science

I feel the exact same way about the giant fart planets, to be honest. Scary.

Spooky scary radio signals from planets

Which one is your fave? I personally like Saturns screams of the damned

Also, fun fact, gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are mostly made out of fart gas with wind speeds that would tear your skin off. Neptune has winds of around 1,242 miles per hour (2,000 km/h), compare that to Earths average windspeed of 7.4 m/h (12 km/h)

In a major advance, the Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved two gene therapies that target sickle cell disease, one of which is the first commercially available treatment in the United States based on gene-editing technology. The historic move offers hope for a long-overlooked genetic illness that can cause excruciating pain and cut decades off people’s lives. It also cracks the door open for a new era in medicine.

One of the new treatments, named Casgevy, is based on CRISPR, a gene-editing tool that moved lightning-fast from a scientific breakthrough in 2012 to a therapy that can alleviate suffering. In the wake of the FDA approval, experts anticipate that treating sickle cell disease will be the first of many medical applications for this technology.

The other treatment, developed by Bluebird Bio and called Lyfgenia, uses a harmless virus to insert a gene into a patient’s stem cells. The treatments are approved for patients 12 and older who experience repeated pain episodes.

“I’ve been taking care of kids with sickle cell for over 30 years, and I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for a long, long time,” said Lewis Hsu, chief medical officer of the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America and a pediatric hematologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In clinical trials, both therapies freed the overwhelming majority of patients from severe pain crises. Several of the patients who received Casgevy, developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, testified before a federal advisory committee in late October, sharing emotional stories about how the therapy opened up their lives, giving them the ability to work or attend school, be present with their families and imagine a future.

“Prior to therapy, I had focused on the short term. Life was in a state of touch-and-go,” Jimi Olaghere, 38, who received the treatment three years ago, told the committee. “Long-term planning meant planning for a world without me being able to support my family. Now, those long-term plans include me.”

Victoria Gray, 38, a mother and wife who was the first patient to receive the experimental treatment, said at the meeting that she is finally free from pain crises that felt like being hit by a truck and struck by lightning at the same time, requiring frequent blood transfusions, lengthy hospital stays and three kinds of opioids.

She predicted that the approval of the gene-editing treatment would have profound effects for many others. In the United States, an estimated 100,000 people, most with African ancestry, have sickle cell disease.

“It’s going to change the lives positively of many people who are suffering from diseases and disorders who now feel hopeless,” Gray told the committee. “Once it comes, they can feel hope again, just like I did.”

Replacing sickle cells with healthy ones

Sickle cell disease is caused by a mutation in a gene that contains the instructions for hemoglobin, an oxygen-carrying protein found inside red blood cells. The abnormal hemoglobin causes red blood cells, normally disc-shaped and pliable, to collapse into rigid, sickle-shaped crescents that clump together and die early. The disease varies in severity from person to person, but blockages caused by the clumped cells can trigger crippling pain and starve organs of oxygen.

There are several therapies for sickle cell disease but only one cure: a bone marrow transplant, typically from a matched sibling. Bone marrow cells from a healthy donor produce normal hemoglobin, allowing transplant patients to live pain-free. But the procedure comes with risks, and only about a fifth of patients are able to find a match.

Fredrianna Copeland-Webster, 19, of Jacksonville, Fla., is one of those patients without a bone marrow match. She has battled two rare diseases: sickle cell and a cancer called neuroblastoma. Her doctors at Nemours Children’s Health eliminated her cancer before her first birthday, but even with a new sickle cell drug that has made her pain less intense, she experiences about four pain episodes per year and, like many sickle cell patients whose pain is exacerbated by cold weather, she goes to sleep with chronic pain all through the winter.

“I began to ask myself why I was able to be cured from cancer but not sickle cell disease,” Copeland-Webster, who hopes to be a candidate for one of the new therapies, said in an interview.

Gene editing gets around the problem because it turns a person’s own cells into a treatment. Casgevy takes advantage of the fact that before birth the body produces a form of fetal hemoglobin, and red blood cells that carry it don’t sickle. Casgevy disables a genetic switch that represses the production of fetal hemoglobin after birth, flipping production back on so the body makes red blood cells that don’t sickle.

Lyfgenia uses a harmless virus to modify patient’s cells so that they create a form of hemoglobin that doesn’t sickle. The treatment will carry a black box, the FDA’s most stringent warning, due to the risk of cancer. In a clinical trial, two patients in a clinical trial developed acute myeloid leukemia and died.

“Sickle cell disease is a rare, debilitating and life-threatening blood disorder with significant unmet need, and we are excited to advance the field especially for individuals whose lives have been severely disrupted by the disease by approving two cell-based gene therapies today,” Nicole Verdun, director of the Office of Therapeutic Products within the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.

