Yes, Greek root so it ought to be platypodes, but everyone just says platypi. Similar situation as octopus - Greek root, should be octopodes, everyone just says octopuses. What everyone says defines the language, so platypi and octopuses it is.
Australian here; I’ve never heard anyone say ‘platypi’. It’s always ‘platypuses’. On the other hand, the plural of ‘octopus’ can be either ‘octopuses’ or ‘octopi’.
I’ve long wanted it to be octopi but my iPhone and most sources say no. Out of the dictionaries, only Oxford English seems to include but says based on a misunderstanding. Some detail on history here:
I have never seen nor heard anyone write or say “platypi” before now. Some web sleuthing suggests that platypuses is somewhere between 20 and 100 times more common in English.
You're missing a word, but it seems like you're saying octopuses is wrong. But it's right, and not just because a spot informal weird had been accepted: it's technically correct. As sibling comments have said, the original plural would be octopodes because it's from the Greek, not octopi because it's not from Latin, but English doesn't normal take Greek plurals.
Platypodes is more correct than platypi, but I think that English rules apply once a word is a part of the English language (I don't know who decides that). So it should be platypusses.
That's interesting. I seem to kill small mosquitoes when they bite me. I've observed it multiple times. It lands, it bites and it becomes completely unresponsive. Because I was drunk at the time, I chalked it up to blood alcohol content which will yield quite a bit of alcohol if a mosquito drinks so-and-so many times its own body weight (I did some basic math) but since then it also happened when I was sober.
Even if you were at 0.5% BAC (legal driving limit is 0.08%, and 0.5% would kill a lot of people), that's still about the alcohol percentage in NA beer. Unlikely to have any effect.
Leaving aside the vast differences in physiology and effects of alcohol on humans vs mosquitoes, mosquitos can drink maybe 2x their body weight in blood. If you drunk 500 bottles of 0.5% a/v beer in 10 minutes it would likely have some effect.
> If you drunk 500 bottles of 0.5% a/v beer in 10 minutes it would likely have some effect.
If you drank the same amount of 0% ABV water in that time, you’d probably die of water intoxication, so I’m not sure any adverse effects of the alcohol would be noticeable.
> If you drunk 500 bottles of 0.5% a/v beer in 10 minutes it would likely have some effect
No, the alcohol wouldn't. Unless you distilled all that beer and ingested the alcohol alone. The massive liquid intake would kill you though.
The liver doesn't store alcohol, so how many grams you ingest in total doesn't matter, only in what concentration. Keep in mind that alcohol is perfectly soluble in water too.
Basically it remains "stuck" in position and completely stops moving, even if I wait 5 minutes. Poking it causes no reaction. I can just pick it up and put it away. It is either dead or it passed out.
We really seem to know extraordinarily little about how our bodies work apart from physical mechanics & electrical activity. I can't even put a % on the rest except that we have barely scratched the surface. From epigenetics to the brain, metabolism, and immune system, we have a long way to go.
On the other hand, we've probably made more progress in that understanding during the past 100 years than in all of the time before that. So, if our rate of knowledge acquisition is increasing, maybe that upward hill isn't quite so steep.
Well, once we discover a way to prevent or reverse aging, everything else would be a matter of time, of which you would now have an effectively unlimited amount.
I have never believed the argument that we can develop a way to live to 200. I am now in my mid 60s and it seems that a number of my parts are starting to "wear out". My skin is certainly thinner; my eyesight is damaged (macula degeneration) in one eye; ... And covid has taught us that our immune systems are not as effective as when we were younger. We older folks all see heart and cancer problems over the horizon. Cancer just seems a matter of time: I mean how can our cells keep replicating the 3 billion(?) base pairs in our genomes - with a mistake rate of about 1 per 100 000 (i.e. 30k mistakes per division) - without those eventually leading to cancer? And if I could only remember how to spell that alzyhmr thing, I would mention it also. And why does our government keep sending me those kits for faeces samples? Sorry to disagree with you, but I don't think aging is a reversible process: we seem to have too many parts, each with an "expiry date".
