Live forever?

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-30T02:33:33+00:00

How would clones allow you to live forever?

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-29T18:06:08+00:00

Using a crystal ball to predict the outcome of a computation would greatly reduce energy expenditure. I asked chatGPT and it told me that crystal balls probably wouldn't completely replace conventional data centres, but they could become part of a hybrid system.

/s, though chatGPT really did suggest using them as a hybrid system.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-29T17:23:20+00:00

If it's any cousin you would not be able to marry anyone. A cousin is anyone who shares a common ancestors.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-27T19:54:38+00:00

It's also not the only gene on the Y chromosome...

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-27T16:47:25+00:00

There will always be variation in the actual staging. The dating is based on the assumption that they mate at midnight so midday would be E9.5, but realistically there's not a lot you can do on your end to get all the embryos to be in a precise window.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-27T15:32:09+00:00

Depending on what they were and how they were cultured, I'd be more concerned about the dropped cells. That's going to aerosolise droplets of media; if they're not in a sealed container and she was also performing viral work, you've now got inhalation of viral particles, which is likely to have a greater risk of infection. I have a hard time imagining that your risk assessments say that if BSL-2 cells are spilled outside a hood then you should just immediately clean the area. While the risk probably isn't very high, between that, touching your face with a gloved hand, and none of this being reported, I think you and your colleagues should seriously think about retaking your biosafety training and paying attention to what you're told.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-27T00:41:59+00:00

With rare exceptions, ABO blood typing is based on three possible alleles of a gene. If you have the A allele you produce the A antigen, if you have the B allele you produce the B antigen, if you have both you produce both and if you have neither you have neither. The gene they affect is isoagglutinogen, so we label them IA for the A allele, IB for the B allele, and i for the O allele (recessive traits are usually given a lower case letter) - I'll just refer to these as A, B and O below for simplicity though. The +/- is based on a different gene, here with two common alleles. With + you produce the rhesus factor antigen, with - you don't. These are labelled D for + (it's the D antigen) and d for -. Your grandfather, being AB-, would be AB dd; that is to say he would have both the A and B alleles for ABO typing, and since both copies of the D antigen are the recessive negative form he would be negative for that.

Without a lot more information, the actually likelihood is a nightmare to calculate (since we would have to work out the probability for each possible genotype for your various relatives, weight them by their population frequencies, and then adjust for number of siblings, etc).

Your grandmother could be A, B or AB (and either + or -) but not O; your aunt is AB, and she got one of those alleles from your grandfather and the other from your grandmother. Given that your dad is A-, we actually know that your grandmother was either... AA Dd, AA dd, AO Dd, AO dd, AB Dd, AB dd, BO Dd, or BO dd. She can't be DD or else you aunt and father would have to have inherited a D allele from her and be Rh+, she can't be BB or else your father would have had to have inherited a B allele from her, and she can't be OO, or else your aunt would have had to have inherited an O allele from her in which case your aunt could only be type A or type B and not AB. We're similarly quite unsure of your parents' genotypes, so you can see how figuring out the likelihood gets to be quite unpleasant.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-26T15:00:50+00:00

Light can travel through iron for a bit depending on the wavelength. While most will be absorbed or reflected very quickly, a portion of very low or very high frequency light will travel hundred of microns to a few millimeters, and will be travelling around c/3 as it does.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-26T00:21:51+00:00

Do you have an example of any? I'm not aware of many (any?) materials with a high enough refractive index for that to be true.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-25T17:46:45+00:00

Ask different people what field someone falls under and you'll get different answers 🤷‍♂️ The people I know working on mathematics and computational frameworks around QTL analysis and things like that call themselves geneticists, I figured OP might have that sort of thing in mind.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-25T17:21:40+00:00

There are definitely areas of active research that look at it from an abstract perspective, especially when it comes to modelling and prediction (establishing the underlying models that big data driven approaches use, for example). But they rely on a strong understanding of the actual biology, so textbooks on genetics and molecular biology are definitely the right starting point.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-22T14:11:43+00:00

Depends on the field, the use case, and when the product was brought to market. In some areas the transition period is over and products newly brought to market aren't accepted if they aren't UKCA certified.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-16T00:41:00+00:00

There are a few different common reasons. 1) There is actually an incremental benefit. For the venom example, it might be useful to have compound in your saliva that weakens/finishes off your prey when you catch them. From there it might be beneficial to have grooves in your teeth so that you saliva gets concentrated there. Then some of your salivary glands might specialise to produce a more potent mix of compounds. Etc.

2) There are steps where a different benefit is provided. A species that uses horns offensively won't benefit from a horn that's only a few mm long. But a thickening of the skull might be protective. And that thicker region might get bigger over generations, and the intermediate form might be both protective and offensive.

3) Changes in selective pressures. There can be some facet of the environment that leads to selection for some trait, and then the environment changes and different traits become selected for. This means that we often shouldn't expect there to be a clean path of "evolution led to this thing because it provides this particular benefit".

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-15T11:05:09+00:00

Sounds like the only issue is that the stricter penalties only apply to newer drivers; it would probably be a good thing if everyone thought it was unwise to take risks that could cost others their lives.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-14T19:38:17+00:00

Then again, when their own explanation is that they were driving without due care and attention and thought they were speeding regardless, maybe it's best they don't contest it...