The catch is that neither is a simple drug but is an intensive procedure that unfolds over months. Patients first have their bone marrow cells collected. Then, the cells are sent to a laboratory where CRISPR is used to edit the cells, or a virus is used to modify them. After cells are checked for quality, patients must receive chemotherapy to make room in their bone marrow. Only then can they receive an infusion of edited cells, which pump out fetal hemoglobin.

James Taylor, director of the Center for Sickle Cell Disease at Howard University, said that the approval is an optimistic moment. But he said the new therapies raise a slew of concerns, ranging from scientific unknowns about long-term risks to logistical questions.

“I’m excited about it, but it’s a double-edged sword,” Taylor said, pointing out that one of the biggest obstacles for sickle cell disease patients in the United States is inequities in the health-care system that block access to existing care and treatments.

Three new drugs have been approved by regulators for sickle cell disease since 2017, for example, but about 2 percent of patients take them, according to a study in the journal Blood Advances. And in less well-resourced places where the disease is more common, such as sub-Saharan Africa, a gene-editing solution is impractical.

Patients will have to spend significant time in a hospital that is authorized to perform the complex, multistep procedure. They receive chemotherapy, which has side effects, including infertility, and Hsu noted that support for fertility preservation is a patchwork that varies by state in programs under Medicaid, which covers about half of all people with sickle cell disease in the United States.

The long-term safety and effectiveness of the therapies are still being tracked — the first patient was treated in 2019. And there’s a big question about how insurers will respond: Vertex and Bluebird Bio did not immediately announce the prices for their therapies, but an analysis by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a nonprofit group that evaluates the value of drugs, said $2 million per treatment would be cost-effective.

“We are very gratified and celebrating, but at the same time we have to roll up our sleeves and figure out how to make it happen,” Hsu said.

The dawn of a new gene-editing era in medicine

Despite these hurdles, the approval for Casgevy sets a galvanizing precedent for scientists seeking to turn CRISPR from a laboratory tool into mainstream medicine.

In nature, CRISPR is used by bacteria to disable viruses by cutting their DNA. Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California at Berkeley who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her work on CRISPR, recalled the moment more than a decade ago when she and postdoctoral researcher Martin Jinek pored over data suggesting that it could be turned into a pair of programmable genetic scissors, homing in on specific regions of the genome to make targeted cuts.

“It’s quite extraordinary to go from that to an actual approved drug that is helping patients,” Doudna said.

Since 2012, the hypercompetitive field of gene editing has led to improvements in CRISPR, as well as a next generation of even more precise gene editors, sometimes referred to as CRISPR 2.0 or CRISPR 3.0. Research teams have also started developing ways to deliver gene-editing therapies with a simple infusion.

Scientists who are deploying the technologies against an array of diseases see this as the beginning of a new era in medicine.

“Gene editing is going to be the biggest story of the century,” said Kiran Musunuru, a cardiologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and one of the founders of Verve Therapeutics, a company that is using a different gene editor to create a cholesterol-lowering treatment that is a one-time infusion.

The Vertex sickle cell treatment is also being reviewed by regulators for a different rare blood disorder, beta thalassemia, that can also be treated with fetal hemoglobin; a decision is expected in March. Other gene-editing therapies in human testing include a treatment aimed at kidney cancer, leukemia and a rare genetic illness caused by misfolded proteins.

But for gene editing to become mainstream, significant problems still need to be solved.

Scientists working on ways to deliver CRISPR with an infusion need to figure out how to get it into the target cells and edit them inside the body. Other barriers include the traditional drug development regulatory framework and the business model, argues Fyodor Urnov, director of technology and translation at the Innovative Genomics Institute.

Urnov says that CRISPR has turned engineering medicines for thousands of diseases into a straightforward task instead of a major bottleneck. But getting bespoke medicines that could be life-changing for small numbers of patients tested and manufactured through the current regulatory landscape is a challenge.

“Give me a mutation. Leave me alone for 10 minutes. And I will produce a CRISPR for that. Beautiful,” Urnov said. “The cold light of reality is the majesty of CRISPR as a platform to build medicines is running into the way that medicines are discovered, developed and delivered … in the modern health-care system that we have today.”

Many experts are thinking about how to make such treatments easier to use, accessible and more affordable. But today, they are also taking a breath to celebrate a major step forward.

“It’s an amazing moment,” Doudna said. “I think it’s exciting for the field, and it’s a sign of what’s to come.”

