What are some recent breakthroughs or findings that haven't received much attention?
What are some recent breakthroughs or findings that haven't received much attention?
Scientists discovered the source of multiple sclerosis to be the mononucleosis family of viruses.
66Do you have a source for that? As I have close friends affected by MS I'd be really interested in reading a paper about it and sharing it with them.
From my initial searches I can't seem to find anything else than this being a proposed theory among others.
Edit: I've found this article https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/study-suggests-epstein-barr-virus-may-cause-multiple-sclerosis suggesting it's at least one of the factor but not the source of it.
38I found this one but it's locked behind a Paywall so I can't tell you the full story. I did however find that it's linked to or referenced by 35 other sites, most of which are reputable science sites
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41582-023-00775-5
Edit: another that is talking about the next stages of research now they discovered this
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This seems so out of left field that I wouldn’t have believed it save for me actually looking it up myself
17I mean that does prove it fits the OP well, doesn't it?
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Going to need you to actually link a source for that because I don't know if your bullshitting or not
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This is not new. My mother was diagnosed with MS over a decade ago and this was a theory then. I also have an auto immune disease and it has been linked to mine and pretty much every one of them including long COVID. As far as I know I've never had it.
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JWST's observations seem to have made "the crisis in cosmology" worse. i.e two of the most well known proxies for the expansion rate of the universe are diverging from one another: https://youtu.be/hps-HfpL1vc?si=DOEv2DWQ6vya6NI6
And the followup: https://youtu.be/-kTe0xRAU1w?si=wVZrva1mQYUeTS-A
59Lol, I read "cosmetology" instead of "cosmology" and for a second was thinking there was some sort of cosmetic student crisis happening.
8I think assumptions about the "standard candles" in astronomy are going to be proven flawed. The arguments for asserting that the sources are of known brightness have always been a bit on the tenuous side.
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Wow. That last one is super fucking cool. Lots of questions about longevity, but still, science is wild!
4JWST's observations seem to have made "the crisis in cosmology" worse. i.e two of the most well known proxies for the expansion rate of the universe are diverging from one another: https://youtu.be/hps-HfpL1vc?si=DOEv2DWQ6vya6NI6
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A new type of ceramic-based storage technology by a German startup: https://www.cerabyte.com/ It stores infinitely more data than regular hard discs, lasts longer too. Might not everyone's cup of tea, but I'm very interested.
32Microsoft also has something similar and designed around data centers, called 'project sillica' or just 'sillica' or something
6I design substations for a living, and the major client I'm assigned to is a data storage Corp. This is.... fascinating. Right now the big thing my client is switching to is "data cubes" to replace the miles-long structures needed to store data on regular servers. Very curious about how this will enable companies like my client to save massive amounts of space for their data centers
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New space station was launched and has people living there.
28Are you talking about chinese one or some other one?
16yes, the chinese space station (since named Tiangong after passing the trials) - it didn't seem to be well-known in the public consciousness here.
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For software engineers; you can make an executable that runs ANYWHERE. Same file, executes on windows and on Linux and on mac, x86, arm doesn't matter.
27this sounds awesome! is anyone able to oversimplify how this is possible?
3Different platforms have different layouts for executable files. Most platforms support multiple formats, some older and some newer. Luckily it happens that pretty much all platforms have formats that don't overlap each other (or if they do, they do so in a compatible manner), which means that the executables can be "jump-started" on every platform.
Now, the libraries developers usually rely on aren't cross-platform at runtime, but at build time (i.e. I can use the same library to create separate executables for separate platforms), so the developer and contributors of cosmopolitan re-implemented all the low-level stuff to work on all separate platforms with one codebase. And since they have the jump-starting routines, the whole application works anywhere!
It's a massive effort, but it's starting to work really well. And the best part is that you can even build applications with emulators included that translate code for different architectures. And, to top it off, you can run the applications without an OS, since they are basically mini-OSs themselves!
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We can revert normal human bloodcells into stem cells and then into specialized cells like neurons. It was an incredible breakthrough several years ago that nobody seems to know. There's been recent developments too
I only found out about it when I was talking to Hon (the lead on this project), and asked him where he got the neurons for playing pong, and he said "I got them from myself".
21Do you have a link for the paper that describes the process for converting blood into stem cells? Curious how they went about it because making red blood cells into stem cells would be hard since they have no nucleus and no DNA. I googled but couldn't find anything about how they do it.