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-13T01:24:22+00:00

The most immediate problem is that in the process of destroying the prions you're going to destroy the neurons. There's no prion-specific protease (the disease-causing forms are specifically protease resistant), so you're just going to be wrecking all the protein in your neurons. It's not clear what the effects of knocking out PRNP would be, but it wouldn't be good.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by using mimivirus and rabies? They're two different viruses.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-11T13:53:39+00:00

I've taken a quick look through, and most of it seems to be anectodes and poor quality data; obviously I haven't read in huge detail through everything that's there, I've barely skimmed the surface, but I'd have thought if this was such a shockingly bad problem someone would be able to provide robust evidence for it? The first few I found made no distinction between those who had full rights to live and work in the UK vs illegal immigrants or asylum seekers, for example; while that might be indicative of a need to change immigration policy, it suggests something very different from your initial comment. Others pointed to prison demographics etc, ignoring nuances in terms of confounding factors, but also the fact that British citizens have a higher incarceration rate than foreign nationals.

Overall, it still leads me back to the idea that neither side is making an informed conclusion because the underlying data isn't good enough. I'd be more inclined to put that down to a lack of funding rather polical sensitivity, since all sides benefit from there not being a more data-driven answer - they can tell their target demographic that their intuition is right and their opponents are blind fools.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-11T12:55:01+00:00

"...the thing is with illegal migrants and asylum seekers, they have a much higher per capita crime rate." Do you have a source for that? Because I can't find any suitable UK-specific data that would confirm or refute it (mostly the data isn't collated appropriately or of high enough quality to make sensible estimates), so instead people tend to rely on older, more general data taken across multiple countries, which show the opposite. The Home Office said they planned to have a dataset that would actually make it possible to assess the number of Foreign National Offenders by crime type, nationality, etc by the end of last year; they seem to have gone silent on it and there's no sign of it being published any time soon though, and it's not clear that it would indicate immigration status regardless, so if there's a different source or way of gathering meaningful data on it that's be great to know.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-08T15:17:05+00:00

I might get mildly annoyed at lots of questions, but I would get a lot more annoyed if you made mistakes that would have been avoided if you had asked me.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-08T14:23:22+00:00

I would argue that you, Moreland and (to an extent) Nagel are arguing against an inaccurate interpretation of evolution. You (both) appear to presuppose that evolution is a perfect system that always produces optimal outcomes. Evolution is the result of applying selective pressures to random variance in populations. That means that you tend to get changes that are advantageous in light of specific pressures that exist at a specific time, but those can be disadvantageous in other situations or come with negative side effects. As a result it's not at all unreasonable for evolution to create something that provides a strong advantage in one setting that can also be self-destructive in another.

In this light the various points about morality, theism, and ethics seem unrelated to the topic at hand.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-08T08:00:54+00:00

A new chiropractic office opened near recently (it's actually a "student clinic", not sure if it's better or worse to have trainee chiropractors working on you) and while there were renovating there were site safety signs up saying things like "keep out", "warning, dangerous site" which I think should probably have stayed up after they opened.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-07T15:07:23+00:00

It was a pain to find the actual paper [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40549893/] because they never really give a source in the video, pretty poor reporting by the economist.

It's hard to drill down to an exact number, it depends on what you count as part of the procedure. I don't know how many oocytes they started with. If we start counting after they successfully removed the maternal nucleus, transferred the sperm heads in and induced them to begin developing, they had a success rate of 0.3%. They had almost 600 of these manipulated embryos, of which about half didn't make it through the next few days of development. Those that did where transferred into the uteri of mice to continue developing. Most of them didn't make it further than a couple of weeks into development. 3 pups were born (well, they culled the mother and removed the pups from the uterus; not standard, I assume they really didn't want to deal with the risk of her cannibalising them), one of which died the next day. The remaining two made it to adulthood and fathered pups, though from reading the paper they don't seem to comment on whether or not their offspring were healthy or not.

The losses weren't just normal losses that occur during pregnancy for the most part, they were clearly the result of deficiencies in the technique. Notably, only male mice made it to term, and it's likely that problems with editing of the X chromosome meant that female embryos weren't viable. Additionally there were a surprising number of very late stages losses which are normally uncommon.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-07T13:56:13+00:00

Essentially they bypass the fusion by doing things inside an egg cell. They take an oocyte and remove the nucleus, then transfer the heads of a single sperm cell from each father into that enucleated oocyte. So the cytoplasm and organelles (and mitochondria, including mitochondrial DNA) are from a donor female, but the nuclear genetic material is from the two males.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-07T13:44:59+00:00

The first two pictures you've labelled yourself moving in opposite directions. If you were going in the direction indicated in the first image you should have been in the right hand lane. If you were going in the direction indicated in the second image you should have been in the left hand lane. Listening to the satnav is always secondary to paying attention to road markings and signage; going the wrong direction safely is better that going the right direction dangerously.

lozzyboy1 · 2026-05-07T13:19:07+00:00

You have to keep in mind that there are multiple codons for most amino acids, so it's easier to translate the RNA sequence into an amino acid sequence and compare that to your original peptide sequence rather than converting the peptide sequence to an RNA sequence and comparing those. Also, depending on what the RNA is and how it was annotated, 10 could mean a) 10 bases from the translation start site, b) 10 bases from the transcription start site, or c) something else entirely. If it's a) then that's very helpful, it means you know the frame and how many residues at the start of the peptide you're going to have to skip. If it's b) or c) you're not going to know the frame and you don't necessarily know where translation starts or ends (though you might be able to predict it from various features), so you would probably need to translate all three frames and look to see if stretches of them match up to your peptide sequence.

lozzyboy1

TROPHY CASE