Ovah

It's sadly not available for the last few major releases of Safari on Mac.

Fun fact: the number needed to treat (NNT) for SSRI, the first line medication for depression, is a whopping 11! The NNT tells us the number of people we need to give a drug to in order for just one person to receive a benefit. I.e. if 11 people with depression are prescribed SSRI, only 1 of 11 will benefit from it. At least that's what I was taught in med school. Psychiatry has in the past decades been a game changer for schizophrenia, bipolar etc. But I feel like there room for so much more to be done for people with 'mild' anxiety and or depression.

Tangent: I have years of academic studies. And yet it can be time consuming to truly understand where and how ideas came to be. I might have an equation but to understand how it was initially thought of or derived might require access to physical contemporary books. At least once I've had to resort to 18th century handwritten manuscripts. Wikipedia can be great. But I often wonder if historical scientific progress can be made even more accessible.

Cancer from soft tissues (sarcoma) has a high mortality rate. Even a very low risk of getting it from growth hormones would drastically limit their use. I believe there was a study showing a minute increase in risk of sarcoma in kids getting growth hormone injections. Which is why pediatric endocrilogists are lot more restrictive these days prescribing growth hormones than maybe 7 years ago. At least in my country.

I can only comment on why it's important for the physician to know about any allergies. Some people have a history or risk of severe allergy and anaphylactic reactions can be potentially fatal. I've had to managed such a reaction in a healthcare setting. Such a reaction is not only potentially fatal but is often very dramatic and sudden. After that I always err on the side of caution and ask for allergies regardless of what the patient's chart says. It's often a wise idea to confirm what's in the chart rather than to blindly trust what's already in there regardless.

It's the physicians job to weigh the benefits against risk of a drug. And potential allergic reactions is a part of that. If a patient with a known history of severe allergic reactions gets another one from a prescribed drug, and the physician hasn't done their due diligence, then the physician could be at fault. I can only imagine that it's even more prudent for US-based physicians to ask that question due to lawsuits and or personal liability.

Also a patients medical status is never static. While unlikely a patient could have had a reaction since the last visit. I guess a more realistic example of something non static is pregnancy status which can be equally important when prescribing drugs etc.

I wish the article would be more nuanced with statements like: "higher levels of electromagnetism caused cellular changes in the crabs". This will just be used as 'evidence' by the electromagnetic hypersensitivity and anti-5G folks.

“We found that exposure to higher levels of electromagnetic field strength changed the number of blood cells in the crabs" - is it the EMF or rather physical inactivity that reduces the cell count?

Same news event already posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28822990

Technically speaking ... the genetic code of the B cell receptor gene of B cells is altered by vaccines. The same goes for pretty much all antigens the body comes across. But that's the point of the adaptive immune system and is obviously not what OP meant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination

You kinda do - it's one of the most common causes of sleepyness during the day. Obstruction of airways during sleep (apnea -> transient oxygen deprivation -> stress -> short interruptions of sleep and arousal). And it's common too: >40% has some kind of sleep apnea. 20% stress, 10% restless legs, and 10% because of obstructive sleep apnea (OSAS, obesity). I bet OSAS is a lot more common than that in the US.

The National library of Sweden has a similar website but for newspapers printed in Sweden. They write "Copyright protection is valid for 115 years on the day. The free material is moved forward by one day every day." I get that likes such as Disney has an interest in extending it. Maybe a middle ground could be the ability to apply for extensions of individual works instead of a universal blanket extension? This long period really hampers my ability to do research on 1700s literature - a lot of such research was done in the early 1900s. But that content, even if it's 100 years old, just isn't indexed anywhere (e.g. Google books) due to copyright even if it is already digitized. https://tidningar.kb.se

I'd say the jump from eukaryotes to procaryotes is a realistic scenario in recombinant DNA technology.

I have some experience with recombinant yeast and PTMs. Degree of glycosylation actually vary a lot depending on strain used and has a huge effect of protein activity. And of course these PTMs affects the crystal structure.

While the laws of physics remain the same, the folding machinery between species varies to some degree. Protein folding is determined by the unique environment/machinery of a cell. A concrete example is disulphide bonds (S-S, ex cystein-cystein) that require a certain pH to form. The primary pathways of disulphide-bond formation are localized in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) of eukaryotic cells and the periplasmic space of prokaryotic cells. So two complete different mechanisms to end up with the same bond (protein structure) depending on the organism.

Interesting that they're porting it to other organisms. Different organisms have variations in ribosomes, post translational modifications and even tRNA repertoire. So it's not a guarantee that two identical DNA sequences will give identical proteins in two different organisms.

I guess that's the thing with psychiatry: the whole field is pretty far away from basic science, mechanisms etc. My (second hand) understanding is it actually triggers schizofrenia in 16 y.o. people who would not otherwise have gotten it. Not sure if it's clinical experience or if there is data to back it up. The 16 yo-scenario is one of the few medical arguments I've heard for why there should be an age limit on marijuana.

