101–110 of 127 posts
I had a lot of fun building this marketing website for Debug back when I worked at Verily in 2016. Crazy that despite their progress behind the scenes, they appear to have not touched this website since. I probably spent a little too much time tweaking the CSS to get the mosquitoes to not overlap the text on various viewport sizes :)
I love this idea but I feel scared as well; who knows what we discover when we wipe these bugs out...
I had a lot of fun building this marketing website for Debug back when I worked at Verily in 2016. Crazy that despite their progress behind the scenes, they appear to have not touched this website since. I probably spent a little too much time tweaking the CSS to get the mosquitoes to not overlap the text on various viewport sizes :)
Why does the website have Google branding at the bottom? Is it a Google project or associated with Google somehow?
This is a great initiative. HOWEVER, THIS IS NOT NEW. This has already been tried and tested successfully in Singapore. https://www.nea.gov.sg/corporate-functions/resources/researc...
My understanding (very informal armchair) is that someone could relatively easily wipe out aedes aegypti using a gene drive with a sort of sex-selective infertility: Release a few thousand females carrying a gene drive that produces all infertile males, and all fertile females (who all also have the same gene due to it being a gene drive). Every generation, there are more and more infertile males, and more and more f…
So from this armchair, I'm glad to see that at least for aedes aegypti (which seems like the clearest case for deploying a gene drive), there's an alternative like debug.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does the website have Google branding at the bottom? Is it a Google project or associated with Google somehow?
Verily (under which this project exists) is part of Alphabet.
My understanding (very informal armchair) is that someone could relatively easily wipe out aedes aegypti using a gene drive with a sort of sex-selective infertility: Release a few thousand females carrying a gene drive that produces all infertile males, and all fertile females (who all also have the same gene due to it being a gene drive). Every generation, there are more and more infertile males, and more and more f…
I'm hoping that at some point someone just disregards all the "safety" debate, does it, and succeeds. There is something deeply upsetting about being in the position humanity is on earth and still being expected to tolerate being eaten alive. I wonder why we don't just try it on some remote island that has had mosquitoes introduced to it, but is otherwise considered isolated from the rest of the ecosystem (at least a…
Is this safe? I hope it doesn't affect the ecology in worse ways we won't foresee, it has happened before
This was tested in Singapore 10 years ago and successfully reduced the spread of Dengue fever by 77% and has not negatively impacted the ecosystem. This isn't a project to eliminate all mosquitos. There are over 3600 species of mosquito - this project is only targeting one: Aedes aegypti, which spreads many diseases, and is in fact an invasive species. Anywhere you see an Aedes aegypti outside of North Africa, it was…
My twisted brain spun out a version of this paragraph from some kind of parallel universe Hacker News (presumably where humans aren't the dominant species on the planet) that said:
> Homo sapiens, which spreads many diseases, and is in fact an invasive species. Anywhere you see a Homo sapiens outside of North Africa, it was humans who brought it there in the first place.
I think it's fun that my brain decided to come up spin the accepted African origin of humans and their proliferation around the world into this fun paragraph. No value judgement about humanity is implied.