6g comes out, carriers push everyone to get new 6g phones as the 5g networks get worked over. Bunch of vaxxers just walking around like "Nah, mine's fine. Why spend hundreds on a new one? 🤷" AT&T and Samsung suddenly sponsoring research to undo vaccinations and turn the frogs hetero 🤣
[Punny jokeness] Now that I think about it, isn't there a limit to how many g's a human body can handle? We're all gonna have to train like fighter pilots or switch our cell network naming scheme 🤔
People should be allowed full decision over the treatments they want to get, no matter how arbitrary, stupid, or contradictory. To suggest otherwise is a horrific dystopia
No, he’s right. They SHOULD be allowed full decision over the treatments they want to get.
However, those decisions should not be free from the rules we as a society have put in place.
Us banning COVID vaccine deniers this treatment could be a good compromise. They freely get to decide, and they also suffer the consequences of that decision. Win/Win.
Right. I don’t care if COViD deniers chose not to get a vaccine. I care that they endanger people who want or need to be more careful. Let them make the choice, as long as the rest of us can choose not to be exposed to them
Literally me. I’ve been locked inside since 2020 because I had a double lung transplant and COVID will most likely cause my lungs to reject, and I die.
Assholes refusing to put a damn n95 mask on has pretty much thrown my life away. My transplanted lungs wont last forever. My final years are locked indoors because a fucking mask is political.
Yeah, because kidneys are a rare and valuable thing what drinking would prevent from working
That makes zero sense for your petty ass sense of vengeance by denying people easily manufactured treatments because they turned down a vaccine you think they should have gotten.
To be clear, societies exist regardless of the existence of states. The fact that states are trying to control societies and communities doesn’t make any state “The Society”… Society is people.
Yes, you do get to decide the treatments you want to get. Nobody is forcing any treatments on you. But just like freedom of speech, it doesn’t mean freedom from consequences of that speech. Too stupid and didn’t want to participate in saving your fellow human? Well, said fellow humans don’t want to participate in saving you either.
Science isn’t a religion. It’s a process. Just because it’s called a vaccine doesn’t mean its safe. You can be anti-this-particular-vaccine without being anti-all-vaccines.
(Edit - I misremembered what was hinky. For posterity, I’m restructuring my comment and preserving the bad take struck out below.)
In the case of the covid vaccines, that process was intentionally minimized as to bring the vaccine to market faster.
The vaccine did have benefits. It also had complications
that instead of being found out in trials were found out after release.
There were side effects that were serious. The vaccines and boosters effected different age groups differently. Some age groups were more likely to develop serious side effects.
Covid effected different age groups differently. Some age groups were more likely to develop serious complications.
In the instances where the risk of serious side effect was more likely than the risk of serious complication, at least one of the boosters was more likely to be bad for the patient.
If it is more likely to cause harm, I can understand not wanting to take that version.
My point is it’s ok to refuse medicine based on medical evidence.
By refusing COViD vaccine despite all evidence showing it safe and effective, you put others in danger. I agree on being spiteful: you endanger me and my family because you don’t trust science , then you don’t deserve the personal benefit of science treating your auto-immune disease
I didn’t refuse the vaccine. Get the fuck out of here.
E: And all evidence didn’t show it was safe. There were risks. In the case of the vaccine itself, iirc, the risks of serious side effect were less than the risk of serious complication from covid. The primary 2-stage vaccine is a good call.
I did refuse a particular booster because the available data on it showed for my demographic the risks outweighed the potential gains; it was more likely to harm me than help me.
And all evidence didn’t show it was safe. There were risks. In the case of the vaccine itself, iirc, the risks of serious side effect were less than the risk of serious complication from covid.
Just wondering how you justify saying garbage like that when people died, have serious heart conditions, taste problems, balancing issues, etc. from catching COVID?
I don’t understand your comment. To put it another way, vaccine was less bad than covid. Or Covid was worse than the vaccine. Do you still object with the simplified phrasing?
I believe the COVID vaccine trials were the largest ever done, or close. And most of the “complications” were simply the same issues of “long COVID” but scaled down significantly.
Anyway, if people were only against the COVID vaccine, then that’s better than more broad anti medical stances. And I think it would be stupid to deny someone medicine for almost any reason, least of all that.
