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How to survive boiling water

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Re: How to survive boiling water

#71

Post by Schiendelman »

neonstatic wrote: post #59
Schiendelman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully the political football is simmering down - I think we have mRNA flu vaccines in progress now, and attempts to stop that failed.

I was a conscious adult when all that was going down, so I can remind you, that on top of standard lunacy, there were legitimate concerns about safety of injecting something novel and untested to large parts of the population, genuine collusion to get as many people as possible injected, harassment that went both ways, and last but not least, there were many people who took one of the many vaccines and had life crush…

I've heard a lot of arguments that sounded, at first glance, like legitimate concerns. But I haven't seen any that weren't rooted in "People are telling me to be scared so my concern must be legitimate," or "I don't know how this works and it sounds new so I'm worried."

I think people with followings online got a ton of economic benefit from scaring people, the same as the rest of the news industry. Remember Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

The ONE thing I know of that survived study was the higher incidence of myocarditis in young men with Moderna, and provider guidance lists it as a potential side effect. However, the Novavax vaccine had the same myocarditis outcome without being mRNA, and the Pfizer mRNA didn't have that outcome.

It's very unlikely clinical trials would have exposed that issue, so even in hindsight, none of the concerns seem to have been legitimate.

Re: How to survive boiling water

#72

Post by Eisenstein »

Aachen wrote: post #62
pazimzadeh wrote: post #54

spores are the reasons that labs use autoclaves instead of boiling to sterilize things. autoclaves are pressurized so can reach much higher temperatures

I didn't know pressure is used in sterilisation. Trying to look up why that helps, the Wikipedia article on autoclaves does not explain why but says it uses 1 bar, which would be equivalent to ambient pressure (atmosphere at sea level is ~1.01 bar). Does it maybe mean an additional bar, so twice atmospheric pressure? Wikipedia also says it uses steam, not just hot air, and again doesn't say anything as to why Do you…

I'm pretty sure it is because when there is high pressure the boiling point of water is higher.

Re: How to survive boiling water

#73

Post by 6177c40f »

cobbzilla wrote: post #63
dotancohen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how spores work.

It is in fact how Deinococcus radiodurans works: Deinococcus radiodurans has a unique quality in which it can repair both single- and double-stranded DNA. When damage is apparent to the cell, it brings the damaged DNA into a compartmental ring-like structure where the DNA is repaired, and then is able to fuse the nucleoids from the outside of the compartment with the damaged DNA.

However, to bring it full circle, Deinococcus radiodurans does not form spores!

Re: How to survive boiling water

#74

Post by onraglanroad »

roughly wrote: post #44
cratermoon wrote: post #2

This almost throwaway line from the article struck me as an example of what we can do with technology, if we choose to put our billions of dollars towards it: "I downloaded the BC30 genome".

It's a shame it became such a weird political football, because the story of the mRNA COVID vaccine is absolutely in the "we are as gods" pantheon - the virus was sequenced, and 3 days later two separate labs had sequences for the vaccine. Phase 1 trials began within 3 months. To go from "weird novel pathogen" to "enough engineered vaccine candidate to start Phase 1 trials" is some legitimate sci-fi shit.

What felt Sci-Fi to me was when I saw this Stack Exchange question about what the A's at the end of the COVID virus sequence meant: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/90607/does-the-g...

Edit: I found the wrong one; I think the one I remember was https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/questions/11227/why...

Re: How to survive boiling water

#76

Post by lithocarpus »

Aachen wrote: post #69

> about 7 out of 10 people in the U.S. were prescribed antibiotics in 2024 according to . This blew my mind so I double checked the source. It links to https://www.cdc.gov/antibiotic-use/hcp/data-research/antibio... which contains some numbers but not the claim. It links to various reports, the latest one (2024 at the time of writing) https://www.cdc.gov/antibiotic-use/media/pdfs/2024-Annual-Re... says at the top of…

There's no way 7 in 10 people were prescribed antibiotics in 2024. This looks like a simple and egregious misinterpretation of the data, which seem to be all too common. I could believe there were 700 prescriptions given in the US per 1000 people in the US population. But many of those would be repeats to the same smaller number of people. I still would say there's way too much antiobiotic use - every time doctors have wanted to give me antiobiotics it wasn't necessary.

Re: How to survive boiling water

#77

Post by neonstatic »

Schiendelman wrote: post #71
neonstatic wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a conscious adult when all that was going down, so I can remind you, that on top of standard lunacy, there were legitimate concerns about safety of injecting something novel and untested to large parts of the population, genuine collusion to get as many people as possible injected, harassment that went both ways, and last but not least, there were many people who took one of the many vaccines and had life crush…

I've heard a lot of arguments that sounded, at first glance, like legitimate concerns. But I haven't seen any that weren't rooted in "People are telling me to be scared so my concern must be legitimate," or "I don't know how this works and it sounds new so I'm worried." I think people with followings online got a ton of economic benefit from scaring people, the same as the rest of the news industry. Remember Upton Si…

> I think people with followings online got a ton of economic benefit from scaring people

Yes, it was very upsetting at the time and unfortunately remains a constant. I guess one has to go through that at least once to recognize a grifter.

> so even in hindsight, none of the concerns seem to have been legitimate.

The point was not only that the vaccines were rushed, it was also that there was a tremendous amount of coercion to force people into taking them. There are a few countries that didn't do that (Sweden comes to mind) and they ended up not having a much worse outcome than anyone else. I think it was a very telling moment in modern history, because it exposed a lot of myths, e.g. the American myth of gun ownership to stand up to a tyrannical government was totally shredded. The government turned tyrannical re: vaccines and mandates, did the guns help?

Re: How to survive boiling water

#78

Post by lostlogin »

advisedwang wrote: post #50
GJim wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if millions of mammals suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

To be fair, this was a comment about commercially produced cows milk.

Then the statement can be corrected:

As if billions of mammals suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk

Re: How to survive boiling water

#79

Post by lostlogin »

nekusar wrote: post #35

This is kinda disgusting but I think applies to this discussion. Blue cheese. Its living mold. I think it tastes good. BUT.. when I eat it, I notice a few days later that my excrement smells more like blue cheese as well. My guess is that I'm inoculating my own digestive tract with blue cheese molds. Another mishap happened with my cat too. I gave her some beef from our supper. Some of the gorgonzola blue cheese sauc…

Kopi Luwak is coffee that’s been digested by a cat, and it’s very valuable.

You might be onto something, have you considered trying the cat blue cheese?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_luwak

Re: How to survive boiling water

#80

Post by underlipton »

> While unhappy microbiomes can be unhappy in their own way, we do not have a consensus on what a “healthy” gut microbiome looks like, either. In collaboration with a continent-wide consortium in Africa, our lab helped catalogue the species found in healthy adult women across the continent. We found over 1,000 new species relative to what had been previously described in studies focused on Western countries.

>Companies trying to introduce targeted combinations of microbes into the gut are thus forever shooting at a moving target.

IIRC, the only semi-reliable way to "adjust" one's microbiome is to find someone who is healthy (and preferably your target body composition/energy levels/psychological profile; and, even more preferably - and possibly paradoxically - who is as close to "you", genetically and physiologically, as possible), harvest and freeze their feces, and take a daily, months-long course of the resulting poop pills, hoping that their gut microbes colonize your own digestive system.

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