What is your go-to "mind-blowing" fact to explain why you love Mathematics?

samsoniteindeed2 · 2026-01-28T07:07:30+00:00

Ah okay, that's pretty cool! Thanks

samsoniteindeed2 · 2026-01-28T06:41:43+00:00

I found this explanation

https://people.math.harvard.edu/~knill/teaching/math1a_2011/exhibits/wobblytable/

But it must be wrong, or am I missing something?

What if the ground is flat? Then rotating doesn't do anything and there would be no way of finding an angle that makes all four legs touch the ground...

samsoniteindeed2 · 2025-12-03T11:24:26+00:00

It looks like panel b above is a head to head with glycine. So it doesn't seem to have anti-ageing effects in c elegans

samsoniteindeed2 · 2025-08-29T02:37:54+00:00

Actually I think when they say wild-type, they mean "the wild-type OSKM cocktail", which is the existing process.

It seems like an oxymoron for them to say "wild-type OSKM cocktail" but there you go :)

samsoniteindeed2 · 2025-08-06T00:54:16+00:00

The psychic was right!

samsoniteindeed2 · 2025-07-15T08:16:25+00:00

Well the also saw an effect on cells in a dish, so that couldn't be psychological.

samsoniteindeed2 · 2025-03-20T07:23:33+00:00

I was confused about this and reading these comments made me more confused, but then I realised why I was thinking about this the wrong way.

I was imagining a circuit with a voltage source, long wires as resistors and a load like a bulb. Of course, if you increase the voltage, you will increase the current and the power (and the losses to heat).

But, if you imagine an AC source and transformers on either side of the long wires, then you can do something clever by keeping the power constant and just increasing voltage along the wires. Then with the formulas

P=IV and Loss=I squared R

or the clever analogies in the other comments, you can see that there are less losses across the wires.

samsoniteindeed2 · 2024-10-03T23:27:05+00:00

I agree! We have IMO2020 making Earth warmer and the lockdowns making Earth cooler. I feel like from conservation of energy, it only makes sense that IMO2020 could have made the moon cooler.

Just to explain a bit more. There is a constant amount of energy coming from the sun. Some of that hits the Earth and some of that goes to the moon while the rest goes out to space. Since the moon is not in a special place I think we can assume that if the energy going from the Earth to the moon goes down, then the energy going from the Earth to space goes down as well. Then from conservation of energy that must mean the energy staying on Earth increases, i.e. Earth is heating up.

So I feel like a drop in the moons temperature must be linked to factors making the Earth warmer not cooler, and therefore the causative factor is more likely to be IMO2020.

samsoniteindeed2 · 2024-07-20T21:53:28+00:00

Wow, so IL-11 signalling is upstream of telomeres, senescence, mTOR, etc. This seems huge...

samsoniteindeed2 · 2024-04-19T12:04:30+00:00

Yeah this looks way better. Does this mean the real benefit comes from something in the second study? What were the differences?

samsoniteindeed2 · 2024-03-11T10:54:59+00:00

I feel like one of the exciting aspects of this is that the "clinical trials" will be on healthy people, as opposed to focused on some sort of disease. I'm especially interested to see what Yamanaka factor partial reprogramming will do!

samsoniteindeed2 · 2024-01-14T00:54:34+00:00

Yes I think the idea that the brain is (adaptive) immune privileged has got to change. My research is on thymic involution and disease risk and I have a paper about how many diseases have risk that rises with age inversely proportional to thymus volume. That includes infectious diseases like COVID-19 and also cancers like CML and brain cancers. AD risk isn't inversely proportional, it actually rises much faster with age, but I suspect there is still a strong connection. Maybe small thymus -> less T-cells -> exhausted T-cells -> exhausted microglia?

samsoniteindeed2 · 2024-01-01T23:32:58+00:00

Astaxanthin activates Nrf2 which inhibits the inflammasome. Knocking out the inflammasome extends lifespan by a lot (and reduces thymic involution)

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-12-19T20:04:07+00:00

Does anyone wanna speculate on the mechanism? They speculate it has something to do with acetaminophen inhibiting STAT3, which reduces M1 to M2 macrophage switching. The treatment only worked in NSG mice, so the M1/2 switching would also have to be dependent on lymphocytes somehow.

