I imagine it’s classified, but NASA being NASA, you know a full risk assessment along these lines exists, probably with dutiful updates as it’s still an active program. It would be fascinating read especially with the updates, with how much the world has changed while the probe remained the same.

I don’t get the panic. It worked great for 50% of Venture brothers.

I just want that snake. Is that some iconography I’ve missed? I have the rainbow gadsen on my range bag I want that one as well.

Not going to lie, despite loving the stories about the monkey king, I skipped it entirely because of the notes they sent to content creators. Which would also be why I skip movies and games that take the US’ DoD money. I’m glad it got passed over.

ooooh this is it! If you wanted to optimize evil add photosynthesis and nitrogen fixing and you’ve got it.

Hell, I’d bet you could work on the chloroplasts in isolation of the rest of the organism to parallel path the research and optimize.

I’ve been out of synthetic bio for damn near two decades now, and an undergrad when was I even in it, but I’m not so sure. PCR didn’t come around until 85. I had professors that used to do every cycle manually. Human genome project wrapped in 03(?). You can order custom oligos for like $0.13USD a base pair mail order now. You type it in on a webform, a machine creates a custom molecule for you, and if you want to pay a little extra you can have it over-night. I suppose it depends what you call “near future”, and synthetic biology has always had moving goal posts when it came to “functional liposome” and “synthetic life”, but I don’t know… shit can move fast sometimes.

you bet! I just remember that because we were learning about glucose is taken up (it’s an active process swapping sodium and potassium). Another fun bonus for you: thats what they figured out at university of florida (or at least implemented). Someone had the bright idea that if you gave athletes a beverage with not only glucose but the specific K+/Na+ they needed to run the enzymes that took up the glucose, they might perform better.

So the football team, the Gators, got a special concoction of “Gator-aide” at their games. It smelled kinda like sweat, wasn’t sweet (glucose isn’t actually that sweet), so the formula was eventually tweaked, the branding changed to “gatorade”, but the university still RAKES in the money for that license.

edit: Just to add another cool layer. The money to date has nothing to do with the innovation, that patent would have expired (which is fantastic because that concoction is basically how you treat all sorts of things like cholera where the body dies of dehydration despite having clean water, the UN, FEMA, etc basically hands out off-brand gatorade mix). The reason U of florida still gets the money isn’t formula, it’s the brand. Pepsi pays them for that “gator-aide” name. It’s rare IP perfect win; hydration mix for all, and if you there’s a business to be made selling it under a specific name so be it, doesn’t matter much to the person whos life is saved because of “generic hydration mix”.

Ok. THANK YOU. I also have to say my biggest issue with the newer one (I forget which) is when the parks going to hell, and the park director just decides to go off into the jungle. Like outside of just design of the park, there is NO way you don’t have rigid protocols in-place. Like you read about half the crap Disney does/can do at their parks… there’s no way the head of the park just goes “oh you guys got this, I’ll be back at some point, just do your best”.

Like if ONLY for the reason it would be a known PR disaster for something that in universe already had PR disasters… that shit would have been drilled in since day -1000. It’s my biggest issue with the writing because it’s not even sci-fi.

/end rant.

Sorry about your grandfather. There’s probably more than one mechanism for alzeimers (not an expert), but amaloyid plaque formation, which is definitely A way to develop alzheimer’s, is indeed a prion like event. I’m not sure if “prion” has some hyper-precise definition but the ideas similar: you get one amalyoid protein that misfolds, and acts as a nucleation site misfolding and agglomerating others.

“mirror sugar”. Just dropping some trivia. The first “no calorie” sweetners were actually mirror sugar. They’d activate tastebuds but couldn’t be adsorbed in the gut. Only problem was people crapped their brains out because the osmotic balance went to hell.

edit: I think technically the first zero calorie sugar would have been literal lead (as in Pb) back in the ancient roman days, but I’m not really counting that.

Jumping in down here. I agree with you entirely that racemic mixes are a very different ball than mirror organisms; it’s been a known thing for a long time, and while I’m not positive, I’d be very surprised if FDA testing didn’t include different chiralities of both the original compound and metabolite.

That being said, there’s nothing to say one version of a chiral protein can’t behave like a prion. I don’t know of any evidence where we’ve seen it happen either, though. There’s also potentially the issue of partial bonding. Not every domain on every protein is chiral. If a mirror protein has some domains that bind but other functional domains that are incompatible, you could see it incorporated into complex that either 1) are now non-functional or 2) have alternate folding that behaves similar to prions.

Again though, I can’t point to any evidence of that. You can do the arrow pushing that shows how you get tetrodoxin from the stuff in your tea or coffee, it doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen beyond the statistical realm interesting only to quantum physicists.

Just chiming in because your comments are level headed and you’ve clearly got some knowledge in the area and appreciate the discussion. Looking forward to digging into the report this weekend, I had no idea this was even something are even attempting!

Snow’s fantastic. You just make sure you have food and booze. Most (keyword most) employment is accommodating. Apart from that you make sure the heater vent is clear, if it’s a real fun one you might need to shovel the roof, but you prep to not go anywhere. OR the even MORE fun part is walking to the local bar.

That’s for relatively warm lake effect. That all goes out the window if it’s a truly brutal blizzard. Buffalo specifically had an ugly cold christmas a few years back that was absolutely brutal. People freezing to death leaving there cars looking for a house with someone home. Suspended emergency services. That was not the “fun” kind of snow storm.

I’m no hero, just doing what I can.

Yank. Can second. Unless it was well and truly off most bartenders would just laugh at you. You might get an exception if you’re in the kind of joint that’s $20 for a Sam Adam’s or something because at that point it’s not a pub it’s an adult daycare.

I loved FC5. Ubisoft gets a lot of crap because they make the same game over and over but there’s a reason they started doing that. Good characters, and the pacing is pretty solid unless you’re a completions (which is your own fault). There’s some weird mechanics that progress the story that kind of break immersion that they chose because of the open world setting, but it’s a solid game. Enjoy!

If you like it, “new dawn” is pretty OK. Wait for it to be cheap, it’s basically really meaty DLC.

No joke: Uncle Sam was a real guy and Ive been to his grave. I forget if his wife was there (or if he had one).

I think it’s because ones a drug prescribed for a medical condition. So you may have a condition where your doctor says “stay away from cured meats” but might prescribe you a drug that unwittingly has what they’re looking to avoid. And just in general drugs give you a lot of control: there should only be what you know and want in there. Foods a big ol mess of compounds. My heart meds get recalled all the time for less acrylamide than I’d get in a flame grilled burger.

Insurance companies jacking up premiums and/or pulling out of areas is like the only proper feedback loop for adapting to climate change left. Not saying I’m happy about it. I would not be totally shocked if health insurance starts having carve outs for heat related illnesses and their complications. Typing it out, I guess what’s more likely is raising premiums in areas with hospitals that serve a patient base in a high risk area.

It’s not even evil, it’s just math, so long as this is the way we want healthcare to “work”.

It might be? I forget exactly what it is in humans, I just remember the pictures I was shown. Midline disorders are nightmare fuel.

Oh I get how it got that way, it’s just unfortunate what that lead to in a clinical setting.