicated) because it demonstrates that the established theory of low temperature superconductivity [1] has predictive power all the way up to these high temperatures and likely to room temperature, providing new motivation for theoretical chemists to dream up new materials that the theory predicts would superconduct under more accessible conditions. Practical room temperature superconductors would, in my opinion, change the world as much as the development of semiconductors.

[1] a modified version of BCS Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCS_theory

Re running your program "backwards": good luck ever figuring out if your sampling of an unknown but very complex distribution has converged :/