How to survive boiling water
taxa.substack.com
taxa.substack.com
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 page 2 that the prescription rate is 679 and 775 doses per 1000 people in 2024, depending on the gender. That matches the 7-in-10 number so I'm guessing this is where the statistic comes from
Doesn't that reflect how many prescriptions there were rather than what number of people got it prescribed? See also page 3 where Mississippi has 1167 doses per 1000 persons. Either the number of people is wrong (if the prescription given to a tourist and counted towards this statistic, the tourist should also be counted as person, but the CDC says they take the population count from a census) or it's about doses and not about what part of the population got an antibiotic in the last year. In both of these cases, you can't conclude 116.7% of people got antibiotics prescribed. The claim in the article based on that CDC data sounds to me like saying 520% of the people drink alcohol when, in reality, 10% drinks a bottle a week and the rest nil
I'm probably misunderstanding the CDC report but I'm not sure how I should be able to tell that
Hell - my children just this year would have counted for 10+ doses (my daughter 6 all by herself for a series of severe ear infections).
I'm amazed that there are 1216 antibiotic prescriptions per 1000 people per year in West Virginia though (2.5x the rate of California or Colorado, which itself frankly seems pretty high). Are large parts of the South just awash with bacterial infections, are people being prescribed antibiotics for viral illnesses, or are they just taking antibiotics prophylactically?
Ticks are pretty bad nearby in WPA, I've taken antibiotics prophylactically for them.
It's probably just as the CDC document says: number of prescriptions. If you are told to take it for 3 weeks thrice a day and later in the year a second time, that's two prescriptions (per my non-native understanding of English medical terms anyway)
Three antibiotic prescriptions this year and it’s not even August yet! It had been a number of years since I had taken antibiotics.
Pasteur was born after Napoleon was exiled. Maybe she is referring to Napoleon III, but then it's misleading to just write "Napoleon." Two factual mistakes in the first couple pages and I can't trust the rest. Especially on a topic I know little about so I can't be discerning regarding.
Among many stunning things, they have a shelf full of foods and drinks (behind glasses) with age labels, ranging from days to years. It is fascinating to see how they evolve over time.
On this subject, I once led an investigation in which Bacillus cereus somehow survived in situ media sterilisation for 30 minutes and >121.1°C, despite there being no cold spots. At the end we realised it was the bioburden load of a media component and water temperature used during compounding.
In English, please ;-)
"So, in ordinary language:"
"One dirty raw ingredient introduced far more spores than expected, and the way it was mixed into the water made the sterilization cycle less effective against them. The autoclave itself was probably not broken."
"The exact relationship to water temperature remains somewhat ambiguous because the HN commenter did not provide the detailed investigation findings."
> The Milk was declared missing on August 20th, 2022.
> The dorm’s extended mailing list of over 300 current students, alumni, and other assorted Random-adjacent humans was contacted, twice.
> In the end, no Milk.
https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/guest-post-the-random-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing-children_milk_carton
So the "political football" characterization is itself very political.
According to your description it sounds completely accurate.
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.
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?
I have no doubt Sweden did better than say sub-saharan africa. But it seems to me that only their neighbors are good comparison and they did worse than all of them.
Norway 1,050 deaths / million
Denmark 1,696 deaths / million
Finland 2,058 deaths / million
Sweden 2,812 deaths / million
> The government turned tyrannical re: vaccines and mandates, did the guns help?
I mean, the federal government had no mandate. So like were Floridians going to shoot up DeSantis because he didn't make a mandate? Or shoot up the other guy they elected, Trump (Biden not president until Jan 2021).
And then you don't really expect New Yorkers who elected Coumo to then shoot him up either?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
Well, if you are asking for my opinion, the gun stuff in the US is so stupid it could be considered a mental illness. I don't disagree with your points at all
Re: Sweden - according to the article you listed, Sweden is on par with the rest of Europe, worse than other Scandinavian countries, and much better than the Balkans.
Edit: I found the wrong one; I think the one I remember was https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/questions/11227/why...
Being much smaller than a whole organism genome, the base-pairs are literally published in a WHO Word-document. :p
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
I dont understand why the cold brew test had fewer bacteria than the steeped teas. If the bacteria are shielded in spores, shouldnt it be expected that they have the same amount of bacteria?