This guy is apparently a widely cited education scholar not an extremist Marxist or whatever: "You Can’t Get There from Here" Johnstone 2010 [PDF]: https://sci-hub.se/10.1021/ed800026d

"capitalist competition makes us stronger and more innovative"

sorry radlibs but there's a reason why 35% of students in your shitty designed STEM classes drop out, they aren't stupid for getting bad grades. You're the stupid one for being so ignorant that you've managed to fail to educate people for over 60 years. I take back everything I said about "western kids want to be Twitch streaming gamers lol they're losers", these families literally have not had access to a decent science education for three generations!

Are we still persisting in making our students sick of chemistry because “that is how chemistry is done here”? Who set the scene? How did it all come about?

The answer lies not with some malevolent group of people, but with a response made in the 1960s in the United States and throughout the Western world to combat the perceived threat of Russian scientific supremacy. ChemStudy and Chemical Bond Approach sprang up in the United States, Scottish Alternative Chemistry and Nuffield Chemistry appeared in the UK, and similar schemes were launched

the PMC class of finance imperialism educators are a malevolent group of people, Jeffrey Epstein was a NYC math teacher

his suggestions for improved chem curriculum

Begin with the idea of the filter that is driven by what the learners already know and by what interests them. There is no point in beginning a course in chemistry with a treatment of atomic electronic configuration or bonding because the anchorages in long-term memory are not there. Without attachments in long-term memory, a student can only learn by rote methods. An approach to chemistry through acids, bases, and salts is unlikely to stir students with enthusiasm. Apart from common table salt, how many salts are in place in long-term memory to provide relevance and reality for the learner? On the face of it, inorganic compounds are “simple”, but are they? So many wrong concepts are introduced by teachers or constructed by the learners in this area of chemistry. A glance at a book of chemical data will show the absurdity of suggesting that sodium (or any other metal) is “anxious” to lose electrons and chlorine is “desperate” to accept them. It is too soon to introduce lattice energy or hydration energy to provide a rational basis for compound formation. The octet rule, with all its pitfalls for later study, tends to raise its ugly head here as a sort of rationalization.

The model suggests that we should begin where students are, with their interests and experience, and lead them into discovering new ideas among the familiar. An obvious starting point is in organic chemistry, with gasoline, camping gas, food, clothing, plastics, and drinks and so much more that is familiar. I know that it has been the tradition to keep organic for later, but are we taking a “monkey” point of view? Let us consider some of the advantages in starting here.

The long-term memory already contains anchorages for what we want to teach and the filter is primed and ready to go. The working memory is not in danger of overload. We can go a long way into organic chemistry with only a few elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and possibly sulfur and phosphorus. Most of these are familiar (at least their names are) to the learner. By considering the spatial arrangement of the four electrons around a carbon, students, using their fingers, can see that a tetrahedral arrangement is likely. Never mind sp3 hybridization. It is a cobbling together of atomic orbitals (isolated atoms in the gas state) to produce a tetrahedron. This is using unreality to arrive at reality. Pasteur knew about the tetrahedral arrangement long before atomic orbitals were conceived.

Using the simple tetrahedral idea, we can do a lot of sound organic chemistry linked to what the students already know, avoiding overload of working memory. Only when we reach organic acids do we have to reconsider bonding, but this can now be linked to the simpler ideas of covalent bonding already established. Another advantage of beginning with organic is that there is no pressure to use balanced equations. Practicing organic chemists do not bother, so why should we?

The model has led us to select a starting point that fits what is already in a student's long-term memory. The working memory is not overloaded because only a few elements are involved in making familiar compounds. The representation triangle can be used along its sides to build ideas of the relationship between the macro and familiar, with the molecular. The use of the representational is reduced, and no calculations are necessary. All of this provides a logical basis for an applications-led approach instead of a conceptual approach followed by a passing mention of uses and applications.

The troublesome mole can be rethought in the light of the model. It has been my sad experience to have graduate students who confessed their inability to do mole calculations. The very word “mole” left them uncomfortable. How could highly intelligent young people have such an aversion? They met the mole too soon, wrapped up in incomprehensible (and even totally irrelevant) calculations that flooded the working memory into a state of paralysis. In an earlier publication (4) I set out an analysis of a trivial (from my point of view) mole calculation. I saw it as a four-step procedure, which did not tax my working memory, because I already had tricks for grouping the processes, but students saw it as a ten-step task, which blew their working memory.

In a thesis he calls medical nihilism, Dr. Jacob Stegenga argues that society’s confidence in the effectiveness of medical interventions ought to be low. Stegenga points to bias and malleability in medical research, the ubiquity of tiny effect sizes from the best studies, and the thin theoretical basis of many interventions. After describing the arguments for this position, he will discuss what medical nihilism entails for clinical practice, medical research, and regulation. As an alternative, Stegenga suggests that “gentle medicine” is a better course -- that is, a less aggressive clinical practice. He says the aims and priorities of medical research should be reconfigured and that regulatory standards should be strengthened. This lecture was recorded on Wednesday, October 30, 2019.