It really is / was a difficult information landscape.
Forgive my ignorance on the subject. Instead of reading studies directly, I used the opinions of doctors quoting studies to inform my opinions. If memory serves, for the first booster, it was more likely that young men would develop serious complications from the vaccine booster than if they developed covid instead. I think they were heart complications.
So if a drug is shown to be more detrimental than helpful, why is it bad to refuse it, or ask for a different drug, or for more investigation?
They did not skimp on the process with the Covid vaccines. Not with the big ones like Moderna or Pfizer, anyway. They accelerated the process, but they did not skip steps. They did steps in parallel.
Don’t DERAIL this conversation about a completely different vaccine.
I was replying to a question. Please follow the context thread, or go away.
Here’s what you said, context wise …
Unpopular opinion: Anyone who refused the COVID vaccine should be banned from getting this.
You weren’t responding to a question, you were just offering your own opinion, an opinion that was different from the topic and the context of the conversation being discussed, and hence my reply to you, calling you out for it.
Ya, I am allowed to post my opinion. I don’t think people who refuse a vaccine that can help save others should be allowed to receive a vaccine that benefits only them.
If you’re upset, you’re part of the problem. Not my fault. If you don’t want to see my comments, which I am free to post, block me.
In fact, don’t worry about it. I will block you, because your reply is insane. Literally complaining to me because I posted my opinion, and then calling me intellectually dishonest. Nutters.
No one says you’re not. The only point I was making is you’re posting your opinion in the wrong place and you’re ‘muddying the waters’ of the conversation.
That point was said straightforward to you, but you chose to ignore it and try to move the goal posts onto something else.
If you’re upset, you’re part of the problem. Not my fault.
I’m not upset at all, I was just asking a question, why are you expressing an opinion that doesn’t match the conversation being had and that you know would be inflammatory and pollute the conversation.
You keep trying to warp the meaning of my initial critique of your initial opinion into something else to win an Internet argument.
Not that i necessarily support this policy, but to the people who are acting all offended at the idea you might be cut off from future scientific advances because of you’re hurting the public good (“Consequences? For my actions?!”): You could just get the vaccine.
Relatedly, where are memories stored? How can we have flashes of memory from decades ago? Why can we not access certain memories until something traumatic or triggering happens and then it comes flooding back? Why do smells trigger memory?
Long term memories are stored in the hypothalamus as you sleep at night.
Smells are tied to more primitive structures in in the brain. I'm a little rusty on why it makes the memories so strong, but there's quite a bit of research out on that one.
Trauma is also encoded differently, but there's a lot of garbage research that muddies the waters on that particular subject.
I just got slapped with an auto immune problem with my thyroid. It’s inflamed and will never go back to normal. So far I only have a fat neck and I’m stable but at any moment I might develop hypothyroidism because of this. I can’t wait for this to work.
Edit: having said that… the source of this post has been known for clickbait bullshit articles so maybe I shouldn’t hold my breath :(
So far my levels are okay and I’ll have to do half yearly checkups to catch it changing. But from what I’m seeing it’s mostly an incrrased risk, not a death sentence just yet
Yeah that sucks. Really shows its a tug of war between doctors and patients, where patients get to deal with doctors that don’t care / have prejudices that cause misdiagnoses, while doctors have to deal with patients who think they know better than the doctor… I’m happy that for the moment I’m fine
As phase I clinical trials are underway, we’ll see how far this can get. But sure, don’t expect too much, then you won’t be disappointed. Let’s hope it can really help people.
Hypo here since just a couple years. I just take Eutirox daily and monitor my TSH levels each year. Other than that it’s been fine, no quality of life issues for me luckily yet
Well, all went a bit quiet. Partly because the Montreal-based company leading the way, Nexia Biotechnologies, a company spun out of McGill University, swiftly went bust and sold its two GM goats — Sugar and Spice — to the Canada Agriculture Museum in Ottawa, which in 2013 removed its genetically-engineered goats from display amid public pressure.
Quiet momentum continues, however, under Dr Randy Lewis of Utah State University and his team. Though he is unaware of the whereabouts of Sugar and Spice today, his lab looks after over twenty goats capable of producing silky milk.
