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Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
101–110 of 195 posts
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#102I had project in college on Prions. Some interesting things I remember: * Kuru (laughing disease) was transmitted from cannibalism. Women and children of the tribe were more likely to contract it because they were more often given the less palatable parts of the bodies, which included brains * Some countries do not trust American cattle because our standards for Prion screening are too low * Kentucky has issues with…
Eating sheep's brain is pretty common in certain parts of India Is it a big issue out there? If I've eaten sheeps brain twice myself, how soon should I plan my funeral?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5052957/
iirc, incubation periods can be decades long. I believe the more you injest, the shorter the incubation period
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Prions don't really suggest that life is a simulation." If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level for living things, or that the simulator has an incredible desire for accuracy, and has put a lot of non-trivial work into ensuring it. Almost anything you can think of that would reduce the computational l…
>If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level for living things, or that the simulator has an incredible desire for accuracy, These are both somewhat my logic for even believing we live in a simulation. Obviously humans seem to be the largest factor on Earth given how we are rapidly changing the planet and…
"Throw in many other things like the fact we've not detected life off-world,"
I do consider the simulation hypothesis to be one of the answers to the Fermi paradox, because "not deeply simulating the observable universe" is definitely another one of those obvious ways of cutting the load exponentially. Again, lots of attention to detail; if the external universe is something other than a full QM-level (or true ToE-level) simulation, it's obviously running on one heck of a detailed model... but it could still be exponentially less detailed than it superficially seems to be.
Of course, even if we are an island of advanced simulation, there could be others out there, surrounded by much-lower-detail areas.
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is also an are where our innate fears, fears that modern society tells us are unacceptable, might have a place. There is a deep-seated fear of diseased people that once kept us healthy. Modern science has given us an understanding of disease that means there is often no need to physically separate paints where we know the disease is not easily transmitted. The shunning of an aids victim, or a child with cancer, is…
As stated in the parent comments that the likelihood of prions spreading in an infectious disease like fashion is very slim. Articles like this, ironically from a science-oriented publication, really don't help the conversation. Luckily modern medicine is fact based and not fear based.
Is your username… related?
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Prions don't really suggest that life is a simulation." If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level for living things, or that the simulator has an incredible desire for accuracy, and has put a lot of non-trivial work into ensuring it. Almost anything you can think of that would reduce the computational l…
>If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level for living things, or that the simulator has an incredible desire for accuracy, These are both somewhat my logic for even believing we live in a simulation. Obviously humans seem to be the largest factor on Earth given how we are rapidly changing the planet and…
Are you saying that the more complicated things are, the more it hints at a simulation?
Here, let me ask the most important question: What evidence about how things work on earth would make you less likely to believe the world is a simulation? Because it's always possible to come up with a justification after seeing evidence.
(Other planets are a different issue entirely.)
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#106The part about the possibility of contracting these from your doctor's equipment when you go in for an eye exam is truly scary: "Undiagnosed CJD patients may seek testing. And the diagnostic equipment used to test them may then become contaminated, the authors write. They recommend single-use instruments or the adoption of new decontamination procedures for opthalmological equipment with better effectiveness on prion…
The fear of contracting something from equipment is one reason why I go to an eye doctor who uses contactless air-puff glaucoma diagnostic machines rather than the older style which touches the eye.
In my last several visits, nothing has touched my eye at all.
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
The example in the article has very little transmissive ability because it grows in the brain and eyes. If there were a respiratory prion disease that could be much different. By nature of being a protein they are simpler and harder to eliminate than bacteria or viruses: > In a particularly vexing twist, prions are also nearly impervious to destruction, even when attacked using a strenuous combination of disinfectant…
> If there were a respiratory prion disease that could be much different. Not really. The point your parent is making is that prions themselves don't reproduce like viruses and bacteria. Its basically impossible for a large scale breakout to occur and spread.
But they do reproduce, by causing other proteins to misfold. If they didn't reproduce at all, then ingesting a few prions wouldn't cause any problems.
