stenl (u/stenl) - Readit News

stenl commented on French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence bbc.com/news/articles/cvg... · Posted by u/begueradj

ctrlp · 5 months ago

This is hopelessly naive. Heads of state should not be prosecuted in democracies. It sets a bad precedent and there is no easy way to apply the rule of law to the head of state. There are too many examples in history of abusive lawfare practices. Better not to nitpick about "crimes" in such cases and let the man disappear from the stage. Aggressive prosecutions only increase the likelihood he'll try to mount a political comeback.

stenl · 5 months ago

He was not head of state when the crime was committed and he is not head of state now.

stenl commented on The Longest Sightline on Earth calgaryvisioncentre.com/n... · Posted by u/lemper

stenl · 8 months ago

If, like me, you wanted to see the actual farthest distance photo, here it is: https://beyondrange.wordpress.com/

stenl commented on Doge cuts to USAid blamed for 300k deaths – most of them children thetimes.com/us/american-... · Posted by u/mnewme

hoseyor · 10 months ago

Not only that, but the whole system was such that the very type and nature of the support led to ever more dependency and creation of yet more need that the system could then further argue needed more support, i.e., a self-licking ice cream cone.

Worse yet, at the cost and expense of people who are damaged by being forced to support this system against their will.

I propose that everyone that supports things like USAID be able to willingly and freely sign up to have their taxes increased by whatever proportional amount is necessary to fund it every year. We need to move to a voluntarist system for anything but the tightest core functions of government.

It is a win-win, USAID continues and people get to feel good about themselves, while others are not damaged by being forced to support it against their will.

stenl · 10 months ago

The average federal tax rate is 14%, and the USAID budget was about 0.8% of the federal budget, so you’ve been paying about a 0.1% tax to fund USAID.

stenl commented on How much information is in DNA? dynomight.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/crescit_eundo

stenl · 10 months ago

A much more detailed and thoughtful (and peer reviewed) take on the same question from my colleague Jussi Taipale: https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embj.201696114

stenl commented on Fish have a brain microbiome – could humans have one too? quantamagazine.org/fish-h... · Posted by u/rbanffy

j6m8 · a year ago

A few years ago my team mounted what I think was the largest-(to-date) scale search for this in electron microscopy brain tissue volumes [1].

I STRONGLY believe there is a substantial central nervous system microbiome, but (spoiler alert) no evidence found in that search :)

If you're excited about this work, the datasets are all freely available from BossDB [2] — well over a dozen petavoxels of it! I'd be so curious if models these days could pick up on something we missed!

[1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.12.499807v1 [2]: https://bossdb.org

stenl · a year ago

Cool! Has anything similar been attempted in tumor tissue, given the many claims of microbes in tumors? Especially tumors not in contact with the exterior.

stenl commented on Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction nobelprize.org/prizes/che... · Posted by u/mitchbob

DevX101 · a year ago

Here's a direct quote from the Alphafold paper:

"These authors contributed equally: John Jumper, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, Olaf Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Russ Bates, Augustin Žídek, Anna Potapenko, Alex Bridgland, Clemens Meyer, Simon A. A. Kohl, Andrew J. Ballard, Andrew Cowie, Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Stanislav Nikolov, Rishub Jain, Demis Hassabis"

stenl · a year ago

And further down: ” Contributions

J.J. and D.H. led the research. J.J., R.E., A. Pritzel, M.F., O.R., R.B., A. Potapenko, S.A.A.K., B.R.-P., J.A., M.P., T. Berghammer and O.V. developed the neural network architecture and training. T.G., A.Ž., K.T., R.B., A.B., R.E., A.J.B., A.C., S.N., R.J., D.R., M.Z. and S.B. developed the data, analytics and inference systems. D.H., K.K., P.K., C.M. and E.C. managed the research. T.G. led the technical platform. P.K., A.W.S., K.K., O.V., D.S., S.P. and T. Back contributed technical advice and ideas. M.S. created the BFD genomics database and provided technical assistance on HHBlits. D.H., R.E., A.W.S. and K.K. conceived the AlphaFold project. J.J., R.E. and A.W.S. conceived the end-to-end approach. J.J., A. Pritzel, O.R., A. Potapenko, R.E., M.F., T.G., K.T., C.M. and D.H. wrote the paper.”

stenl commented on Scientists create a cell that precludes malignant growth phys.org/news/2024-07-sci... · Posted by u/alexahn

formvoltron · 2 years ago

So would using these cell modifications, in the case of growing organs perhaps, require germline modifications?

Or what are other types of uses for these cells?

stenl · 2 years ago

These cells won’t divide because they will fail to replicate their DNA due to the lack of thymidine. The use case is cell therapies, where you give the patient cells grown in the lab but you don’t want those cells to potentially divide and cause cancer. For example, CAR T therapy to treat cancer, or dopaminergic neuron replacement therapy for Parkinson’s disease.

stenl commented on Anti-aging molecule successfully restores multiple markers of youth newatlas.com/biology/tac-... · Posted by u/sebazzz

stenl · 2 years ago

TERT activation is one of the most common alterations causing cancer. In fact, the whole point of the normally very low TERT expression in somatic cells is likely to be cancer prevention. It’s the mechanism behind the Hayflick limit, which puts a bound on the max number of divisions a cell can go through, via telomere shortening. Without such a limit, you get cancer. I highly doubt it will make you live longer.

stenl commented on Frozen human brain tissue was successfully revived for the first time bgr.com/science/frozen-hu... · Posted by u/amichail

stenl · 2 years ago

Freezing and thawing organoids is not new, it’s fairly routine. The frozen piece of brain from an epilepsy patient doesn’t retain ”normal function”. There is no evidence in the paper that it integrates into neuronal circuits (this was not even tested), or supports anything like normal neuronal firing. The cells are alive, yes, and likely highly abnormally perturbed.

stenl commented on mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma in 48 Hours insideprecisionmedicine.c... · Posted by u/birriel

max_ · 2 years ago

Is there a good book about cancer for a layman? That can help them understand what exactly the disease is, it's variants and a list of potential strategies to beat the disease.

stenl · 2 years ago

”The Emperor of all Maladies” by Siddhartha Mukherjee is fantastic