The main reason why it seems like it's not just a matter of "parts wearing out" is that different animals all age at different rates, but strikingly they all seem to age in similar ways.
For example while dogs have a much shorter lifespan than humans they seem to face all the same age-related declines humans face. This holds for animals close to or exceeding our mass as well. If different parts of the body wore out simply due to e.g. mechanical stress, you would expect e.g. dog joints to be perfectly healthy after 15 years since they are biologically very similar to human joints, when in fact dogs tend to still have arthritic and otherwise fragile joints at 15 (or earlier).
Everything declining together, just on different timetables in different animals, seems to suggest that aging is controlled by either a single mechanism or some interwoven set of mechanisms that cause everything to fail at the same time, rather than individual parts failing because "they wear out." If you could target that mechanism(s) then maybe you can make humans live as long as e.g. tortoises. But of course we haven't confirmed that such things exist, but the above is at least some motivation for why they might exist.
I would guess it is because there was no evolutionary pressure to have joints that can sustain 80 years if there are other parts of body that only sustain 18. Maybe I am missing something but I would expect that life expectancy of various parts of body of each specie converge because of that.
Evolution is rarely so tidy in its convergence. Humans have vestigial organs and crazy anatomical features left over from our ancestors. In light of that it would be a rather stunning coincidence to find that when it comes to aging across species (!) that organisms seem to have all their systems age at the same rate simply by individual evolution of each of those systems or that all the systems are effectively immortal with nothing in-between.
Without a coherent theory of senescence this is all conjecture, but there's compelling evidence that there's some set of hidden variables we aren't seeing that is "pulling the strings" when it comes to aging.
On reflection evidence is too strong a word given that we don't have a good, specific hypothesis for what's going on. Observations of the sort I laid out above.
Not a biologist, but I'm following related research and at this point am fairly convinced that aging is an intentional, pre-programmed process, as opposed to the popular understanding that it's the consequence of wear and tear.
Let's just think logically about it for a bit. Your cells come with all kinds of repair machinery and redundant DNA encoding. All cells do. But there are single-celled creatures that don't age and reproduce by cell division, and they haven't lost their function despite billions of years and millions of generations. Same for humans and whoever else reproduces sexually — there's A LOT that needs to go just right for a new human to be born, including making billions of copies of parents' DNA, yet it does work just fine most of the time. This tells us that the DNA copying process must be very robust, and that with age, it's these mechanisms that keep everything in check that deliberately get weaker or stop working altogether.
Recent research proves it.
For example, there's evidence that organisms propagate their age throughout all tissues using some kind of signaling in the bloodstream: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13363
You're not wrong, but your models of aging events seem to be too simplistic. Aging is not one process but a complex of interacting processes.
There are definitely a number of processes involved in aging that are pre-programmed as you suggest, namely the hormonal clocks involved in puberty and maturation, and then later senescence.
It's not particularly useful to compare humans/mammals to single-celled organisms, which operate under way fewer constraints. They don't have to deal with cancer, as just one very basic example. They also don't have to figure out how to clear old junk from their tissues and individual cells. They just start over with a clean slate every time.
Signals in the bloodstream - various hormones and immune cells - are obviously involved in aging. But there are many of them, and we are just starting to understand their different interactions. There is no doubt that aging research is going to yield ways to suppress or promote the action of certain hormones, replenish/reactivate certain stem cell populations, etc. but better understanding of intercellular regulatory networks is needed for that.
To call DNA methylation the determinant of an "aging clock" is also too narrow or simplistic. DNA methylation is the mechanism of cell differentiation, but it's "metadata" that has to be copied over between cells when they divide, just like the DNA itself. Early in embryogenesis, the DNA methylation pattern is reset and overwritten using the regulatory cascade of master control genes (homeobox, etc.) - so it is expected that the methylation pattern will have lower fidelity with each division cycle before or after that point.