They can't reproduce outside of the body, but neither can viruses.
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The example in the article has very little transmissive ability because it grows in the brain and eyes. If there were a respiratory prion disease that could be much different. By nature of being a protein they are simpler and harder to eliminate than bacteria or viruses: > In a particularly vexing twist, prions are also nearly impervious to destruction, even when attacked using a strenuous combination of disinfectant…
> If there were a respiratory prion disease that could be much different. Not really. The point your parent is making is that prions themselves don't reproduce like viruses and bacteria. Its basically impossible for a large scale breakout to occur and spread.
Can you explain why? I'm not saying this is wrong, but they definitely replicate (by encountering and warping other proteins), so are you (and grandparent) saying that the replication rate is too slow? If so, why? Are you saying we have no means of transmitting proteins? (that sounds wrong, though I've been wrong before)
From my (ignorant, despite being interested in prions for decades now) perspective, you have something that (1) can replicate, (2) is durable (3) is harmful, and only the relative rarity of prions in general (because 1 and 3 are physically unusual to combine) have kept them from being a general problem. As we tinker with DNA and thus look into creating new proteins and factors that would influence protein-folding, I'd think it's worth taking the matter seriously (though not fear-mongering), certainly as part of our need to understand proteins better anyway.
What are my faulty assumptions?
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The example in the article has very little transmissive ability because it grows in the brain and eyes. If there were a respiratory prion disease that could be much different. By nature of being a protein they are simpler and harder to eliminate than bacteria or viruses: > In a particularly vexing twist, prions are also nearly impervious to destruction, even when attacked using a strenuous combination of disinfectant…
How is this at all a "twist"? The reason you cannot deactivate prions using these methods is that they are meant to denature protein. Prions are "amyloids"/beta-sheets, which means they are already in the lowest-energy state. This lowest-energy-state is exactly why the presence of prion can serve as a nucleation point for other proteins to denature into beta-sheets.
I don't care whether or not it's a "twist". I care that there is an entire class of pathogen that we don't know how to sterilize a surface of.
Re: Prions, Nearly Indestructible and Universally Lethal, Seed the Eyes of Victims
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If life is a simulation, prions suggest either the simulation is run at an extremely high degree of verisimilitude, indeed simulating QM at a particle level for living things, or that the simulator has an incredible desire for accuracy, These are both somewhat my logic for even believing we live in a simulation. Obviously humans seem to be the largest factor on Earth given how we are rapidly changing the planet and…
Are you saying that the more complicated things are, the more it hints at a simulation? Here, let me ask the most important question: What evidence about how things work on earth would make you less likely to believe the world is a simulation? Because it's always possible to come up with a justification after seeing evidence. (Other planets are a different issue entirely.)
Speaking for myself, I can not imagine what evidence would disprove the Simulation hypothesis.
At the moment, reality is indistinguishable from being "real", for appropriate values of "real". There are things that would increase the likelihood of us being in a simulation, like us finding a QM effect of some sort where we can prove that what's actually happening is a computationally tractable simplification of what the theory presents. Instead, in the real world, every torture case we put QM to, QM keeps on QM'in just fine, regardless of what our intuitions think.
So I would say that for me, the simulation hypothesis is more-or-less as improbable as it can get. However, that isn't zero, and I can't see how it would ever be zero, and I have to admit that the "not zero" in question is not merely a pro forma "not zero, but 10^-huge number", but some sort of non-trivial "not zero". No idea how to put a precise number on it, though.
(As Scott Aaronson has said, one interesting reason to pursue quantum computers is that they are the things that will allow us to run experiments to see if reality does perhaps give up after a certain amount of entanglement and turn the system classical again despite there being no QM reason to do so. It's probably not the best reason to do it, but it is a reason to do it. If quantum computers turn out to be truly impossible, and not just an extremely hard engineering challenge, the reasons why can't help but teach us something profound about the universe.)