When I eat a raw vegetable or a piece of sashimi I'm consuming many pieces of mRNA. Does it matter what these molecules encode for? Doesn't my stomach just chop everything up? Would it matter if a baby ate COVID vaccine mRNA?
While it’s slightly concerning that the baby ingests genetically engineered mRNA that has been untested for infant consumption, the more pressing concern is that mRNA proliferated further than expected in mothers’ bodies.
We were originally told that mRNA vaccines did not spread around the body.
An mRNA vaccine that spreads around the body is problematic, because the body’s own cytotoxic T cells and NK (natural killer) cells will destroy some of our own cells if they express the spike protein (as prompted by the mRNA vaccine). This is particularly problematic in heart cells, where permanent scarring of tissue can occur, weakening the heart and shortening the life of the patient.
It's not only the heart that's at risk. The shots have been seen to cause diabetes or cause uncontrollable ketoacidosis in people who are already diabetic.
This isn't a surprise because diabetes is caused by the destruction of irreplaceable cells in the pancreas. The body can't regrow them and you are diabetic for life. So if those cells take up vaccine mRNA and express spike, the body will destroy them thinking they are infected with something (which they sort of are), and that will create new diabetics.
Originally we were told such cases were just coincidences, but that this can happen is obvious from the mechanism of action which is why they stressed so hard that the shots would stay in the arm muscles. Nowadays doctors recognize that the mRNA can spread through the body and cells can be destroyed anywhere. Example case report:
Even Moderna's own study of the shots on young children caused one of participants to get diabetes a month later and they admitted it was causal, but the case was only mentioned at the very end of the appendix (see page 62 here https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2209367/suppl_f...)
Modern COVID isn't dangerous. The vaccines can be. And the vaccines don't stop you getting COVID anyway, so, the risk is additive in any event. Your call.
Incorrect. It is injected into muscle (ie IM vs IV). Furthermore, we were told for safety’s sake it would be absorbed locally. Finding it in breast milk, heart, ovaries, etc is a big ducking deal. Long term effects? Unknown but a certain subset of population very quick to minimize it. Like feeding your baby pharmaceutically altered mRNA is just like feeding your baby a carrot. Uh huh, sure, Prove it. That’s the whole point, can’t prove anything because they destroyed the control group (officially at least, my opinion is that we are all in the same massive experiment so I guess that makes me control).
Nah, moving goal posts on “safe and effective.” One by one the claims are they made have been dropped from marketing materials. The posters around my hospital sure have changed in the strength of their claims over the last few years.
The doctors giving the injections here in Belgium were explicitly told not to aspirate. I asked both of the ones I had. They said it went against their training, but apparently they were told aspiration would somehow destroy the very fragile vaccine. None of them sounded convinced but both refused to aspirate.
You could walk out, but that meant the app by the goverment would not show the "fully vaxed" status. This app was mandatory checked at every bar, cafe, restaurant, theater, ... , and they had to refuse you entrance if not vaxed.
This isn't "mRNA" this is modified-mRNA (where the name Moderna comes from).
Unfortunately they are allowed to abbreviate it as mRNA, which IMO is extremely problematic.
Modified-mRNA uses pseudouridine in some of its base pairs. As such, it is able to remain stable for orders of magnitude more time in many chemical situations.
This practice is incredibly deceptive and lead many in the medical profession to disregard some pretty serious safety issues.
Natural mRNA is too unstable to reliably transport into the cell via injection. Part of the reason mRNA gene treatments spent so long in development without a single approved product.
The two technologies that facilitate this techonology are:
1. Base-modified mRNA (modRNA or :( mRNA), where they substitue uridine.
2. Nano-technology which protects the payload in a bubble of fat, lipid-nano-particles (LNPs).
While LNPs on their own are capable of their own side effects, the modRNA is particularly worrying because of its extended lifetime. IIRC some studies claim to have found it intact many weeks after injection, which would be astounding were we talking of natural mRNA.
Bret Weinstein said of this situation "if a fiberglass tree falls in the forest", which illustrates that most biologists and medical professionals could estimate how long a tree would take to decompose in a forest, however, their estimates would be wildly incorrect if you omitted to tell them the tree was made of fiberglass.
You can tell that it's fine because babies already survive breastfeeding from women who eat meat. Whether or not the mRNA breaks down, it's not harmful.
Babies are actually different from adults here; they get antibodies from breast milk and it supports their immune system, since theirs isn't developed. It's a good thing.
