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[Shadowlord]

Would any government tell millions of people that they have to leave their homes and won't even be able to sell them due to a disaster that's only theoretical and several years away?

[Eric Blank]

Sure. The populace will be absolutely livid, but a government that wants to do that without compensating them obviously doesn't give a flying fuck.

[Shadowlord]

I'm just used to denial and wishful thinking on the part of governments. Example: states in the USA declaring that accelerating sea level rise is illegal, or at least illegal for anyone in said government to make plans or reports based on.

[martinuzz]

"If the sea doesn't stop rising I'll nuke it into oblivion" - D.Trump, 2019

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

[Starver]

Trump may well be an anagram of Cnut The Great but, unlike the king, he's probably not far wiser than his courtiers.  Or one has to hope.

[Max™]

Trump may well be an anagram of Cnut The Great but, unlike the king, he's probably not far wiser than his courtiers.  Or one has to hope.

Ugh, I'm going to pretend you got bashed on the head by a viking just before making that post, and go back to enjoying a great story with my favorite version of Cnut.

[scrdest]

Paper I can dig up:

http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31664-6

So far as I can tell, there's no actual trials been done, only model tests, though I've not read it thoroughly, nor am I a trained biologist.

Augh god DAMN IT I had high hopes here. They induced, albeit transiently, the fucking Yamanaka factors. That doesn't sound like an aging therapy, that sounds like die of teratoma all day erryday.

Those four factors are the holy tetrad of reprogramming normal cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. Which are great for therapy, but need to be cultured into target cells or they basically try to form a new embryo inside your body like one of the lesser known Xenomorph species.

Now, they claim they didn't get Nanog protein expression, which is the pluripotency effector, but the risk is there.

This is a mice model of premature aging, progeric mice. They have a fucked up cell nucleus component which results in symptoms similar to aging (same thing happens in humans with this defect, for reference). They claim there's similar changes in 'normal' aging, and there are good reasons not to doubt that, though it's still a model, might not be 100% accurate to physiological aging.

Optimistically, if the transient expression does help and NOT KILL YOU HORRIBLY, that's pretty great. Putting in something with permanent expression would be harder, and the expression of the factors could be possible to induce pharmacologically, short-term. Then it's only a matter of dying in one of 'em massive wars rather than old age down the line.

[ChairmanPoo]

Eeh, dude, it's a great proof of concept, and the experiment went well.

This is a mice model of premature aging, progeric mice

No, they used both progeric and regularly aged mice. And human cells, for that matter.

Says it right in the article

Spoiler: aged mice (click to show/hide)

Based on our experience on the reprogramming of cells from patients with HGPS to study aging in vitro (Liu et al., 2011), we decided to use a premature aging mouse model to test the hypothesis that in vivo reprogramming can alter organismal aging. We chose the premature aging mouse model that carries a G609G mutation in the gene Lmna (LAKI)....

Spoiler: human cells (click to show/hide)

To further explore whether the effect of short exposure to the Yamanaka factors on aging hallmarks is conserved among species, we next used human cells to test this hypothesis. For this purpose, and to avoid the use of viruses for the introduction of the Yamanaka factors, we chose a human secondary system for OSKM expression.

Spoiler: regular old mice (click to show/hide)

Lastly, to investigate whether in vivo partial reprogramming could have a beneficial effect on aging in WT organisms, we tested the effect of cyclic OSKM induction on the regenerative capacity of aged WT 4F mice.

[Sergarr]

Absolutely great news and a major victory for humanity: it has finally been confirmed that the newly developed vaccine against Ebola is 100% effective!

[scrdest]

Eeh, dude, it's a great proof of concept, and the experiment went well.

This is a mice model of premature aging, progeric mice

No, they used both progeric and regularly aged mice. And human cells, for that matter.

Whoops, I stand corrected, I've been drive-by posting between helping out with the Christmas shit, I didn't finish the article.

All things being equal, it's still stem cell shit. I am incredibly, incredibly jaded and so I read 'Stem Cells to fix X' in the same way physicists treat 'So I solved Quantum Mechanics...'. If you are right, that's amazing! But you probably aren't.

Just look at Vacanti or Macchiarini. If it sounds too good to be true - which is does, here - it probably is. But hey, if the concept holds, it's only like 20 years or more until an actually effective drug will hit the market.

[Amperzand]

So, NASA's website has a bunch of old research papers and tech overviews from the cold war. As it turns out, there are some really neat scanned-in documents talking about nuclear propulsion and so on. Really fascinating, if obviously dense.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19710014431.pdf

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19640019868.pdf

[inteuniso]

Don't know if it's been shared but here's Erlik Verlinde's most recent writing on entropic gravity.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.02269v1.pdf

EDIT: Read somewhere that reminded me just because something aligns nicely with mathematical tricks, doesn't mean it's going to hold up in reality.

[Reelya]

Absolutely great news and a major victory for humanity: it has finally been confirmed that the newly developed vaccine against Ebola is 100% effective!

Well 95%+ effective at least. The control group got 23 cases of Ebola, the study group got zero. Obviously, it could work 100% of the time, but you can never be sure. We can give a probability that it's > X% effective using statistics.

[Sergarr]

So, remember when I before have put an article that has said that we now can predict people's intelligence from DNA? There are already plans/suggestions to use it for mass scale genetic selection at an embryonic stage. For fuck's sake!