This article is garbage but I’m a molecular biologist and the publication they’re talking about is really neat.
The “ELI5 to the point of maybe reducing out the truth” way to explain it is that the researchers can add “flags” to proteins associated with immune responses that make cells pick them up and examine them. This is shown to work for allergins (so say, add a flag to peanut protein and the cells can look at it more closely, go “oh nvm this is fine” and stop freaking out about peanuts) as well as autoimmune diseases (where cells mistake other cells from the same body as potential threats).
It’s not nearly to a treatment stage, but tbh this is one of the more exciting approaches I’ve seen, and I do similar research and thus read a lot of papers like this.
There’s a lot of evidence that we are entering a biological “golden age” and we will discover a ton of amazing things very soon. It’s worrysome that we still have to deal with instability in other parts of life (climate change, wealth inequality, political polarization) that might slow down the process of turning these discoveries into actual treatments we can use to make lives better…
Still, don’t doubt everything you read! A lot of cool stuff is coming, the trick is getting it past the red tape
Wealth inequality won’t stop these discoveries making people’s lives better, it will just ensure that the 1% live forever in perfect health and the 99% get to watch their kids and grandkids get sicker as the environment, living standards and employment situation deteriorate, until automation gets to a point where the working class are no longer required and can be safely left to starve or killed off.
Americans invest milions in healh evolution and only 1% of the americans can use it. On the other hand every other country with a free heath care will provide the solution discovered by americans for free to their people. Americans dying to keep the world alive. This is really fucked up.
This is basically my fear, also. How can I retain hope that new, amazing treatments will help people if we don’t even have equitable access to the current treatments?
For example, we still make people seeking medicines for mental health try going through a gauntlet of dependency-forming drugs from greater than half a century ago (that have been shown to be effective in less than half of people who take them) before insurance will pony up for contemporary alternatives (that work much more often).
I don’t work in the clinical space so don’t trust me too much… but jeez we have so many things to solve before the “bio golden age” really helps normal people
Maybe if people knew they’re going to be around for 200 years they’d think twice about these other issues because now it’s affecting them too and not just the next generation.
The privacy on that site was horrible, and I stoped de-selecting vendors who want permission to track me after two minutes.
But I wanted to ask you: are there any biologics based on this discovery in phase I or even II at this point? Any odds on one of them making it to III?
(also re: your last comment, read William Gibson’s The Peripheral; you are describing his “jackpot” scenario)
It still knows your IP and browser fingerprinting still works, they still know who you are and what sites you visit. If you change your VPN server you’re a little closer, and of course there’s Tor assuming you don’t get a malicious exit/entry node set, but private browsing isn’t as private as people seem to expect.
Nope! This research is all done in rodents, to my knowledge. I’m always like “wow what a cool and maybe lifesaving discovery!.. for people in like a decade+!” 🙃
Well, you’ll also be happy to know that they started this work on allergin way before working on autoimmune disease, and in my opinion, the evidence that it works for allergies is much stronger than how it works for autoimmune diseases! Not necessarily because it won’t work for auto immune stuff… just that they have done less confirming.
I have severe allergenic asthma so I was excited about it too 😁
“Red tape” eh? Shit if I had MS or AIDS I’d get some red contact lenses and some fake white fur, just don’t ask where the rat tail is attached, and be in for clinical trials in the AM. “I’m a rat it’s fine. I mean squeek squeek.”
That is so funny… tbh I know I’d get shit for this professionally, but it definitely frustrates me that we don’t allow people with few other choices to have access to crazy, left field treatment stuff.
My best friend died of a specific and rare cancer this year. We know exactly how that cancer works on a molecular level, and we’ve found a few chemicals that interfere with the function of those cells in vitro while not seeming to harm average cells.
Sure, it’s a huge risk to take that drug that’s only been tested in a dish, and it wouldn’t be worth it for most people. But he was going to (and did) die within a year of diagnosis. It’s not like he had other options.
Maybe? But it works by flagging specific proteins related to allergenic response. For people with higher tendency to develop allergies in general, I imagine you’d need a LOT of different flagged proteins to cover the bases of what one’s immune system was already alerting to.