I'm speaking as a medical student. And I can't speak for what it's like in the US - only Sweden. Here it's not uncommon for schizofrenic patients to self medicate with marijuana. I guess it increases their quality of life until they have just a little too much and end up having a psychosis. That said, at least among Swedish psychiatrists, it's well know that marijuana can trigger schizophrenia in people that are ~16 years old.

A few years ago there was a CCC? talk about registering domains a bitflip away from the intended domain. Which effectively hijacked legitimate web traffic. While the chance of a bitflip is low it added up to a surprisingly large number of requests maybe a few hundred or so. Here is someone doing it for windows.com https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hijacking-tra...

Fair point, my statement was too general. NSAID indeed shouldn't be used willy nilly. The same goes for cortisone and long term use. My point should have specifically referred to biologicals such as anti-TNF and other anti-cytokine treatments.

I frankly disagree that antiinflammatory drugs having "long term costs". I'd be very interested if you have a paper to back that claim up. A couple decades ago it was common for rheumatic patients to end up in wheelchairs. Today that's very uncommon. I agree that most antirheumatic drugs, and most drugs in general, treat the symptoms rather than provide an outright cure. But that's enough to drastically reduce disease severity and increase quality of life. Actual cures might be ideal but we are far from there research-wise - at least for most rheumatic conditions.

Which amounts to almost 20% of those arrested. Maybe it's partly due to Sweden historically having strong computer literacy. Only time will tell.

> The second is about removing subsidies to farmers that use any kind of pesticide, or regularly use antibiotics on their livestock, etc.

Anecdotally through medical school I've heard that there is evidence that antibiotic overuse in livestock, contrary to intuition, has no correlation with antibiotic resistance of human pathogens.

(I'm aware of the sarcasm tag). Technically that 100% should be 99.999%. Not all drugs are found in nature. Technetium, a man-made compound, is used in some radiology. https://go.drugbank.com/categories/DBCAT001978

"A full 40 percent of the drugs behind the pharmacist’s counter in the Western world are derived from plants that people have used for centuries, including the top 20 best selling prescription drugs in the United States today. For example, quinine extracted from the bark of the South American cinchona tree (Cinchona calisaya) relieves malaria, and licorice root (Glycyrrhiza glabra) has been an ingredient in cough drops for more than 3,500 years." https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/ethnobotany/medicinal/inde...

Apparently this seems to be an ongoing and contentious internet debate lol. There's even a wiki article on the subject.[1] The main three arguments appear to be that virii 1) is grammatically incorrect Latin, 2) virus has historically never had a latin plural "as it is a mass noun" and 3) it's a neologistic folk etymology.

While I may agree with the grammatical merits [1)] I'm not convinced (yet). The second argument [2)] that it's never had a historical plural doesn't hold up. The field of virology is much more recent so the need for a plural 'virus' didn't exist at the time.

And 3) is literally how words are formed. If a term used frequently enough it eventually becomes a word regardless of the original grammatical correctness. The term even has 175 years of precedent.[2] As cactus has the plural cacti it's non-obvious why the same doesn't hold true for virus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_form_of_words_ending_in... [2] https://archive.org/details/homopathictreati00test/page/48/m...

It happens frequently with retroviruses. In fact 5-8% of the human genome is from (ancient) retrovirii. Coronavirus however is a completely different class of virus which makes it interesting, at least to me.

"It is describing the fundamental equivalence between mass and energy" I agree that this is widely agreed upon when referring to E=mc^2. It's almost a dogma by this point. But the derivation Einstein used to come up with his equation doesn't actually support said dogma. I'd really like to understand how this "fundamental equivalence" came about and the proof behind it, or if it's just dogma. E=mc^2 is a lot more profound than E=delta m * c^2. IIRC Einstein in the final sentence of his paper tries to generalize his result and jumps on the E=mc^2 train without backing it up.

Physics is usually pretty rigorous. In the context of science for a general audience, or printing pretty T-shirts, I get why it's omitted. I just find it funny that when it comes to E=mc^2 physics suddenly lack some rigour even in the college physics classes I've taken. It's probably OK to skip it I'm just curious as to why. I don't think I've ever seen the delta mentioned except in Einstein's original paper.

I'll give it a read-through this weekend, thanks!

Kind of pedantic but I've never understood why it's E=mc^2 and not E=Δmc^2. In Einsteins original paper he derives the equation with a delta m: a change of mass corresponds to some amount of energy. To me that is different than to say that a whole mass corresponds to a some amount of energy. I've never seen a justification why the delta can be omitted and why the equation still would hold true.

This guy CRISPR'd himself.. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/diy-dna-hacks-wounds-take-lo...

I've always wanted to see one of these but I probably shouldn't. Apparently one of their major threats is ecotourism.