Using nearly the exact same rhetoric and party platform, with the exception of austerity measures. Only difference really seems to be that he knows how to pass a budget, but hasn't really offered anything substantial in terms of hope to the working age population
Peak approval for Trudeau was over 64% - Carney hasn't hit that high water mark yet. Now peak to trough - I think Trudeau probably had the biggest fall.
I think it’s also important to think of skills in the context of tasks, so when you want an agent to perform a specialized task, then this is the context, the resources and scripts it needs to perform the task.
I'm excited to use this with the Ghidra cli mode to rapidly decompile physics engines from various games. Do I want my flight simulator to behave like the Cessna like in flight simulator 3.0 in the air? Codex can already do that. Do I want the plane to handle like Yoshi from Mario Kart 64 when taxiing? It hasn't been done yet but Claude code is apparently pretty good at pulling apart n64 roms so that seems within the realm of possibility.
IMHO I feel the title is appropriate. They are not claiming to have found life on Mars, they are making the very pivotal claim that there are forms of life that can turn liabilities on Mars into assets.
Agreed, the clear was very clear for me too. I wonder what the microbe eats, and if we can supply that in enough volumes to make a dent to Mars' atmosphere.
True, it is deliberately misleading. However, some possible indicators of life have been found on Mars although these are contested. Two thar I can think of are methane emissions on the planets, and the soil tests by the Viking landers in the seventies, which returned ambiguous results.
I love Loro and its probably my favorite open source project (you can see me refer to it as such in my comment history), I have a very specific multi CRDT and search indexing architecture that precluded me from using it.
Ah, sorry, I completely left out context, when I say by hand I don't mean there are no good CRDT projects, Loro is absolutely great, others are very good as well.
I mean only in the context of writing your own, you can't use Ai, Ai can be used to write code and certainly can explain a lot of code and as a resuly people start ascribing more reasoning power to Ai than it has, CRDTs are an area where current models just completely lose the plot.
If you're only using Ai in well mapped areas it's easy to start assuming it has human level reasoning capabilities, the illusion is quickly shattered if you're operating at the edge.
I don't understand what AI has to do with CRDTs, you don't need to use one with the other, as in, your initial comment seems like a non sequitur to the topic of the post.
Sounds like starving Lyme of manganese is likely the better option that trying to overdose manganese. I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting.
> I don't know how effective a low-manganese diet or lifestyle would be though but it is very interesting.
You cannot achieve what the paper is discussing through diet or supplements.
The paper is hypothesizing that if a drug could target the components of B. burgdorferi that regulate manganese then that would kill it.
You cannot deprive the cells of manganese or overwhelm them through supplementation or restrictive diet. You would damage your own body long before reaching levels that killed the Lyme infection.
I really hope the alternative medicine people don't start abusing this headline to push diets and supplements.
Deliberately inducing manganese deficiency (which I doubt you could pull off while still eating food) isn't "self care". It's a misunderstanding of what this article is saying.
Your body needs manganese and MnSOD (one of the target enzymes mentioned in the article) just as much as Lyme disease does.
You could theoretically kill the Lyme by killing the host body, like that classic XKCD about destroying anything in a petri dish if you don't care about collateral damage. The key to making a successful treatment is finding a way to kill the infection without killing the host.
Calling anything you're suggesting "self care" is dangerous and wrong.
WP says that manganese deficiency causes skeletal deformity and inhibition of wound healing. So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
> So I'm guessing that you could survive weeks in a severe-manganese-deficiency situation before you noticed any ill effects.
Your guess would be wrong. Your body needs manganese for similar reasons that Lyme disease needs it. You also produce MnSOD.
If you starved your body of manganese sufficiently (which I doubt you could do without eating a completely synthetic diet for months) then you'd be killing yourself in parallel with the Lyme disease.
The idea is not trivially wrong. It's the same idea as chemotherapy. Sure, it is a poison for you. But it hits the cancer harder than you, and so can also be an effective treatment.
That said, it is very unlikely that simply reducing manganese is preferable to existing antibiotics. But that doesn't rule out the potential effectiveness of a combination therapy.
Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS). Orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans. (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.) While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
Sure, a medicine that targets manganese in Lyme disease bacteria would be even better than this combination. But that medicine does not exist. And the combination in question is something that can be experimented with today, using drugs that have already been approved by the FDA.
Furthermore this is a combination that we already have a lot of experience with. Back in the 1950s, a variation on this, working on the same principles, was the standard treatment for tuberculosis. It was abandoned not because it was ineffective, but because we developed treatments with fewer side effects.
> Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS).
I responded to your comment above with this same claim. I cannot find any sources that say reducing manganese was the mechanism of PAS in TB.
A recent research paper on PAS in TB doesn't even mention manganese once. It identifies Dihydrofolate Reductase related actions as the mechanism against TB: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
> orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans.
EDTA has been the standard treatment. PAS has been explored and trialed. It can be used, but I don't know if I'd call it the "standard" treatment.
> (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.)
I was talking about a low-manganese diet, which the comment above me suggested. I don't know why you're so set on calling me "dead wrong" so much when you can't provide sources and aren't even reading what I'm writing.
> While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
You're really going to have to provide sources for PAS reducing manganese as a mechanism for fighting TB.
As I pointed out in my other comment, manganese is an essential cofactor for one of the other anti-TB drugs in the triple combination that was used in the past.
