Slightly different point but many bacteria in us right now also make lipopolysaccharide (LPS). If it were purified and injected iv, the LPS in me could probably kill me 1000 x over.

LPS is a critical component of gram negative bacteria, like E. coli.

We evolved LPS detection so long ago that it's in our innate immune system instead of adaptive immunity. It's so ancient we share this immune function with fruit flies.

LPS detection is so good and immediate because it's tuned to pick up single instances of LPS molecules. Not a few nmol. Single molecules. Detection will trigger inflammation and immune scale up to deal with the problem.

If you go injecting LPS or E coli into your blood stream, of course your own body is going to kill you. It'll freak out and think WW III has started and begin firing the nukes in every direction to stop it.

This is septic shock.

Nothing about this discussion was about injecting anything.

I agreee with the caution. I am not endocrinologist enough to guess what may happen and when. Because of the level of variably in all that is being experimented with, my guess is there may be a slower burn rather than explosion of odd toxicities. It does feel like stuff will happen.

Will side effects for hormonal and gene therapy approaches be shaken out in just 3-5 years? For gene therapy, the rare blood cancers associated with car-t or bluebirdbio suggest maybe not. Maybe they remain rare, but as scale and flexibility of use increases, how that may evolve. Hormones are a whole different calculation. With the creative and dosing, combinations, and applications I’m not sure how many from conclusions will be available. I’m not judging good/bad here, I’m just thinking that this “democratization” of medicines (maybe otherwise not available to some) will increase access, with both risks and benefits.

“Viruses” have a very broad feature set-beyond evoking Batman, it seems like a lot of details need to be hammered out here, even residually chlorinated water can be problematic in maintaining titers. IMO, These days, public health policy (conspiracy?) seems to be a more efficient way to spread pathogens. Not precise targeting tho.

AIDS has been treatable for a few decades, with good progression getting it to developing world and some towards a cure. That said, some of this recent progress has been impeded due to differing beliefs of some current governmental regulatory and research leadership, and beliefs that infectious disease treatments and vaccines are not needed for most people that are 'healty'.

This made me think of the "Institute for one world health" . It came out as a non-profit pharmaceutical company in the mid 2000's. Victoria Hale was the founder-it got her a MacArthur fellowship. It is focuses(focused?) on global health and populations underserved by for-profit models. I think they successfully developed a treatment for leishmaniasis. it's an adorable model and should be pushed but as usual it seems like the philantropy money is limiting.

also, Elephants have a much higher copy number of a gene called p53/ It codes a protein that acts to force suicide in cells that have damaged DNA (think from UV light, cigarette smoke, age, etc). In cancer this is a common 'early' mutation that allows collection of further mutation and progession towards cancer. In having many more copies of p53, it makes it less likely the p53 function will be eliminated

As a bit of a Flight Aware addict, well done.

Curious, what would make you default to this tool over FA?

I use Flightaware for detailed information about specific flights. They have tons of information about the history of the flight, past delays, etc. I use it to track specific incoming flights when I have to pick up someone from the airport. I keep an eye on it when I'm waiting to fly, and I also use it to see progress of the flight while I'm in the air if the airline doesn't provide that in a seat-back screen.

While your site is pretty cool, it's more of a neat thing to look at than it is a useful tool like Flightaware. That said, I bookmarked it and will visit it often (probably) as I live near an airport and can see planes in the distance. Also, I second the request for higher-resolution map tiles.

Thanks for the feedback!

If I mowed 2 acres of lawn dad would give me a stack of quarters. It didn’t take me long to realize that a fraction of that mowing time spent playing Defender would consume those quarters. I still loved playing it, but valuable perspective.

Yes thank you. The concept of Natural Selection has a lot more dependencies and complications than typically attributed. Especially for a complex outcome like “intelligence” or economic success.