Tbh, it might be a good treatment for those individuals for their few, most problematic triggers, but I think in general there are probably better approaches for them!
Hope it’s not a stupid question but would this kind of thing work for ankylosing spondylitis??
I ask because I suffer from AS the doctor’s that I’ve gone to are always arguing whether it’s an autoimmune or an autoinflammatory disease, and on the web it says that the underlying mechanism is either of the two as well.
So it’s not clear to me whether it’s one or the other, or if itimplies the same thing. I’ve read a huge deal about AS but I’m not really good at biology or medicine to understand a lot.
Honestly the only reason I’m commenting -and asking- here, is because I want to have hope that this actually leads up to something that can help me stop this fucking pain that makes me feel like I want to die (figuratively) but I’m afraid of this being a clickbait article.
Also my English is not the best so sorry for any mistakes and for the long comment.
Do you take humira or another medicine for it? I have AS too and it’s bearable with Humira for me. But yeah if this research leads to something that would be great
I used to take Humira for 5 years but my country stopped delivering it (I used to live in Venezuela), then I moved ti the US and started Humira again, but it was about 30-50% effective only, I still had a lot of pain
I then went through Cosentyx and Taltz, none worked. Then I tried Enbrel, same effectiveness, got it through a foundation. Healthcare didn’t want to cover it and the foundation didn’t approve me if I had Healthcare.
Got sick in the US, lost all my money (due to lack of money), so I spent the little I had saved to return to my country, moved to Brazil and I’m about to start Golimumab (Simponi) tomorrow, hopefully it works because I haven’t gotten medication in 2 months and the pain feels unbearable.
Having said all this, if there is a speck of a chance that this helps people with AS and other similar conditions, it would make me happy. Having this kind of pain is unbearable.
Sorry for the long comment, I suddenly wanted to rant about this!
Wow. You’ve tried a lot more than me. I just met a nurse in the airport and she said to try this drug she administers, but I can’t remember the name now… she did send me a link to their website though. But honestly I’m a bit suspicious of stuff like this. soleohealth.com/chronic-inflammatory-disorder/
But I mean, if you’re desperate then maybe give them a call, idk. Kinda seemed too good to be true, the story she was spinning for me.
I’m sorry! My knowledge of this process does not extend to the point where I could even give you a hint of the answer. To be honest, it would require me diving into the underlying mechanisms of your condition, and it sound like your doctor has said it isn’t even settled science why it’s happening, so I don’t think anyone can tell you if this would work for you.
I know that isn’t what you wanted to hear, but two things: 1) this treatment is a long way off anyway, so anyone will have to wait for it to be available, and 2) there are probably many other treatments coming down the line for your condition… even if those also take a long time.
Anyway, I’m sorry for your pain and that I couldn’t help! Honestly, I hope something will be available to help you many years before this becomes a treatment option.
That would also work for cancer then, wouldn’t it? Since the mutated cells hide from the immune system you can mark a few to get the immune system to take a look and realize that shit is happening, or am I oversimplifying too much?
There are immunotherapy treatments for cancer already. Infections and cancer use the immune system the correct way: “tag” the problem cell/virus part with an antibody, make a lot more antibody and flood your body with it to clear the problem cell/virus.
This is the process a vaccine uses. The old vaccine method is to take a bunch of dead bacteria or inactivated virus and put that in your body. Your body should identify it and begin making antibodies against it. If you do get exposed to the disease, your body is full of antibodies which can immediately clear it, rather than letting the infection/cancer work for a few days without much of an immune response.
An autoimmune disease, a body “tags” its own cells. Then the immune system invades the person’s own tissue.
I have celiac disease. If I eat gluten, the enzymes I use to digest gluten become tagged. Unfortunately, humans make one gluten enzyme (TG2) that’s found everywhere in the body. A third of celiacs will have their thyroid tissue affected if they consume gluten.
One particular antibody, IgE, is known for extreme reactions to antigens. These are the ones known for the immediate and life-threatening allergies (peanuts, shellfish, bees, wheat).
