Tag: medicine
Interferon & COVID-19
Those numbers come out to p-values of less than 10 to the minus 16th, which means that we all pretty much have to stand up take take off our hats – this one’s real. anyone who screens with such antibodies needs to take extreme precautions, because they are clearly at far greater risk of severe disease and death than the run of the population
Designer Proteins
the baker lab / rosetta are still going strong, with complementary ML approaches:
The hope is that the next time there’s an outbreak, within 2 days, we’ll have models of candidates
2023-07-13: Protein design is getting real.
10–20% of RFdiffusion’s designs bind to their intended target strongly enough to be useful, compared with less than 1% for earlier, pre-AI methods.Biochemist Matthias Gloegl has been hitting success rates approaching 50%, which means it can take just a week or 2 to come up with working designs, as opposed to months. “It’s really insane”. The latest protein-design tools have proved to be extremely powerful at creating proteins that can do a particular task — so long as that function can be described in terms of a shape, such as the surface of a protein to bind to. Tools such as RFdiffusion aren’t yet able to handle other kinds of specifications, such as making a protein that can carry out a particular reaction regardless of its shape — when “you know what you want but you don’t know what the geometry is”.
Wildlife Vaccines
Can vaccines for wildlife prevent human pandemics?
the concept of self-disseminating vaccines to prevent spillovers “is definitely intriguing.” The effort could also help to highlight the interconnection between the health of humans, animals, plants and the environment as a whole. “We have to stop being reactive and trying to stop something in the middle of the crisis”
Mitochondria stress response
Mitochondria may hold keys to anxiety and mental health
Mitochondria seem to be central to the very existence of a stress response, serving both as mediators of it and targets for the damage it can do.
Pandemic futures
a very wide range of outcomes.
Most Effective Face Masks
Go with surgical. Some masks like fleece are worse than no mask, because they make the droplets finer, which causes them to stay airborne longer.
PFAS Contamination
The CDC has found PFAS in the blood serum of “nearly all of the people tested,” meaning these chemicals already occupy the bodies of virtually everyone in the United States, regardless of whether one drinks polluted tap water. Manufactured since the 1940s, PFAS represent over 4700 industrially derived substances that repel or resist heat, oil, grease, and water.
Quantifying Hangry
So I nicked a sensor from a friend and monitored my blood sugar levels continuously for the last 2 weeks. This is the spring-loaded spike that stayed in me for the 2-week period, feeding data to a cell phone app. I ran some experiments, like eating Stevia packets on an empty stomach, and looked for patterns (graphs below). Here is what I learned
1) Liquid sugar is the worst. I have heard the same conclusion from everyone I know who has monitored themselves. High-end fresh-pressed juice and Chic-Fil-A’s frosted lemonade spiked my blood sugar like nothing else… super fast and super high relative to any food.
i wish more people did these kinds of experiments, we’d learn so much so quickly about our metabolisms. i did the same for 2 weeks as part of a viome study, but they were lame and only shared the data as pdf, not raw.
The Power of Vaccines
The immune response generated against a virus during natural infection is, to some degree, at the mercy of the virus itself. Not so with vaccines.
Since many viruses evade the innate immune system, natural infections sometimes do not result in robust or long-lasting immunity. The human papillomavirus is one of them, which is why it can cause chronic infections. The papillomavirus vaccine triggers a far better antibody response to its viral antigen than does a natural HPV infection: It is almost 100% effective in preventing HPV infection and disease.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 