If you look at the pictures of the plates the one with cold brew and where the full tea bag is added to the plate seems to have a good bit more growth than the others (there is a larger image of this one). So it doesn't seem like the spores are necessarily unaffected by the boiling just that some survive (or maybe they all survive but only some decide to start growing?). The thing I find strange is that the tea bag that was directly added without any brewing doesn't seem to have much growth at all. Actually, also that in the one with the tea bag added after cold brewing that has extra robust growth much of that growth seems to happen away from the visible pieces of tea.
I agree that the author has great style and I find it interesting to think about where and how bacteria (and fungi) like to grow.
That paragraph is pretty extraordinary with what is being claimed.
Crazy to think that anything could survive 25 kGy.
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.~ Mae West, Little Shop of Horrors, Broadway (1958)
Buddha would like a word with you
/Is that a transporter energizing I hear?
Then I will entertain you with another Buddhist objection - there is also no "end" since the conditioned "you" exists in the beginningless, endless cycle of samsara, while the unconditioned you (Nibbana) is unborn, unbecome, unmade, unfabricated.
above comment == Q.E.D.
What even is a good experimental design for probiotic tea? Brew -> agitate in hydrochloric acid & digestive enzymes for X minutes -> mix with billions of existing gut microbes (that may kill this microbe or out-compete it for resources) and incubate at body temperature -> count the number of new colonies of this particular microbe?
It turns out vim vs emacs is a universal phenomenon.
"It was at this point I realized I needed a sterile-ish way to transport the steeped tea and tea bags from my house to the lab."
Was steeping the tea at home somehow relevant to the experiment?
And then I would assume the sterile transfer was to preserve this state of the tea as-made without changing it on the way to the lab.
Many consider it to be a candidate for the cause of Crohn’s disease. Johne’s disease, which occurs in a subset of cattle infected by paratuberculosis, bears many similarities to Crohn’s disease.
When Crohn’s disease was first described, it was believed to be an intestinal tuberculosis, though tests seemed to counter this idea; to this day, it remains difficult to test humans for paratuberculosis infections.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07400...
[1] https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(19)...
As if billions of mammals suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Wikipedia also says it uses steam, not just hot air, and again doesn't say anything as to why
Do you know why pressure and steam help?
Edit: I may have found it while looking at what I thought was an unrelated part of the rabbit hole. Gravity displacement sounds like antigravity technology but it's apparently the cheapest autoclave type and means "displace using gravity" (by letting gravity do its thing; not adding in a vacuum pump). What it's displacing is air. This matters because
> Steam at 134 °C can achieve a desired level of sterility in three minutes, while achieving the same level of sterility in hot air requires two hours at 160 °C. (—Wikipedia)
I'm now assuming that pressure must help push the air out, and steam is used for having better heat conductivity. Neither is quite spelled out but that's my best guess currently
Apparently at 2 bars, water boils at 120°C. The first temperature mentioned on Wikipedia is 121°C. That's awfully close; but elsewhere the article is quite clear about using higher-than-atmospheric atmospheric pressure. I don't see an explanation that fits all the mentioned facts
If water boils at 100C then steam condenses at 99C. If water boils at 120C then steam condenses at 119C.
> higher-than-atmospheric atmospheric pressure.
What does that mean?
> I don't see an explanation that fits all the mentioned facts
Is it really a difficult concept? If the boiling point rises so does the condensation point.
But if we want it to be steam, isn't that a bad thing?
Don't we want a nice big safety margin between our active steam temperature and the temperature it condenses?
Not if we want the steam to be hotter.
> Don't we want a nice big safety margin between our active steam temperature and the temperature it condenses?
Water is in one of three states: liquid, gas, solid. It has to be one of those. Where does the margin come from?
Is the pressure helping directly? Why not use a heater; is dangerous levels of pressure easier than an extra heating element?
It took some roundabouts but we got there. Thanks for the information.
Just a tiny nit... Should "Brewed as directed for 4 minutes in boiling water." be "Brewed as directed for 4 minutes in boiled water." Was the tea sitting in water that was boiling or placed in water that just boiled? The later is how I brew my teas.
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 sauce got on it, but I thought I cut and kept the blue cheese off. Nope, I didnt, not enough. She had diarrhea for the next 2 days cause it wrecked with her digestive tract.
Maybe this will help a microbiologist.
You might be onto something, have you considered trying the cat blue cheese?
>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.
"Boiling" does have a few meanings in English. As a verb, it can either mean "cook in boiling liquid", or it can mean "heat a liquid to its boiling-point". As an adjective, it means "heated to boiling-point". Also "boiling angry" means very, very angry.