skadamou

I'm not a doc or a pharmacist (though I am in med school) and I'm sure there are areas that AI could do some of a pharmacists job but on the outpatient side they do things like answering questions for patients and helping them interpret instructions that I don't think we want AI to do... or at least I really doubt an AIs ability to gauge how well someone is understanding instructions and augment how it explains something based on that assessment... on the inpatient side, I have seen pharmacists help physicians grapple with the pros and cons of certain treatments and make judgement calls about dosing that I think it would be hard to trust an AI to do because there is no "right" answer really. It's about balancing trade offs.

IDK, these are just limitations - people that really believe in AI will tell you there is basically nothing it can't do... eventually. I guess it's just a matter of how long you want to wait for eventually to come.

Yes, absolutely low cost/free is what I'm looking for. Thank you for the suggestion!

This paper is interesting but I want to point out there is a difference between a research paper showing that something is hypothetically feasible and something that is actually useful clinically.

Clinically, methylene blue is used to treat a different condition, methemeglobinemia and is not used to treat carbon monoxide poisoning which relies on hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

That's definitely a danger zone for healthy people but interestingly enough people with things like COPD may have a blood oxygen level in the 80s and while that is indicative of the disease, they may be totally stable and may not even need oxygen [1].

[1] https://www.drugs.com/medical-answers/normal-oxygen-level-so...

Methylene blue is actually used to treat acquired cases of a similar condition called methemeglobinemia which is when the iron in heme is oxide from Fe2+ to Fe3+ [1]. This is different from carbon monoxide poisoning which is caused by carbon monoxide binding more tightly to hemoglobin than oxygen preventing oxygen from effectively getting into your blood.

[1] https://www.uptodate.com/contents/methemoglobinemia?search=m...

I guess a better way to put that would have been "what is the significance of being able to run protein mass-spec by an order of magnitude faster"

The article links this to Alzheimer's research but I was hoping someone on here familiar with the field would be able to point out how significant this advancement is.

There was quite a bit of fluff here so I only skimmed the article but the major takeaway here is that they figured out how to run protein mass-spec "by an order of magnitude" faster. This is certainly cool but I'm not sure I understand why this is on the front page of HN. What am I missing?

edit: Does anyone familiar with the field know what the significance of being able to run protein mass-spec an order of magnitude faster is? What kind of questions can we ask now that we couldn't ask before?

I like the quip that AI raises the floor not the ceiling. I think it helps the bottom 20% perform more like the middle 50% but doesn't do much for people at the top.

I know someone with a PhD in biochemistry who was hired at Intel from a cancer research lab... I'm sure he sold his chemistry background well but I always thought that was an odd hire. Maybe there are just so few qualified PhDs that they'll happily take folks from adjacent fields?

Here are a few of Lewis Lapham's obituaries

Harpers: https://harpers.org/2024/07/remembering-lewis-lapham/ Lapham's Quarterly: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/lewis-h-lapham-1... LitHub: https://lithub.com/on-the-remarkable-legacy-of-lewis-lapham/

If you are able to pay off your credit card balance each month, you can earn rewards points on every purchase which is money back in your pocket. Even if it seems like a tiny amount, in the long run, you are leaving money on the table using a debit card as opposed to a credit card for most of your purchases.

The big caveat being you MUST pay the balance off each month to avoid paying interest otherwise you are losing money by using a credit card.

>If students expect that the university will provide accommodation, the university needs enough staff to run a small city and all associated services.

No doubt you need admin to help accommodate students learning needs but I've come around to thinking that they should change the parameters around testing and give every student the opportunity to use "accommodations" rather than making them prove their disability. Everyone is being granted the same degree, if a significant number of the students in your program need accommodations, like extra time on the exam, why not grant it to everybody who asks? Or better yet, just give everyone the time they need. It seems silly to me that you need to prove your need before you can get things like extra time - I think it should be opened up to everybody

I think you mean that the US has the longest continuous running democracy - not just government [1] I think this true and I agree with you that the while the constitution is not perfect, it is still an incredibly impressive document.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/countries-are-the-wor...

From the text:

"This document is dedicated to the memory of the late Professor Charles Lochmuller (right) of Duke University. Dr. Lochmuller was a good guy, a natural comic, and an eminent scientist.

Here I approach biochemistry in a new (I believe) way. It is tradition, starting with Lehninger's first Biochemistry textbook and continuing in essentially all subsequent biochemistry textbooks, to teach about each type of biopolymer in isolation of the others other. Protein DNA, RNA and carbohydrate are described in distinct, well-separated chapters as unrelated chemical phenomena.

In Part 2 of this document I present DNA, RNA, polypeptide, and polysaccharide in the context of their common attributes. Rather than focusing exclusively on the differences (amino acid side chains, nucleic acid bases, etc), I focus on the profound universal properties (self-complementarity, emergence, etc) that unite biopolymers. In my view only by learning about biopolymers in context of each other can one hope to achieve a reasonable understanding of them"

"We found no evidence of increasing risk with a larger area of total tattooed body surface."

Without a dose response, I'm inclined to believe that the increase in lymphoma seen in people with tattoos has more to do with confounding factors than with the ink or the act of getting a needle poked into your skin. I would think that controlling for all confounders in a study like this would be exceptionally difficult.