Foreign mRNA doesn't hurt us because it's recognized by the body as harmful and immediately destroyed by the immune system. This was one of the biggest challenges to developing mRNA based drugs and vaccines.
The mRNA used in the COVID shots isn't normal, of the type found in the wild. It's been created in such a way that the immune system doesn't recognize it, and then wrapped in artificial lipids. So you can't generalize from natural mRNA molecules to the artificial types, they are fundamentally different in both construction and effect.
This is not at all the same situation, and this sort of hubris is what causes public health disasters such as the Vioxx, Thalidomide or Dengvaxia scandals.
This is artificially created genetic material ending up in newborns after the manufacturer assured the public that was not possible.
I don't think this will work. Excuse my nonsense logic but the swastika works well as a symbol of hate (despite having other origins and meanings) in that it has a single center with coherent angular spirals, the center signifying the ego and the spirals signifying logic and order complying with it... or something.
The hashtag has an empty center and four equal points that sort of radiate in multiple directions... seems more oligopolistic and ambivalent than totalitarian and opinionated.
Admittedly without yet reading but just looking at the pictures, I'd love to see examples of where it creates patterns of patterns. Sort of like the biomes in Minecraft: one pattern to draw out where the biomes are, one to fill them in with content. Could it be made to do patterns of patterns of patterns?
If this were used to create level design where the local view is several iterations deep of patterns of patterns but not yet all the way to the bottom, I guess a fractal, that would be a trip.
Each block has a probability of being selected. You could make this probability location dependent, for example by sampling a noise function. That way you get something like biomes.
Isn't making a robot that looks like a human to replace a human's job a bit like making a mechanical horse to fulfill our transportation needs?
Having worked with robotics for years I can say the amount of setup work that goes into installing fully-functional hardware and software and getting a robotic process running smoothly is enormous. The basic idea is that everything, the robot, all the hardware, all the firmware/software, the end-effector, the workpieces, the sensors, etc. is rigidly-defined and over-spec'd so that with all the tolerance stackup and after all the integration and process debugging work you set it and DON'T CHANGE IT for as long as possible. The chaos that ensues from one little component changing it's behavior can be enormous.
The notion of "smart" robots that you can just slap down or that can just handle all sorts of unknowns and adjust themselves to changes to me always seemed like a really, really big challenge, maybe not as challenging as a driverless car but definitely more of a "general AI" problem.
I'm sure someone has coined the term but there must be some kind of "uncanny valley" of intelligence: a little intelligence (e.g. the PID controllers that actually run robots) is great, a lot of intelligence (fully-blown general AI) is great (if you can get it), but what's in the middle may not be worth the while. Getting the answer correctly 99% of the time doesn't work if you need 99.9% success rate.
From an investment standpoint I would be looking for companies with a REALLY specific well-defined problem that "medium AI" could solve rather than someone who's claiming to take medium AI and apply it vaguely/generally.
I guess that's my take away from this: work on specifying the problem before you work on the solution.
I see current AI to be like donkeys, and the middling AI you speak of as chimps. There's a reason we domesticated donkeys and not chimps.
The autopilot feature of Teslas is a lot like a donkey. It mostly handles itself but is stupid and needs a lot of monitoring. Using autopilot feels a lot like sitting on a cart and pulling the ropes on the donkey every once in a while.
"Medium AI" is definitely useful, as long as you have the correct interfacing and apply it to the correct problems.
Obviously you can't just slap it onto an AI-complete problem and have medium AI perform well enough to ship.
We are probably roughly in agreement here, but I disagree that in reality there's a significant uncanny valley effect. It's just hard for those not in the field to intuit about the capabilities of medium AI.
Doesn't plastic, especially white shopping-bag plastic, reflect more solar radiation than open ocean? Wouldn't covering a large portion of the earth with white plastic actually lower global temperatures? I saw a video where an open water reservoir was covered with floating plastic balls to reduce evaporation. Maybe a large plastic island would help fight global warming.
In theory, yes. But it would also destroy all ocean life, with perhaps the very tiny exception of the ecosystems around deep-ocean thermal vents.
But, as another post has explained that this isn't what the ocean-plastics are. They would be better described as a thin soup, or cloud, of tiny plastic particles dispersed over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of ocean, down to depths of up to 100m.
This may seem unrelated but I watched "The Disaster Artist" for the first time last night. It made me cringe, not for Wiseau but by reminding me of all the times I've been a Wiseau in my life as I disconnected from reality caught up in some fantasy of how I was going to make the world love me by something I was going to do. Reality can be a brutal place for the ego, but at least it's real.
