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[Starver]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydroxyacetone

[delphonso]

Me, a bright shade of orange: I don't see the issue here.

[Naturegirl1999]

Well, some progress was made already on the other, more-realistic, method of obtaining commercial fusion.

The sun in a bottle

The sun? The sun in a bottle?

to think this has been going on for this long, and I was here when the running joke started, this puts a smile on my face

[delphonso]

Oh god, I completely missed that.

I really /dropped/ the ball.

[delphonso]

Recycled cathode material performs better than fresh cathode material in lithium batteries:
Paid access to the actual reseach here

We should all be aware that recycling has basically been a hoax up to this point - most recycled material by the customer never gets reprocessed. The general reason for this is that recycling material is harder and more expensive (more fundamental reasons include greed and desire to bring about the end times) than just making products from raw resources. So, this study, if proven replicable, will do a lot in battery production to reduce waste. The cathode material of spent high-performance lithium ion batteries actually performs better when recycled, giving the batteries a longer lifespan (at the same storage and discharge rates) when compared to new batteries.

This is good, especially because batteries are basically the only practical barrier to a fully solar and wind grid (even if it needs to be supplemented by other forms of energy.)

The study found that the physical structure of the material was why the batteries performed better - which could mean it is generalizable technology to other battery materials, say aluminum batteries (which would be wonderful).

More good news: Malaria vaccine!

"...Mosquirix, is the first vaccine against a parasitic organism and targets the member of the Plasmodium group that is most associated with severe and life-threatening illness. It works by limiting the ability of P. falciparum to gain access to the liver, where it typically would mature and multiply before moving on to invade it’s victim’s red blood cells. The vaccine results in immunity against the circumsporozoite protein that is found on the surface of the malaria parasite when in the form that initially enters the body via the bite of an infected mosquito.

Malaria is one of the deadliest diseases for humans out there - especially deadly for children under 5. Developing a vaccine for it has been particularly rough - but this vaccine, by preventing access to the liver, greatly reduces the amount of malaria-causing plasmodia - giving the vaccine about 40% effectiveness. That's a huge jump from zero. Insecticide-treated netting is still better, at around 75-80% effective - but that's not available everywhere, and the two in conjunction could drastically reduce risk.

Hooray for saving babies!

[Telgin]

I'm surprised that a malaria vaccine is this difficult to make, but it's good to see progress made on that front.  40% sounds pretty bad but as you say it's much better than before.

In other health related news, scientists made genetically engineered pigs whose kidneys have been tested in a proof of concept transplant: link.

[McTraveller]

I'm surprised that a malaria vaccine is this difficult to make, but it's good to see progress made on that front.  40% sounds pretty bad but as you say it's much better than before.

In other health related news, scientists made genetically engineered pigs whose kidneys have been tested in a proof of concept transplant: link.

Hey only one step to go before we have a man-bear-pig!

Then we can work on Dogman?

[wierd]

the problem with porcine transgenic organs, is the risk of humanization of porcine endogenous retrovirus.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4036542/


this proof of concept surgery does nothing to fix that big assed elephant in the room.

[Telgin]

It's a shame we haven't made more progress with cloning new organs from adult humans.  I haven't been keeping up with our general progress on that front, but a quick google search implies that most attempts to do that are still using pigs in one form or another.  That implies to me that we're probably many decades away from it really being practical to do pure human organ cloning.

Actually, I'm curious now if we do that if it will even guarantee that the new organ is compatible with the target.  I would guess that there's at least some chance of the adaptive immune system rejecting it if there were any neoantigens for one reason or another, but I can't begin to guess how likely that would be.  I suppose it would mostly guarantee that immunosuppresive drugs allowed the transplant to survive at least.

[wierd]

IMO, the better use of xenotransplant materials, is the sourcing of extracellular matricies to use as scaffolds.

Basically, you take your pig kidney-- then you brutally murder it, and literally wash out all the cells, and leave just a kidney shaped network of fibronectin and pals.


You then introduce cloned human fibroblasts, which then integrate onto the scaffold, recognize the tissue type by the markers present in the scaffold matrix, and set up extracellular signalling for cell migration and integration.

After that, you hook up the "what is left of the circulatory network" of the organ to a low pressure supply of collected whole human blood, and introduce IPS stem cells appropriate for the organ type.

those IPS cells integrate with the fibroblast network on the scaffold, and replace the missing tissues on the scaffold.


When you are done, you have a properly structured organ, that is fit for transplant, that has been completely washed of the xenobiological tissues, and thus suitable for rejection-free transplant, and free of zoonotic pathogens.

aka--

Tissue Engineering

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2587658/

[delphonso]

Somewhat on that previous discussion,

Flat brain organoids have much longer lifespan than their 3D counterparts.

Organoids are made from stem cells, actually creating the tissues you intend to test your drug on. They provide a few benefits over other testing methods, for one, they're actual human tissue, and they're very controlled (generating the specific tissues you want). Brain organoids have been a bit complicated, as you might expect with such a complicated organ. A frustrating hurdle has been that the core of the 3D organoid would start to die for lack of nutrients, limiting the time you can actually study the effects of your medicine. However, this study generated a flat brain tissue organoid and were able to keep it alive for 240 days. Doing so allowed them to test drugs which broke up protein build-up, which is a sign and possible cause of ALS/FTD - degradations of neural tissue.
Good news for neurochemistry and medications!

Spider's diversity is more...diverse than previously thought:
Knowable's write up on the behavior side with pulls from other articles

A few hypotheses about how spiders evolved have been put to the test and the results are less than satisfactory. Previously it was assumed that spiders mostly evolved in line with insect diversification - the hunter changing to suit the prey that changes to avoid the hunter. The research itself is interesting - taking a look at genetic differences as well as their behavioral counterparts (web building, for example) and poking holes in the assumed connections. I found the Knowable article much more interesting - as it explains a few jumping spider hunting tactics which are really quite complex, such as avoiding an orb-weaver's webs (because orb-weavers will shake them to throw off anything not stuck in the web) by climbing up a tree, silking down like Mission Impossible and swinging into the center of the web to assassinate the orb-weaver.
Spiders are cool!

Juno's microwave analysis of Jupiter shows more details about the Great Red Spot:

The giant storm is at least 300km deep, and could go up to 500km deep - which is pretty insane. Crazier still is that this still means the storm is mostly flat (it's about 12,000km wide). The microwaves were used to look deeper into the cloud layers of Jupiter. There's a large water-could around 60km deep, but under it is an unexpected lack of ammonia gas, which suggests something is moving the gas around. Possibly this points to 8 circulation cells that could be pushing and pulling the ammonia around. Interesting!

[Bumber]

tldr.

brb, gonna flatten my brain so i can live longer

[delphonso]

I'm very disappointed they didn't call them 'smooth brains'

[McTraveller]

Move over Zefram Cochrane!

Yes this one is microscopic but... wow...

[Telgin]

Very cool, but until someone builds ones that moves around like a vehicle I'm still a bit skeptical of the ability to actually build a vehicle that can make use of warp bubbles for motion.

Also, worth a reminder that until someone measures one of these bubbles moving faster than c, we shouldn't assume that this will lead to FTL technology even if it's possible to make a vehicle that makes use of it.