Delta waned because it got outcompeted by Omicron. Omicron is way more infectious, better at evading immunity/vaccines, and since it’s less harmful and deadly, societies don’t tend to lock down as much during waves of it. Natural selection has spoken, unless something drastic like an Omicron-specific vaccine drastically changes the equation before Delta goes extinct.

This has to be the nation-state equivalent to finding like a twenty in the wash.

Come lay down your weapons, it is not too late for my mercy.

You take care of your billions of little butt buddies and they will take care of you.

You do them wrong, they will wreck you from the inside out.

r/Bossfights ?

I assume that thrifty Medieval folk would use a sundial during the day and whip the candle out at night for dual-use.

I thought that they were just being cheeky

This is a silly bluff, though. The options are not just nuclear war or Russia is destroyed. The third, vastly preferable alternative is that Russia withdraws from a pointless foreign invasion and takes a ding as a nation but doesn’t come close to being destroyed. They’ve done it time and time again, they didn’t glass Afghanistan or the West for losing that conflict, this isn’t much different.

Free will is an illusion. Have a nice day!

We have only recently figured out safe viral gene therapies (usually called lentiviral therapies)- the FDA approved the first two of them in 2022 [1]. I agree that to actually cure HIV, we'd need a system that can hunt down and correct the rogue DNA in our cells, but the technology is not yet there. First of all, to my knowledge, current lentiviral therapies aren't very good at targeting where in the genome they insert. That would be important to correct the implanted HIV sequence. However, our CRISPR DNA engineering systems are good at this. Understandably, there is work underway to combine the two [2], but academia tends to lead actual therapies by quite a bit. In the cases of both potential therapies, they wouldn't come close to screening / inserting into every potentially infected cell with our current technology. There's a lot of interest in improving this issue in pharma, though. Maybe it'll be possible some day, but not before a lot of work in the field.

I think about this specific question in the shower a lot, and am kind of stoked that somebody asked it.

[1]: https://asgct.org/publications/news/september-2022/eli-cel-second-lentiviral-vector-gene-therapy

[2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34372494/

Apoptosis is a "planned" cell death, where either the body commands the cell to kill itself because it's no longer useful or the cell is mortally wounded and dies a tidy death by suicide for the good of the body.

In contrast, cell necrosis is sudden, "messy" cell death that is not considered apoptosis. It can cause problems for surrounding cells as debris, signaling molecules, and even digestive enzymes get released uncontrolled from the dying cell.

Cancer cells are damaged (usually genetically) in a way that causes them to ignore the body's signals to commit apoptosis, but also to ignore signals to not divide and to stay where they are.

Leishmaniasis (called L- from here on out) prevalence largely depends on the prevalence of the sand flies that spread it. While technically it can be spread sexually [1], people with visceral L- are not generally in a condition to be having sex. Therefore, it doesn't spread too well as an STD. Meanwhile, HIV is an insidious disease where the host can survive for years and be active for much of it before succumbing. Additionally, there are often visible signs of L- sores and lesions- while HIV patients show no outward signs of the disease. In short, L- patients are generally clearly sick to both host and partners, while HIV patients are not.

In terms of treatment, you can wipe it out L- with antiparasitics. Treatment is unpleasant, but it is curable. In contrast, HIV is a very sneaky disease. It is a retrovirus, meaning that it can jam its genetic material into your cells' DNA and hide in that form. Even if every virus in the human body is wiped out, the HIV DNA in the host cells can activate, and then the patient is infected all over again. That's why HIV treatments are the way they are, where a patient can be basically normal, but not cured.

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32943348/

It came from observing changes in personality following head injury. Phineas Gage from the 1800s is the classical example. He had an iron rod go through his head while working on a railroad. He survived but his personality changed dramatically (he was no longer polite and inhibited as he was before, the accounts don’t seem to go into detail but the observers were clearly shocked by what they saw).

You have to be more specific. The basic story of China is about 6000 years of a cycle of a competent emperor coming to power, each successive emperor in the dynasty is worse than the last, it gets to a point where the emperor is a legendary assclown, horrible things happen to the Chinese people, and then a rebellion/coup happens and there’s a new emperor.

Yeah, but the emus were propped up by Mussolini, who had an interest in a fascist flightless bird state in the Pacific.

The West responded harshly to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because they were increasingly aligned with the West. If Russia attacks a province that’s already Russian-aligned, it gets a finger wag, if they attack a nation that we’re actually invested in, it’s on like Donkey Kong.

As for whiteness... I don’t think there would just be a simple finger wag if China attacked Taiwan, I think that it would be a full-on proxy war and a diplo-economic disaster for the world.

Vercingetorix led the Galls in the Second Gallic War. The word Second is critical here. Julius Caesar had a general policy of showing some mercy against a defeated foe once, but if he had to go back again to fight, all manner of brutality was on the table. Caesar was pissed that he was wasting time and resources knocking down the Galls again in the Second Gallic War, and he slaughtered whole cities, sold captured women and children en-mass into slavery, and denied their military leader the customary Roman mercy.

Well, he does soccer, and this is about a soccer venue, so it's a little relevant. Not saying that he wasn't totally bought for 150 million by Qatar, but it's not like they got a Kardashian to promote their little slave-built soccer game.

I've noticed that the news has tried to make the companies seem reasonable by negotiating, but it doesn't sound like their offers did much to address the main issues, ie railroad workers have no flexibility in their schedules and have basically lost control over their lives. It seems like there has to be a reasonable way to arrange rail worker labor where workers can have a work-life balance.

It’s going to go off the rails. Twelve unions all need to approve the contract for it to succeed, and some have already said they won’t. This looks like it’s going to blow up into the next economic crisis in mid-November unless either the workers cave or railroad companies figure out how to give their workers something closer to a normal work schedule.

Also, nice punnage.

You better believe it! The textbook case for this is the "sickle cell" trait. This is the gene that causes sickle cell anemia, a horrible genetic disease where your red blood cells are all jacked up and you mostly die a slow painful death. So why is this gene still hanging around humans' genomes if it kills people? If you are merely a carrier of the gene or have "sickle cell trait", it provides substantial protection against death from malaria (and the symptoms are much milder than full-blown sickle cell anemia). It makes your red blood cells far more resistant to being infected by the disease-causing agent, the plasmodia The crossed-out text was somewhat recently debunked, it looks like the plasmodia either struggles to survive in the mutant red blood cells, or the infected red blood cell is more efficiently removed from the body before it bursts with a payload of new plasmodia.

That’s a mindblowing take to me that children eat the marshmallow not because they don’t have discipline, but because these children learned to view the world as cruel and untrustworthy and that actively abandoning long-term thinking is to their advantage. Thanks for sharing, now I’m sad.

“WILD TURKEY 101 OR RARE BREED, YOU ONLY GET ONE FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, PRICES AT MSRP, WHAT’S IT GONNA BE?”

“I, uh, I choose death”

Bunch of hysterical b****** censoring the word B******.

It’s not a contest! It’s just showing a correlation between violence in society vs their police force.