Ovah

47% of all deaths are from nursing homes (July 8th). https://www.svd.se/fortsatt-stor-andel-doda-pa-svenska-aldre...

Without having a source to back it up, I'm guessing that a month ago tests were more scarce. So you had to have a strong clinical indication to get tested.

In old Swedish (~19th century) nouns were divided into three grammatical genus: femininum, masculinum and neutrum. Dead objects could be referred to as either he or she:

- earth, sun and time are feminine words and can to this day still be referred to as 'she'

- heaven, road and stone were referred to as 'he', although this has disappeared from modern Swedish.

Apparently, the science backs this up. This paper shows that the mortality of calves decreases if they get colostrum. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26995131

This reminded me of neonatal lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune disease where your own antibodies attacks your tissues. In neonatal lupus, the newborn is born with lupus ... because materal autoimmune antibodies are able to cross the placental barrier. So the newborn 'inherits' a lupus condition, which usually self resolves within a month once the maternal antibodies have disappeared. https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/neonatal-lupus/

This is presumably applicable to other maternal antibodies, which may give immunity against germs the infant has never been exposed to. However, this is a 'temporary' immunity, and distinct from the adaptive immune responses associated with 'immune system memory'.

There are many many bacterial enzymes known to be able to able to break down plastics such as PET etc. But one bottleneck has been low/slow catalytic activity, so it sounds like they passed that hurdle which is impressive!

However, a non-insignificant practical challenge is that enzymes are often very picky about what physical environment they work the best in. The pH has to be just right, as well as the temperature and even having enough metal ions present (often needed for the enzymes catalytic site). Looks like they engineered it to work at higher temps, which is another feat.

There are also challenges in scaling up recombinant enzyme production: making sure the enzyme's activity isn't affected by post-translational modifications (such as glycosylations) in the host organisms the gene will be expressed by, and making sure the enzyme maintains it's catalytic activity after it's been purified and concentrated.

T2D patients also have a reduced amount of insuline-producing beta cells. At diagnosis, there's been a 50% destruction of insuline-producing beta-cells. The destruction progresses with the disease.

'Ectopic Pregnancy' is the more general term for pregnancy outside the uterus.

Found this, hope it helps. 'Typically an abdominal pregnancy is a secondary implantation which means that it originated from a tubal (less common an ovarian) pregnancy and re-implanted.' https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Insi...

"An ectopic pregnancy occasionally aborts backwards down a tube, or bursts out of it without killing the patient, and embeds itself elsewhere in her abdominal cavity. Sometimes, an ovum is fertilized outside a tube on the surface of an ovary, and then implants itself in the abdominal cavity. ... An abdominal pregnancy is thus a rare complication of an ordinary ectopic pregnancy"

https://web.archive.org/web/20170814131930/https://www.meb.u...

Same goes for eutrophication. At least initially before more adapted species take over, disturbing the existing ecosystem and reducing diversity. Or even causing anoxic, dead waters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_waters#Human_caused_ano...

Far from all hereditary disease are easy to rule based on genetic tests.

You need to differentiate between Mendelian and Complex genetic disorders. While genetic tests are useful to indentiy disease caused by a single allele (Mendelian disorders), they today are inconclusive for many other Complex diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis, with a known genetic component. These disease are multifactorial: the interplay between several genes (variants) and environmental stimuli cause the disease. One of several genetic mutation must be present for the disease to occur, but without an environmental stimulus, the disease will never materialize. As such, even though we have acces to a full genom sequence, genetic tests are inherently limited and thus inconclusive in determining risk for many diseases.

The described treatment degrades mRNA; no genetic modifications are made.

Years ago I attended a lecture on Toxoplasmosis gondii. Intriguing (unattributed) points made by the scientist: 1) there's a higher prevalance of infection in car crash victims than control 2) by hijacking dendritic cells (blood immune cell), the parasite is able to bypass the blood brain barrier (highly protective filter of brain) 3) once in the brain, it may form cysts that may lay dormat 4) a significant portion of the world population is infected 5) if have cats weren't allowed as pets, there would hardly be any T. gondii infections

The HN title is slightly off; the full name of the prize is "Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine".