"I'm going to make my own Bluetooth smart-lock. It's gonna be amaaaazing. Oh hai Mark."
How to not worry? Relax. Keep the body at peace. Be simple. Stay in the heart (stay with how you're feeling, not just with what you're seeing/experiencing). Let go. You cannot lose yourself because you are always yourself. Be grateful for the incredibly valuable experience you're having, even if it's difficult.
So they're using the screen consisting of three monochromatic LED types as a full-spectrum light source? I don't think that works... You still just get three points on the spectrum, same as the Bayer filter on the camera.
I suppose if the three screen LED wavelengths were significantly different from the three camera filter wavelengths then you could:
Illuminate with screen Red to get Rscreen.
Illuminate with screen Green to get Gscreen.
Illuminate with screen Blue to get Bscreen.
Use ambient full-spectrum light to get Rfilter, Gfilter, and Bfilter.
I think you're correct, barring significant nonlinearity in the bayer mask or object. Technically you can get 9 linearly independent points - each combination of light channels on with each combination of bayer mask channels. Ideally only 3 of those will be nonzero, but if the bayer mask is imperfect you'll see some illumination on adjacent channels. Environmental background is subtracted out from all since it's unknown, so that doesn't give another point.
There's also no way you're measuring pesticide residue with that - I doubt that would even be possible with a high-end visible hyperspectral camera. Maybe with a raman spectrometer.
I've designed a couple versions of cell phone camera-based spectrometers and spectral imagers, so I'm relatively familiar with the design principles.
Can you give us some insight on the whole pesticide thing? How is it possible to detect it with a spectrometer in general?
Are you sure that it is impossible to detect it, even if the app is 'calibrated' to a certain object, e.g. an apple? I think if you limit the search space it could be possible!?
It's impossible. Most chemicals of interest are pretty boring in the visible spectrum. I'd say >95% of pure substances I've worked with - everything from pesticides to pharmaceuticals - are some variant on "white to off-white solid" or "clear to amber liquid." White/clear indicates that all photons visible to us interact with the materially equally. You get tans, yellows, and browns largely from high-frequency (deep blue/purple part of the spectrum) being absorbed by assorted chemical bonds.
Spectroscopy is predominantly done with UV (200-280 nm most common) and IR, which are regions where photonic interaction is dominated by electronic and vibration/rotational transitions, respectively.
Visible light absorption is typically caused by highly conjugated bonds and metal-coordination complexes. In terms of day-to-day, this is almost exclusively dyes (synthetic and natural). Dyes also tend to be really potent absorbers - you only need minuscule amounts of them to create very vivid colors. So a purely visible-light-based app would at best be able to give you a handle of what sort of dyes are in something. It won't tell you if it has pesticides (let alone traces!) or HFCS or nutrients or what-have-you.
tl;dr - no, it's not remotely possible to even detect pesticides with visible light.
The pesticide probably doesn't look very different in the visible spectrum at that low of a concentration - otherwise its presence would be pretty easily detectable to the human eye. If you require detection capabilities exceeding the human eye you're going to need a much more sensitive setup.
Most chemicals have characteristic spectra in the infrared, so you'd need sensors going to much larger wavelengths to have significant difference - even then it would be hard to detect against the variation in signal from fruit.
A Bayer filter doesn't give you single wavelengths they have a broad, somewhat overlapping spectrum. An LED display on the other hand has three distinct narrow bands.
I'm not sure how their inverse algorithm could work, but I have a feeling it should be possible to get more than three points of the spectrum by displaying multiple light patterns.
Regarding full-spectrum ambient light: they can't use it at all because they have to subtract it from the images. You can only recover spectral information from the light you control. At least that's what I'm thinking right now.
That was also what I was thinking. But given that neither the LEDs nor the Bayer filters have an actual line spectrum it might be possible to obtain some more information than under the assumption that they are ideal line spectra. Could there also be some non-linearities? Does the spectrum of a LED change somewhat depending on the input power?
Our quoting engine needs a mesh file to estimate price from. As well, all of the 3D printer compiles need the same... It should be easy to export your model as a STL or OBJ though!
Since Rhino horn is just like keratin and dirt or something, design a process to create spot-on fake rhino horns and flood the market with them.
You would make lots of money at first and eventually drop the price of rhino horn to the point where it wouldn't be economically feasible to harvest real Rhino horn.
Personally I think it's a bad idea, as it's demand which drives this not supply. fixing supply may only increase demand for the 'real thing' even more.
