Science!

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Thad
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Re: Science!

Postby Thad » Sat Apr 24, 2021 12:58 pm

Malaria vaccine has striking early success after decades of disappointment

After decades of disappointing results, recent findings have revived hopes for an effective vaccine against malaria, which kills some 400,000 people every year, most of them children. An experimental vaccine that targets the most dangerous form of the malaria parasite was found to have an efficacy of 74% to 77% after 1 year in children from West Africa.

The results come from a small trial of a vaccine developed by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute involving 450 toddlers in Burkina Faso, where malaria is endemic.

“The efficacy we have got has never been obtained by any [malaria] vaccine candidate. These are really amazing findings,” says Halidou Tinto, a parasitologist at the Institute for Health Sciences Research in Nanoro, Burkina Faso, and a principal investigator at the site of the study. Its findings are in press at The Lancet and were posted 20 April on its preprint server.

Pedro Alonso, director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Malaria Programme, who was not involved with the work, calls it “very positive news.” But he adds: “This is a trial with 450 children. … We are still quite far away from having the type of information that would allow us to get very excited.”

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So, y'know, too early to go getting very excited, but this could turn out to be a very big deal.

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nosimpleway
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Re: Science!

Postby nosimpleway » Sat Apr 24, 2021 9:48 pm

I mean, Burkina Faso is the sort of place that still sprays DDT, because the devastating effect on the local wildlife is considered an acceptable price to pay for people not dying of malaria quite so much. So yeah, an environmentally-cleaner vaccine would be a big deal.

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Re: Science!

Postby Büge » Fri Aug 06, 2021 8:13 pm

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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Sep 09, 2021 3:35 pm

Could almost go in "Good News", but fusion stuff is still fusion stuff ("forever 20 years in the future", indeed):

Superconducting magnet breakthrough allows researchers to create a 20 Tesla-power magnet, vastly more powerful than any previous magnet or magnetic containment field, opening the way to vastly improved (and far smaller) toroid containment fields.

Here's the MIT/SPARC render of the potential scale of a tokamak using the new magnets:

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That's tiny!

Another neat thing the article has is a quick rundown of the state of alternate competing projects. ITER is still trucking along with their huge toroid (which is some 40 times larger because they're obv using their existing magnet design, but is supposed to have a same-ballpark efficiency outcome), as well as various other less-conventional projects.
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Re: Science!

Postby Thad » Wed Sep 22, 2021 11:50 am

Braille display demo refreshes with miniature fireballs

As described, it sounds wildly impractical. But it's an interesting approach. Maybe someday it'll get refined into something more workable, and even if it doesn't, it seems like interesting research. And I'm glad people are still working on accessibility tools beyond text-to-speech readers.

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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Dec 02, 2021 6:44 pm

New fleshlight just dropped.

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Niku
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Re: Science!

Postby Niku » Thu Dec 02, 2021 7:34 pm

you mean the one in the lower right 'cause hey mama
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Re: Science!

Postby IGNORE ME » Thu Dec 02, 2021 7:55 pm

Creepy animatronics are so played out.

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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Dec 02, 2021 8:20 pm

Niku wrote:you mean the one in the lower right 'cause hey mama

Oh I thought that guy was the one which was going to be installed in the new Uber Johnnies.
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Re: Science!

Postby Büge » Thu Dec 02, 2021 9:53 pm

Mongrel wrote:


...Remember ReBoot's first season, and how the animation was for Bob, Dot, and Enzo was just slightly off?
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Re: Science!

Postby mharr » Thu Dec 02, 2021 10:08 pm

Even though they have a cool phrase for it, engineers don't seem to get that humans have a primal, hindbrain reaction to things trying to pass as human that obviously aren't. If we let that thing in the village it's going to eat the kids.

Might as well animate the Mother Bird sculpture and give that a job as a care home nurse.

Just copy Pixar and give them dark glass face screens for animated icon emotes. We love those guys.

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Re: Science!

Postby François » Thu Dec 02, 2021 11:13 pm

I'm getting Eli Vance vibes from this one. I'm not sure whether that's a criticism or a compliment.

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Re: Science!

Postby Büge » Fri Dec 03, 2021 9:14 am

mharr wrote:Just copy Pixar and give them dark glass face screens for animated icon emotes. We love those guys.


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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Fri Dec 03, 2021 1:28 pm

mharr wrote:Even though they have a cool phrase for it, engineers don't seem to get that humans have a primal, hindbrain reaction to things trying to pass as human that obviously aren't. If we let that thing in the village it's going to eat the kids.

Might as well animate the Mother Bird sculpture and give that a job as a care home nurse.

Just copy Pixar and give them dark glass face screens for animated icon emotes. We love those guys.

I like the joke that can be found circulating the interweebs somewhat regularly:

One of the most frightening things I've ever heard is when someone pointed out that the existence of the uncanny valley implies that at some point there was an evolutionary reason to be afraid of something that looked human but wasn't.
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KingRoyal
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Re: Science!

Postby KingRoyal » Fri Dec 03, 2021 1:50 pm

Pretty sure we killed all the neanderthals. You know, those guys who kind of looked like us.

But, honestly, at this point I'm not convinced the Uncanny Valley actually exists, so to speak
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Fri Dec 03, 2021 1:57 pm

KingRoyal wrote:Pretty sure we killed all the neanderthals. You know, those guys who kind of looked like us.

But, honestly, at this point I'm not convinced the Uncanny Valley actually exists, so to speak


IIRC, it has been confirmed in a couple studies as real, and it has to do with more general factors in perception rather than some specific threat like Neanderthals or *spooky music plays*.

But Cavemans Vs Aliens would make for a great "schlock movie with high production values" premise.
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Re: Science!

Postby KingRoyal » Fri Dec 03, 2021 2:21 pm

Studies have shown that things can make humans uncomfortable but so can long, spindly things and weird shadows. I'm just not convinced that the UV is a phenomena specific to human beings and not just part of our general alert systems. And the idea that it was some evolutionary trait starts getting into evo-psych territory where pseudoscience runs rampant
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Re: Science!

Postby Thad » Fri Dec 03, 2021 2:42 pm

KingRoyal wrote:I'm just not convinced that the UV is a phenomena specific to human beings and not just part of our general alert systems.

One time I let the dog out and she started barking her damn head off and I went out to see why and she was barking at the sheets I'd put over my garden to protect the plants from freezing.

I joked that she thought they were ghosts.

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Re: Science!

Postby KingRoyal » Fri Dec 03, 2021 2:45 pm

My dog goes crazy any time he sees a plastic bag rustle. Dogs think any strange thing that moves is a threat, honestly.

Though I should clarify, it's not specific to humans identifying other human beings. Like, we can also tell when like a living room isn't setup quite right
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Re: Science!

Postby Upthorn » Fri Dec 03, 2021 3:48 pm

KingRoyal wrote:Pretty sure we killed all the Neanderthals. You know, those guys who kind of looked like us.

Actually, every single human being whose ancestral lineage ever left Africa has some Neanderthal genes in them, and even many that didn't. So while we know that there was conflict between homo neanderthalensis and early homo sapiens, it's less a case of "we annihilated them" and more a case of "we interbred until we were the same species."

Furthermore, the low percentage of Neanderthal genes remaining in (almost every single example of) modern humanity is at least partly because most of them were slightly maladaptive, which means that intermarriage has to have been even more common than we already knew.

KingRoyal wrote:I'm just not convinced that the UV is a phenomena specific to human beings and not just part of our general alert systems.

I agree with this. I suspect that it probably evolved pretty early as a part of the disgust response that helps many animals avoid infectious diseases?
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