Contrary to what the article states, elevated levels of lactic acid per say do not cause acidification. In fact, the increase in lactic acid correlates to but is not the causation of acidosis. According to Robergs (2004) [1], it is the hydrolysis of ATP outside of the mitochondria (ATP produced in glycolysis) that increases the concentration of H+ and lowers pH. Yet, still, if the concentration of lactate increases it's a good indicator of acidosis from oxygen deficiency.

[1] Biochemistry of exercise-induced metabolic acidosis. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15308499

Note: During low oxygen levels in tissue, metabolism becomes anaerobic -> lactic acid is produced. Lactic acid <-> lactate + H+.

I find the word probiotic to be inherently problematic. It includes any and all microorganisms that have a single positive health benefit, whether or not they're detrimental in other regards. That if a bacteria were to penerate gut epithelium (very bad), it would still be a probiotic if it reduced constupation.

Even if the research supporting the health benefits of a supplemental bacteria is sound, a single study always has a restricted scope.

It's saddening that 'probiotics' have found their way to products such as baby formula, while there is pretty much no regulation governing their sales and use (at least in Europe).

Both. To make a project deadline, the department head signed a waiver to bring on personal without security clearance.

Apparently, companies may subscribe to the vehicle registry. One batch contained people with protected identities. Instead of asking customers to destroy the registry and sending a new, without sensitive information, the Transport Agency sent an open e-mail with all registration and chassis numbers of all those cars owned by persons with a protected identity. The companies were then asked to clean the sensitive data themselves.

The Wiki statement that Europe has banned antibiotics for growth promotion since 2006 may be true legally, but not in practice.

In fact, Denmark has used antibiotics to prevent infections in pig farming[1] up until at least the summer of 2016[2]. As such, some farms have 88% of their pig population infected with MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus)[3], and over 10,000 Danes have been infected with pig-MRSA.[4]

(all sources in Swedish) [1]http://www.expressen.se/gt/darfor-ar-det-danska-griskottet-s... [2] http://www.lantbruk.com/lantbruk/tuffare-regler-kring-antibi... [3] http://www.svt.se/nyheter/danska-bonder-kan-sprida-antibioti... [4] http://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/tusentals-danskar-smittade...

Today there exists a multitude of different genome sequencing techniques, and distinct complexities are associated with each method. However, the number of pairs is today seldomly the main complexity.

Sanger sequencing was one of the first methods of sequencing, and employs linear sequencing: the synthesis of strands with increasing length. With the advent of the Human Genome Project, Celera instead came up with the idea of fragmenting the genome, amplifying the fragments, sequence the fragments, and match them together using bioinformatics. The complexity here lies in that much of the DNA is repeated (such as microsatellites) or no, which makes it hard to 'phase' the genome. As such, a short 20 nucleotide sequence may be present in may parts of the genome which makes it hard to generate a 100% complete connected genome.

Today, Illumina sequencing is the major sequencing platform (~85% of market share). It relies of the fragmentation of DNA into ~300 bp fragments. By synthesising the complementary strand of each fragment with fluorescent nucleotides, we may employ lasers to detect (sequence) the nucleotides of the fragments. Here we have the same problem as with shotgun sequencing: that we have many repeats in the DNA sequence.

To remedy this, error-prone sequencing methods with long read lengths such as IonTorrent/PacBio/etc. may be employed to. These long reads may then act as a map for stiching together the more precise short reads. This is called 'hybrid' sequencing.

Other sequencing methods, such as Pyrosequencing, has the inherent problem of not being able to discern too many (5) of the same nucleotide in a row. Other methods are primer based (i.e. need to know a short subsequence of the DNA beforehand). This is problematic if we want to perform a de-novo whole genome sequence. Note: Illumina does not rely on primers, and may be deployed directly on unknown sequences, unlike Pyrosequencing/Sanger sequencing.