You could probably add enough phosphate to all your food to prevent you from absorbing any manganese, then inject iron, calcium, and magnesium? Just guessing here.
How long would it take you to die on a zero-manganese diet? If it's longer than it takes Borrelia, you still win!
I regularly find myself on a zero manganese diet for hours at a time, and I've yet to experience immediate death, screaming in agony.
Furthermore we have lots of data on how well humans can tolerate extended low manganese regimens. The standard treatment course for TB in the 1950s resulted in humans having low manganese for 1-2 years. This was unpleasant, but not lethal.
Any google search on PAS and manganese will show that it eliminates manganese from the body by chelating it, and is therefore used for treating manganese toxicity.
I don't have a specific reference for manganese levels in people undergoing the old TB treatment. But I'm sure that it should exist somewhere.
If you believe really hard and really try you can transmutate lead into manganese. Of course, eating all that lead will probably kill you first. At least your Lyme won't be a problem any more.
And all those years alchemists were wasting their time trying to change lead into gold when they could have been going for manganese to eliminate Lyme disease! Greed has no bounds
> In its metallic state it appears to be inert when swallowed, unless it meets with much acidity in the alimentary canal, or is in a state of minute division ; its compounds are, however, all of them more or less poisonous.
> Mercury has been employed in one or other of its forms in almost all diseases ; but each of its numerous preparations is supposed to have some peculiarity of action of its own, combined with that common to all the compounds of this metal. The mercurials form, indeed, one of the most important classes of the materia medica.
He goes on to explain that mercuric acetate is the basis of Keyser's antivenereal pills (according to Robiquet), that mercuric chloride (which is probably what you meant by "mercuric chlorine") is "employed as an alterative, diaphoretic, and resolvent, in the chronic forms of secondary syphilis, rheumatism, scrofula, cancer, old dropsies, numerous skin diseases, &c." He also devotes a lot of space to emphasizing how important it is to be careful of it, describing the symptoms of poisoning with it, and explaining how to analyze "animal tissue" to detect mercury salts in it. He also discusses the use of mercuric nitrate in syphilis.
But never in all the pages he devotes to the uses of mercury and its compounds does he suggest that anyone ever used metallic mercury for syphilis.
I've also never seen a suggestion that mercuric chloride was ineffective against syphilis. Wikipedia says, "Once used as a first line treatment for syphilis, it has been replaced by the more effective and less toxic procaine penicillin since at least 1948."
Less academic of course. And mercuric chlorine was an autocorrect mistake from chloride.
If mercuric chloride was actually effective (without killing the patient) seems like total luck, and generally the first actual effective treatment was considered Salvarsan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsphenamine] - which was arsenic based yes?
Until antibiotics came around.
But people tried all sorts of things, including liquid mercury, as your source notes.
The WebMD page is about calomel, mercuric chloride, and perchloride of mercury, not metallic mercury; the body text is clear about this, but the title is wrong. It describes all kinds of poisoning symptoms that don't occur with metallic mercury. So too for the mercury section of the Science Museum web page, except for a brief mention of attempts to treat with mercury vapors. And neither of them seems very credible.
My source did not note that people tried liquid mercury.
“Mercury has been employed in one or other of its forms in almost all diseases”
Are you really saying that in that time, no one tried the most obvious form?
You’re right though that I was wrong it was the primary one - I’m truly horrified at the various things people tried. But I guess untreated syphilis is one of the worst possible ways to die, and I’d try pretty much anything too.
The problem with antibiotics at least in some countries is that official guidelines take the position that chronic Lyme does not exist, and thus doctors are forbidden to write long-term prescription to antibiotics for Lyme. Short-term may not work, as research suggests that antibiotics works only on some phases of the life-cycle of borreliosis and only for some co-infections.
Chronic Lyme where the bacteria persists does not exist. There is no evidence the primary bacterial infection persists as far as I have been able to discover. So, that is a faulty starting point in terms of your framing. Now, what is chronic lyme, does the bacteria injure the nervous system, does it leave "debris" behind that maybe antibiotics somehow help the immune system attack and clear? That is way less clear and not validated medical science.
Pretty amazing technique. I think that's the biggest breakthrough here. They figured out how to much more effectively enable the production of biomolecules from bacteria or other living cells by linking their production to the cell's survival. This technique will most certainly be of keen and immediate interest to so many groups around the world. Key section:
> Typically, when researchers try to get a microbe to produce a foreign compound, it creates a major metabolic burden. Without significant genetic manipulation, the microbe resists diverting its essential resources to produce something unfamiliar.
> By linking the cell’s survival to the production of their target compound, the team was able to trick the microbe into creating xanthommatin. To do this, they started with a genetically engineered “sick” cell, one that could only survive if it produced both the desired pigment, along with a second chemical called formic acid. For every molecule of pigment generated, the cell also produced one molecule of formic acid. The formic acid, in turn, provides fuel for the cell’s growth, creating a self-sustaining loop that drives pigment production.
> “We made it such that activity through this pathway, of making the compound of interest, is absolutely essential for life. If the organism doesn't make xanthommatin, it won't grow,” said Bushin.
The insight they had was to link part of the desired biosynthetic pathway to the cells pathway (but they don't explicitly show that this had been necessary EDIT - Fig 3f shows a 45X increase with their strategy over a similar strategy; however, it's not clear that their 'control' was the optimal strategy).
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