This is the golden age of biology - we have just gotten a hold of the tools that will let us solve these problems - but it's messy and complicated. Investing in your understanding of these processes can have a huge payoff - I recommend reading some of the Nature Reviews articles like https://www.nature.com/nrg/ - I've always found them to be incredibly helpful in summarizing the state of the art.
Every cell in your entire body (on average) gets replaced over a 7 year span. If you figure that you stopped growing around 18, and your body has been slowly replicating itself since then, it completed the first full replication at 25, the second at 32, the third at 39, the fourth at 46, etc. Each time you accumulate some chaos. As the chaos grows, the cell groups decline in performance. The decline in performance makes it more likely that the next replication will be even worse.
While that makes it really unlikely that aging can be reversed, it certainly isn’t logically impossible. All you need to do is expell the chaos, and get one good quality regeneration (possibly taking about 7 years) and then you’d be right back to 18 years old again. That might make it worthwhile enough to be willing to have your body burned by a billion laser shots and float in a vat of liquid for 7 years. We might get to find out in our lifetimes? who knows.
In a society where there's a cure for aging, dying of old age would be regarded the same way as we would think today of a person who dies of a bacterial infection by refusing to take antibiotics. Yet bacterial infections used to be inevitably deadly for most of the human history.
I think that would be very difficult without a much better understanding of our bodies, so it becomes a chicken/egg problem. Aging isn't really just one thing, it is a constellation of factors that often comingle to make the process even worse. I frequently see Telomere "reset" referenced as the big thing that would win or achieved the most gains in the war on aging, but that seems like it would only be an incremental gain. Here's a good overview on the topic:
Also consider that long life may not produce the advancements you might hope for. There's a saying: "Science progresses one funeral at a time." It's a reference to the fact that individuals typically hold fast to their ideas-- scientists included. Certainly we may react to & integrate new knowledge, but at some fundamental level we are hindered by the cognitive foundations of knowledge laid down when we're younger that are not automatically escaped on new information. That's not even accounting for pride & ego causing people to cling even more fiercely to their own ideas.
You might think that on ongoing infusion of new talent would prevent this, but massively extended age would also entrench the older generations firmly into the power structures of the scientific community, creating at least a partial gerontocracy. Heck we have a bit of that now: Plenty of PhD candidates get stuck "playing the game" and not bucking the status quo too much, only guided down paths their advisors find acceptable. If you have something that significantly contradicts the current consensus, then without a very good & open minded advisor willing to go to bat for you, you might as well shelve it, do something mundane & acceptable for your dissertation, and dust off that other idea when you're done. This situation would not improve with the further ossification of power structures.
If we got there though-- massively extended lifespans, the gerontocracy aspect of things in society in general would be also be a difficult sociological issue. With a 300 year lifespan, by the time you got to 200 you would probably consider anyone under the age of 50 as little more than children. The issue of wealth inequality would be incredible as generational wealth accumulated by anyone remotely careful with their finances would, by late-middle age, dwarf the resources of anyone starting out.
There could be some interesting & positive aspects to all of that though too. Imagine have half a century to explore intellectually or otherwise before you were expect to settle into a path in life. And if we found societal of medical methods to help people break out of psychological & intellectual inertia then a person might expect to have multiple very different careers in their lifetime.
Anyway, all of that would be a very long ways off. At my age I might still hope that leaps in medical advances could give me an extra 10 years of productive healthy life, but probably not much more. And I've also gone a long ways off the original topic, so I'll end it here.
You can't reverse aging, that's a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
You might be able to restore the body's ability to regenerate itself. But that's a terrible idea. I shudder at the idea of living to 120, never mind 200. Imagine being born in 1821 and having to live today. Imagine how confusing that would be.
Now start doing the math for how much power (I made it easy, I I'm only asking for the rate) that is required to keep someone alive indefinitely.
Don't cheat! Don't use the caloric needs of a fully grown adult. Their bodies stoically accept a lot of the damage done by entropy. You have expend additional energy to reverse it.
Don't cheat, remember to account for a population growth rate == the current birth rate.
If you don't like having to account for the growth rate, please give a moral explanation for why some select few get to live forever and others croak.