This new stuff appears to be a way to tag antibodies or antigens or memory T cells (they hold the “blueprints” to make antibodies really quickly after your natural antibodies go away) and have the immune system “re-evaluate” the antigen. I’m guessing from the post above and a little of the article. I haven’t heard of this process in the body before.
Cancer itself is not autoimmune (autoimmune inflammation can make it more likely to happen, but tumors don’t form directly through autoimmune mechanisms). So the first pathway used for normal vaccination is what’s needed. The difficulty lies in knowing something in each specific cancer that would make a good antibody target. It is a person’s own cells and DNA, so a lot of care has to be taken to find an appropriate antigen. Immunotherapy treatments that exist are really specific to certain types of cancer. They have much less severe side effects than radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
You’re not oversimplifying from my description, my description was just too simple itself! Unfortunately, no, it wouldn’t work like this. The whole idea is that the cell would pick up anything and discover that it isn’t as dangerous as it thought. That’s the opposite of what we’d want for cancer cells!
Luckily, there are many, many other treatments for various cancers coming in due time, also. My research is actually closer to cancer research than immunology, so I can tell ya-- there’s good stuff coming!
Sounds to me like it's the opposite of how an LED works. Instead of creating a small gap that discharges a photon, the material creates a small gap that collects an ion. The ion is then run downstream to the thing that is being powered, making the gap available for another ion.
In other words, it kinda works the same as clouds do to create lightning, the material just facilitates this in a way that can be reliably consumed and at a much, much lower energy scale.
One problem is that a great deal of correct security advice contradicts “common knowledge” security practices. Password character classes – “must include capitals, lowercase, numbers, and symbols” – are a standard example. That idea got rooted in security requirements for banks and such, and it was a bad idea even then.
But getting rid of that idiocy looks, to the casual observer, like “weakening password requirements”.
Another problem is that the biggest security vulnerability that many businesses have is obedience to authority. If you can “social-engineer” someone into thinking you’re the big boss, then of course they’ll turn off all the security for you. And the scarier the big boss is, the more eager the underlings are to please them by doing exactly what the email from [email protected] says.
Resistance to phishing is questioning claims of authority; it requires being willing to tell the big boss that no you won’t take the security down in response to an email, even a really convincing one. Which means that the worker has to be safe in doing so.
One problem is that a great deal of correct security advice contradicts “common knowledge” security practices. Password character classes – “must include capitals, lowercase, numbers, and symbols” – are a standard example. That idea got rooted in security requirements for banks and such, and it was a bad idea even then.
I don’t know a lot about computer security - but must include capitals, lowercase, numbers, etc seems like a good idea, why is it not?
Still fairly new to the world of computer security myself, so anyone can feel free to correct me of course, but basically;
While adding capitals, lowercase, numbers, etc does make the password more complex, it also makes it harder for the average user to remember. This means that many users reuse the same password across multiple sites/platforms. Or they use shorter passwords with common tricks like Pa$$word1. That checks all the requirements for a “secure” password but it really isn’t. Hackers know that people use $ in place of S, people often use some variation of “password” in their password, and the number is usually a 1 or something easily guessable like the year they were born.
So the more up to date recommendation is to use a long and strong password (like at least 12 characters long), or a password manager and 2FA.
I think “password” is the wrong word for it. “Passphrase” encourages people to make it longer, like a few words, and length beats special characters any day.
Longer pass-phrases are easier to remember, and more secure than shorter pass-words with numbers and symbols.
If you’re using a password manager, make them long, with numbers and symbols also.
TLDR: number of possible passwords is x^y where x is the size of your alphabet and y is the password length. Increasing y is better than increasing x.
It’s not immediately obvious, but it is pretty straightforward math. It has to do with password length vs alphabet size.
Let’s look at an 8 letter lowercase only password. Each time you increase the minimum length, you increase the maximum number of passwords by 26 (the number of letters in the alphabet). So it would be 26x26x26x26x26x26x26x26 or 26^8 which is 208,827,064,576. This is a lot of passwords, but pretty easy for a computer to brute force.
Let’s add the ! symbol. This means there are 27 options or 27^8. The total number of passwords is now 282,429,536,481. A bigger number, but not by much.