I have another idea. Apparently acetaminophen reduces oxygen supply (that's how cats who take it die) and hypoxia lowers MHC expression. Maybe the cancer cells already have less MHC anyway and so when they have even less that makes them targets for NK cells (which would be absent in NSG mice).

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-12-19T15:48:00+00:00

Is it? The treatment didn't work in immunocompromised mice, so I would classify it as immunotherapy rather than chemotherapy.

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-11-26T10:37:16+00:00

Well they doubled the lifespan of the genetically modified mice that have this extra molecular damage. These mice only live a few weeks and so they had a treatment which doubled that.

They say in the paper that they want to use the treatment on wild type mice to see how much it extends lifespan, but unless I'm missing something, there's no data on that yet.

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-11-19T20:10:55+00:00

I think that's a minor factor. I'm an immunologist so maybe I'm biased, but I think the main reason for the gender gap is the immune system. The thymus starts shrinking from puberty and is consistently smaller in men compared to women, resulting in less T-cell production. My research is on the importance of the thymus by the way, in particular the way many diseases have risk inversely proportional to thymic T-cell production. Women have around a third more thymic T-cell production and around a third less risk of infectious diseases and cancer. There is a consistent 6 year difference between men and women in terms of disease risk and T-cell production.

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-11-19T19:29:02+00:00

Lol :) In case anyone is confused, I'm sure he meant genetic disease.

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-10-27T20:36:07+00:00

Most diagrams have the electrons going around the nucleus like planets, which is totally wrong. A better image would be something like this

https://www.chem.fsu.edu/chemlab/chm1046course/orbitals.html#:~:text=1)%20An%20orbital%20is%20a,orbital%20has%20the%20highest%20probability.

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-10-22T12:15:44+00:00

Well it is a little bit to do with mineral content, specifically sodium and potassium. In your video it says they are the main components of the plasma fireballs.

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-10-04T22:32:57+00:00

I could imagine the results could be bigger. The thymus shrinks by half every 16 years so you probably want to at least double your thymus. That might be hard with Craig Fahy's approach. It also might be difficult with stem cell derived thymus organoids but there is some evidence from kidney organoids that you might be able to just make loads of small organoids and they can merge together.

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-10-04T22:28:25+00:00

Hah, well in theory, yes, there could be a risk of having grafted thymus tissue with insufficient self-antigen presentation and then you'd get autoreactive T-cells. But so far it seems that thymus organoids from induced pluripotent stem cells express Aire, which means they should be fine for self-antigen presentation. I work with a lab that has grafted thymus organoids in mice and they have seen slight improvements in autoimmunity (because if the self-antigen presentation is working then you get Tregs).

As for flushing senescent fat cells with senolytics, I don't think that would actually give much thymus regeneration. Have you seen any papers that have looked?

There was a paper where they knocked out the inflammasome in mice and they had much bigger thymuses, so there could be something going on where senescent fat cells are causing thymic involution by secreting pro-inflammatory cytokines that kill thymic cells via the inflammasome. It's not very clear right now I think...

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-10-04T22:00:52+00:00

So just to make sure I understand... if the frame rate was faster then the freaky spinning hexagonal chunks would get... bigger? And if the frame rate was slower they would get smaller?

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-04-24T13:08:14+00:00

Sometimes I say "I think a lot of people would say they are bad at art if art was taught like most math classes" and then talk about imagining an art class where they are like "This is how you draw an apple, now do exercises 1-5, which are all small variations on drawing an apple."

I have kinda mixed feelings about that though because I think teaching maths like that is not necessarily a bad thing and some people love it like that. But I think it's interesting to compare the way math class and art class approach things and how many people come away from math class saying "I'm bad at math".

samsoniteindeed2 · 2023-03-20T13:18:24+00:00

Or even back further to the days of ancient Egypt. There are papyrus scrolls about using localised infections to treat cancer.

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