How much power do you need? How are you supplying this power? It's cute to say "Sun". But solar panels (let's assume 100% efficient) require surface area that would otherwise be used by plant and animals for their existence.
So live forever by
1. Radically transforming the Earth into a massive ball of polycrystalline silicon
2. Giving eternity to only a (very) select few.
Reversing the flow of aging is reversing entropy locally, so you're, overall, increasing entropy more outside of your body.
The live forever types are just assuming that energy will be plentiful enough to sustain hundreds of billions of people indefinitely [1] and heat easy to dissipate
[1] The population of the earth is stable at 7 billion only because people have this nasty habit of dying. If we stopped doing that, the population would grow exponentially at the birth rate of 1.7%. Or a doubling every 42 years. In 160 years (not that far off from the current record of longevity) the world's population would hit 100 billion people.
Of course the "live forever" types never mention that eternity is a promise for the privileged, and not for the masses.
Huh? If you were an immortal, you don't just suddenly appear out of time. A person born in 1821 and still alive today would know more about the world than anyone else.
"Yeah. I was born and lived before the Internet (in its widespread form) existed."
So you're in-between the age of 40 to 60? Let's say you're 60, born in 1961:
- Your local pop radio station often plays a rock song from your adolescence. The Queen of Pop whose posters adorned your room and so scandalized your grand-parents still sings at the Super Bowl.
- The Star Wars movie you geeked out as a teen/young adult has become a billion dollar franchise your grandkids drag you to
- The ATM you learned to use thirty years ago are still around basically unchanged.
- the quarter the tooth fairy left you as a kid that you found in the tin can of boyhood treasures is still accepted as currency
Compare that to a 60 year old person born in 1820.
They have yet to have seen a train: most people in the world at the time lived their whole lives in their villages far from any railroad. China's first railroad was built in 1875, and quickly dismantled. (China, alone, in the 19th century had between 30 to 38% of the world population)
Most likely this person lives in feudally arranged society. The emancipation of the serfs in Russia was in the mid 1800s, and that was the last of the European countries to remove feudalism.
In the anglo saxon world, women were effective properties of their spouses.
The superiority/inferiority of races was obvious to the learned classes.
Slavery was practiced throughout the world except Europe and then the US.
Homosexuality was punishable by execution most everwhere in the world
Sexual roles were well defined and strictly obeyed according to local customs (i.e. they weren't universal norms, but norms existed universally).
The only way to fly was in a hot air baloon. The only people who ever witnessed this lived in Paris or in London
Steel existed but was extremely expensive and not used for construction. Wrought iron was used instead, and it was a brittle mess that resulted in catastrophes. As a result the buildings in urban areas were typically no more than 6 stories high. Religious buildings were much taller, but projects that took centuries to build.
Communicating with someone across the Atlantic took weeks.
Now, let's say our hypothetical person living in 1880 and born in 1820 lived another 60 years.
The airplane is invented and used to devastating effect in multiple wars
The automobile is invented, and by 1940 mass produced.
Throughout the world, therefore, buses provide transport to remote area that aren't serviceable by rail
Skyscrapers pop up.
A world war has impacted most people in the world. A new one has just started.
A communist society exists and has mechanized death killing millions.
Telecommunication, first by wired-telegraph, then by wireless telegraph, and finally by radio exists and enables instant communication across the globe. The most remote villages can receive the BBC world service, often in their native language.
Our gentleman most likely wouldn't be aware of this development but classical physics has been shattered, the concept of time turned upside down. The atomic era has also begun, but most people will be blissfully unaware for another 5 years.
Penicillin is about to revolutionize life expectancy.
I think this person born in 1820 would be very uncomfortable if living today.
Things can really speed up once we have robots that grow cells and perform experiments on them, and collect (big) data and automatically analyze the data.
People already can grow up billions of cells for experiments and use supercomputers to process terabytes of sequencing data with statistical modelling. The hard part isn't the scale, but designing experiments and figuring out what evidence is needed to answer specific biological questions. That stuff you can't speed up with robotic arms and more processor cores, it takes time for people to think about these things and have conversations with others about these topics.