00:00 - [Introduction]

07:35 - [Medical nihilism]

12:55 - [Evidence and confidence]

17:10 - [Biased research]

24:30 - [Small effect sizes]

29:20 - [Few magic bullets]

35:45 - [Most important medical discoveries since 1840]

38:15 - [Objections to medical nihilism and presentation of gentle medicine]

48:25 - [Q and A]

Psychology has a repeatability problem. Turns out Zimbardo wasn’t completely honest about how hands-off the researchers were. The Stanford Prison Experiment is the latest famous experiment in psychology that is proving difficult to reproduce.

I remember learning about this in school and the point being driven home: humans are selfish, and the only thing holding society together is a fragile veneer of civility, ready to burst free the moment no one is looking.

What does a selfish human species imply about society? It means that any vision of a community-oriented society, any revolution or reformation that purports to progress beyond a free capitalist market system in order to end capitalist exploitation, is naïve — nay, illogical.

Science has long been regarded as a pure discipline, abstracted from any particular society because of its faithful empiricism. Leftists ought to keep in mind that science, as with all knowledge, has a social character which cannot be separated from its time and place, and not therefore from politics. Science is a tool which may be wielded for technological progress within an egalitarian society, but by the same token may be used to lend authority to a ruling class who almost exclusively possess the means by which that science is carried out.

”[T]he human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” —Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

Credit to David Revoy on Mastodon for bringing this to my attention (along with an excellent cartoon) https://framapiaf.org/@davidrevoy/111478009178795264

Serotine bats are the first mammals known to mate without penetration, new research suggests

:bat-pog:

We’ve all heard about antibiotic resistance, but is it also possible for bacteria to develop resistance to common disinfectants, like bleach, alcohol and soap?

I was reading this story and was sort of confused as to what was going on

Like I'm not even an expert but I coulda told you that nature already knows what to do with the leaves (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/to-rake-or-not-to-rake-expert-tips-for-eco-friendly-autumnal-lawn-care). This isn't just conservatives, who usually do the yard work themselves, but liberals too. Except the libs hire immigrants to do landscaping, rake the leaves, and then leave them in bags for trash guys to pick them up where they'll go to a landfill or be burned or whatever.

Most common exposure routes include insecticides, pesticides, cosmetics, press-finish fabrics, and pharmaceuticals.

Today is the 35th anniversary of Buran's first and only orbital flight. RIP.

Here is a direct link to the photos.

So, I've started working my first "real job" last month, and it's pretty decent. Good benefits, decent pay, strong union despite being tech, and for reasonable hours (6 per day). The problem is that I took this job mainly so I can continue grad school. Currently I'm finishing up my master's, so I'm managing to conciliate doing both OK since I don't need to be in uni premises for anything anymore, but I'm unsure about being able to do a PhD later.

I figure once I work for a few months and get to work remote for most of the week I can do 6 hours of office work plus 6 hours of research work, or alternatively 6 + 4 and compensate by doing some research on the weekends. However I've heard conflicting feedback about this plan. One of my roommates says this is a horrible idea and that I'll become the Joker after a couple months, while one of my coworkers said I should wait a bit to see if this job won't demand too much of me (still in training currently), but that he thinks it's doable. Both are currently doing/have done a PhD at the same uni I want to enroll in. Also is 6ish hours per day even enough for a PhD?

Additional info: Public latam uni, so no tuition but the government grants are nothing to write home about (before getting the job it was barely enough to get by, and that was with help from my folks). The advisor I'm aiming for can be demanding at times but is also really nice and is new faculty. The PhD is in compsci (ML/NLP) and I plan to continue exploring a niche I'm already familiar with. Work schedule is fairly flexible, save for the fucking meetings (agile delenda est). A lot of credits can be done by getting good publications instead of doing uni courses.

Edit: Thanks everyone! I kind of feared "obviously no you moron" would be the general consensus. I probably got too optimistic about getting to keep doing research immediately. I'll wait for things to settle down and reevaluate my options. There's some mechanisms at the job that are supposedly designed so you can continue education, but my impression is that those are mostly reserved for MBA types, infrequently offered and also really contested, but I should ask around some more to be sure. I also know some better sources of funding are available once you enroll, but seeing my friend applying for those and failing repeatedly discourages me from betting on it. Worst comes to worst I'll save up some money, try doing this for a bit and quit if it proves unsustainable. Again, thanks for the input!