3Fair warning, I was only taking Hon's word for it in my original comment.
That said, the magic term that will get you a flood of journal articles is "induced pluripotent stem cells ( iPSCs)" and this article a good overview/context to the work.
I'll edit my comment to include the link
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The begginings of the cures for human blindness
20Don't fucking tell me that. Prions scare the shit out of me and so does dementia. It's like now they are evil super friends.
15"Although the causal link between protein aggregates and neurodegeneration is clear, "
That's actually not clear at all.
Prion may still be the cause of the misfolds, but be skeptical of the causality.
9Yeah I have read the prion-Alzheimers hypothesis. But it's just that...a hypothesis.
Unfortunately, we still have absolutely no idea how and why Alzheimer's develops. What you've linked is a new bit of info I hadn't heard yet. Thanks for the interesting link.
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Less a breakthrough, more "science is slow and incremental and big advances rarely happen all at once"; Japan have bought their JT-60SA Tokamak fusion reactor back online after spending the last few years upgrading it - it's nowhere near able to produce electricity, but will provide important data that will be used to guide the experiments that will be performed at IETR, the much larger Tokamak that the EU is building that is much closer to being a viable power generator.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/04/jt_60sa_tokamak_online/
17I don't think this is not getting attention, I've had to defend this project on three different platforms from morons that think money spent on nuclear fusion is waste and should go to only renewables. Then one guy spent 7 comment long chain arguing why biochar is the best options and solar and wind can suck ass.
8Idk, "people who argue about different energy generation methods on the internet" isn't exactly a representative sample of the general population.
I like talking about ITER because it's a really clear example of how, most of the time, big discoveries and innovations don't just magically happen cos one genius sat down and came up with a thing - with a few exceptions, science hasn't worked like that for most of the last century - innovations happen because of the accumulation of effort by hundreds of people over years.
Viable fusion energy has been "about 10 years away" since the 70s, and that's not because noone has been working on it, it's because it's hard, and it's more work than one group could achieve in a whole career. It takes serious sustained investment on the scale that only governments can stomach - imagine if Musk had poured his billions into fusion research rather than lighting it on fire to try and make people like him - and there is very little chance that that investment will ever directly turn a profit, but indirectly the gains to be made for societies are gigantic.
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I discovered that follistatin gen therapy is available to the general public (for $25.000). Basically you can have a body builder body for $25.000.
16Great, we're gonna have re-incombinate dna juicers. This will go well.
8That’s very interesting, I did a Google search for it but couldn’t find much discussion around $25,000 therapy sessions, do you know more that you could share?
8I can get you a body builder body for much less than that. Unless you need it to be fresh, that'll cost extra.
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There's a recent study, excuse my lack of citation, that found that Linux is actually more performant at running games than Windows, even though most games need to run over wine on Linux because game devs suck at porting games.
9I can actually confirm this a little, when Elden Ring came out, it ran really poorly on Windows so rebooted to my Linux os and was getting a solid 15-25 more fps. It even made one of my friends install Linux just to get the performance boost.
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Not so recent but achievement of EUV litography.
9Seems OP is Vsauce2 preparing a new mindblowm
9BioNTech has several mRNA based cancer vaccines in different trial stages.
The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is in a phase 2 trial of a mRNA vaccine against pancreatic cancer. The first phase found that the treatment prevented the spread of tumors in 8 of 16 patients.
I can confidently say that I understood maybe 5% of the Nature paper about the phase 1 trial linked in above article but my takeaway is that even 2 years after the study, 50% (8 of 16) of the patients who got the vaccine against pancreas cancer where attested with significantly higher amounts of T-Cells. I can imagine this is pretty remarkable, considering the severity of that type of cancer.
I don't know if the phase 2 trial still is open for patients but I 100% would try to contact them if I was a patient. I mean mRNA isn't exactly new but over 30 years in the making.
Nevertheless I hope this will beat most cancers as well as cultured meat will beat the animal agriculture and renewable/fusion will beat nuclear/fossile. Image the paradise that would be. I know thats naive considering the world rn.
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I found some lint in my belly button. Nobody's given it much attention at all.
-10More after the weather - how’s it looking this weekend Todd?
11I appreciate this answer, apparently most don’t
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