That said, I'm pretty sure that at least some inks do contain known carcinogens[1]

[1]https://tattoo.iarc.who.int/background/

I'm stoked to see an article shedding some light on this! Yes, the best practices for how we treat concussions is shifting and some people are not getting the best advice post-concussion.

The discussion about who to blame is a little naive IMO. Doctors do not learn everything they need to know to be doctors in medical school. Largely, they learn the foundations of medicine that they need to be successful in a residency. In residency is where they will learn the things they need to know about how to treat patients in their specialty. The authors primary care physician was very likely taught about concussions in residency, before these new guidelines came out, and simply has not updated their practice to be in line with the new guidelines... Science changes and I'm sure it is hard to stay on top of each new thing that comes out but at the end of the day, that is the job of the physician to stay on top of new developments.

Lately, I've come to the conclusion that WFH tends to benefit older devs with more experience at the expense of their younger colleagues. If you are established/experienced and already have a strong network in your field, working from home is great because it gives you more flexibility and less distractions from your work. If you're a junior dev however, working from home creates a higher barrier to asking questions/learning from more experienced folks on your team and also negatively impacts your ability to network/meet people in your field.

I'm sure that this is super situational dependent but on the whole I think it negatively impacts junior devs but I would love to hear some other people's thoughts.

Here's the meat of the post:

"To study this, Koff and his collaborators around the world are using existing samples, stored in biobanks, and sequencing vast numbers of crucial lymphocytes, known as B and T cells, each of which contains a unique receptor to recognise parts of viruses, bacteria, or tell-tale signs of cancer cells. Koff’s aim is to create an atlas of these receptors, and feed that information into an AI model to predict what the complete repertoire of B and T cells might look like in young, otherwise healthy individuals, what changes as we age, and what we might be able to do to modulate it."

This seems worthwhile to me but I'm skeptical of an AI's ability to accurately predict biology completely. This is (very loosely) sort of like an AlphaFold for antibodies however, we already know that AlphaFold does not predict unique protein domains well. Maybe this will improve with time - and more protein structures, but fundamentally I don't see how AI could predict the existence of something novel... Similarly, I don't see how this project could accurately map all of the possibilities for B/T cells.

I am open to the idea that someone from a background outside of academia could come up with some really brilliant scientific work. I just know that I am not capable of discerning what is solid science in fields different from my own so I typically rely on signals like an academic background (although not exclusively) to help me gauge the trustworthiness of a claim.

Here's the central finding

"Here is a simple experiment we did one summer afternoon in Kamilche Point, Washington. We compared several forms of organically grown shiitake mushrooms, which had starting level of 100 IU/100 grams. We compared the vitamin D levels of three sets of mushrooms, all from the same crop. The first was grown and dried indoors. The second set was dried outdoors in the sunlight with their gills facing down. The third set of mushrooms was dried outdoors in the sunlight with their gills facing upwards for full sun exposure. The most vitamin D was found in shiitake dried with gills up that were exposed to sunlight for two days, six hours per day. The vitamin D levels in these mushrooms soared from 100 IU/100 grams to nearly 46,000 IU/100 grams (see chart). Their stems, though, produced very little vitamin D, only about 900 IU. Notably, vitamin D levels dropped on the third day, probably due to over-exposure to UV."

It's worth noting that this is Paul Stamets' work. He's definitely worth the google search if you've never heard of him and are into this sort of thing - super interesting guy. He is not educated as a scientist though so I usually take most of his stuff with a grain of salt.

The articles explanation for the origin of this super gene seems similarly complex. Relying on their being some previous version of ant that is not clonal is a step too far into speculation for me to consider that hypothesis too seriously. Or maybe I’m missing something? Maybe an entomologist would think differently!

Pretty cool! Would love to have been able to read the methods to figure out how their imaging can resolve if the blood brain barrier is ‘open’

The crux of PG's argument

"This circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue with the death penalty. We don't even reach the point where theoretical questions about the moral justification or effectiveness of capital punishment start to matter, because so many of the people sentenced to death are actually innocent. Whatever it means in theory, in practice capital punishment means killing innocent people."

Not OP but I really enjoyed Jung's: Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. I haven't read any of the rest of his work so I really can't say if this is the best place to start with him but being totally new to Jung, I took a lot away from this book. The book touches on many of his theories and gives you an idea of the arc of his life which is nice but also provides great insight into Jung's inner world which is what I found most fascinating about the book. I've never read anything else quite like it.

There is some thought that social animals that live past their breeding age still play a role in passing on their genes by increasing the fitness of their relations. For example, by helping your sibling's offspring pass on their genes, you are effectively helping pass on roughly 25% of your genes. I don't totally know where I read this but I'm pretty sure it's in selfish gene by Richard Dawkins.

I suppose every way of understanding (even a scientific law) is just a model for how things might work. Some of these models (Newton's laws of motion) are more useful than others but are obviously still fallible (Relativity being a correction to Newton's laws). I'm not sure how useful of a model animism is but maybe it's reasonable to keep it in mind for some edge cases? Even if it is just emotionally satisfying, I guess that's kind of an edge case.