If we only have lowercase letters but increase it to 9 letters long, then it increases to 26^9 which equals 5,429,503,678,976. We’ve jumped from millions of passwords to billions with passwords only 1 character more.
If you allow all symbols and numbers, but also increase minimum length, you get the best of both without creating difficult to remember passwords.
This of course ignores the primary way people get past passwords: by asking the user for their password. It also ignores that an intruder is going to check the most common passwords and not just try them all. Adding numbers and symbols doesn’t really change the most common passwords though, since dragon just turns into Dragon1!
Also, not having alphabet requirements lets you use passphrases, which gives you access to little mental shortcuts like “lyrics of a song started in the middle of a line”.
Nobody is going to guess that your password is “fame, he’s ignored, action is” even if they know you like Spider-Man. And with 29 characters that password is not easily brute-forced, either. (Okay, this one has special characters but it works just as well without them.)
And it’s super easy to memorize even multiple passwords. You just need to remember song + offset, done.
Notably they trialled first for coeliac autoimmune, but it’ll be 2024 before phase 2 results are out for that. About 10 years back there was a similar vaccine which also passed phase 1 trials but failed at phase 2. Phase 1 is basically testing that the vaccine does no harm in small groups and it is phase 2 where they measure if it is actually efficacious and to what level. If it passes phase 2, then get your hopes up.
I work in clinical (and preclinical) trials. And I have celiac disease. I’m hopeful but not optimistic that I’ll be able to eat pasta within the next decade.
Did they live through the same pandemic I did? Because I distinctly remembering that “simple” advice apparently being too confusing for a huge portion of the population.
The advice these days on computer security is simple too: Use a password manager and let it make a unique password for every site and don’t tell anyone your password.
Of course in the tech world we immediately have a lot of sites that make that impossible, frequently starting with the ones that should be the most secure, your banks and your phone.
Covid advice was simple, people understood it but many didn’t comply because they didn’t find it convenient. There were also covid-deniers, and people who significantly underestimated it. There were people who found corporate cyber security measures inconvenient too in the places I worked, but ignorance was I think always the more important reason.
I also think it isn’t enough for the advice to be simple, it should be somewhat easy to apply. “Don’t fall into phishing emails”. Sure, but how? Then it lists a bunch of tricks and hints and people can rarely remember all, and apply while they go through tens of emails daily. I think this is the message from the article.
Advice against phishing emails can be reduced to, "1: Never click on a link, call a phone number, download an attachment, or follow instructions you found in an email unless you were already expecting this exact email from this exact sender. 2: If you really want to do those things, search up the organization's website directly and use the contact info they provide there instead."
imo it's the ad-hungry articles stretching everything into 10+ pages that's making advice so inaccessible to people. Super annoying because it dilutes the real, simple message that's already there, it's just locked behind an adwall.
It’s pretty amazing how many people still remember and reuse passwords for everything. I think it is still as simple as people haven’t heard of password managers or they’re just too overwhelmed with adding all of their passwords to a password manager and then changing them to something unique.
This is why security is complicated: It’s all about trading risks. Are password managers secure? Yes, unless someone gets your database and can decrypt it. Is writing the password down secure? Yes, unless someone gets physical access to your system. Is memorizing your password secure? Yes, unless someone does some lead pipe decryption on your kneecaps.
For most people, a password manager is better than paper and memorizing.
If you work at a company that provides a password manager, then it’s an easy choice for your work-related passwords. For personal stuff, though? There’s nothing out there I feel comfortable recommending that isn’t a pain in the ass.
Cloud services are mostly bullshit. LastPass got hacked hard earlier this year. OnePassword is no better. BitWarden is maybe better but self-hosting is obviously too high a bar and if you use their cloud service then you’re still giving all your passwords to a third party.
And then if you actually want it to be convenient you need browser plugins. Nah.
Offline solutions like Keepass are great but then you need to find a way to manually sync them across devices. Pick your poison.
I wonder how expensive this will end up being. I also feel like it will be enshittified into an endless subscription of shots or it'll stop working or something. We don't get nice things in this timeline.
Very often, headlines about new, revolutionary medical breakthroughs actually do result in breakthrough treatments for specific niche disease scenarios. For instance, cancer deaths are down roughly 1/3 over the past 30 years.
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