Not to mention the amount of time experiments take-suppose we want to know if a drug prevents an illness that takes decades to develop? Sure you can model it in a mouse, but to do that you need to know exactly what the parameters of your model are.
I'm not so sure about that. For example, with robots you can run "for GENE in GENOME do ..." For humans even thinking about what that statement does is a lot of work already!
It's not a one dimensional problem though. There is a lot of interaction between the various systems in a human body.
To keep with the programming analogy, ya, you can see the SUM statement and that is necessary to understand, but what is it for? What is it's role in the larger program? Where do it's inputs come from? Where do they go? What effect does changing it have in other places?
I do agree our knowledge of genetics etc. will be much expanded soon. But we'll probably also make some nasty errors.
> There is a lot of interaction between the various systems in a human body.
Yes, the interactions are the interesting bit. Perhaps we can figure out the biological pathways at the cellular level by taking a systematic approach of turning genes on/off and turning their expression on/off, then looking at the expression of other genes. This is exactly what could be done by robots.
I think you’re seriously underestimating the scale of the genome and the number of possible combinations that might be responsible for some phenotype, even assuming the genotype -> phenotype causality was straightforward (which it’s not).
This is simply not a problem we’re going to computer our way through, at least until we have large scale quantum computers and way better data than we have today.
Naively, a small protein of ~100 amino acid residues has ~21^100 configurations. Amino acids average 110 Daltons each (110g/mol), you would need approximately 3*10^107kg of matter to build them all. There is an estimated 10^53kg of matter in the known universe.
The problem is how do we sense and measure them. Once we invent the methods of sensing, measuring and observing a single process we need a million more for the other process and that takes time.
I was having a discussion with a friend yesterday and we got onto the topic of vaccinations.
To my knowledge, while we can develop a statistical assessment of a vaccine's safety, we can never know how the vaccine will affect a specific person that takes it. My argument here is that the human body is so fantastically complex that no two cases are ever the same, and so the only way to know how a vaccine will affect a person is to run the experiment, by having them take it.
I think this is one attribute of what are called "Wicked Problems": The only way to know if a change is going to be an improvement or not is to make the change and see how the system state evolves forward in time.
We have a very bare minimum of knowledge for individual treatment, but only in a very few cases. There are genetic markers known, for example, to impact metabolism of specific medications, and there are tests (Genesight) to find out your own profile. So there is some very minimal progress on that front. It's a start towards personalized treatments, but we don't always know why a specific genetic marker doesn't work the same way or why an enzyme has such a large impact on things.
Not really, we can test a drug on a large population and determine it to be effective on 5% of all people. With no further info you know you have about a 5% chance of getting better. With more research we may determine that for people with a specific variant in their DNA the succes rate is 60%, so you can be part of two groups. We can keep making it better, maybe never 100% but very from “a gamble”.
Would you say that hopping on a plane is an experiment in testing if it will crash? When you know it very likely will not?
I’d say it’s more like we have a lot of similar genetics (the plane) and then some small differences (the seat you are in) but yeah the analogy is a stretch, “similar” is not really a quantitative term but I think you are assuming we are more different then we really are. But that also varies per parameter.
For example there is a reason we test drugs on mice, because they are pretty similar to us (mammals), of course there are also differences.
I like Kevin Kelly’s technium concept. We are merely an extension of evolution and our purpose is to continue it, which we do willingly and unwillingly.
The reason for this is that living things are evolved, rather than designed.
We have seen that even in very simple hardware, when using a genetically evolved design, we end up having circuits that functions as per the requirement [1]. But it ended up being very hard to figure out how the thing actually worked, and when components were removed that seemingly did not have any purpose, the thing stopped working.
And this, in my opinion, points to a very important aspect of evolved systems. We can only have a statistical assessment as you say. But no way to say for sure that, "This and this alone will be the only effect of an intervention".
But we can have some idea, depending on the type of intervention. For example, we can say that something that was part of the evolution, will not interfere with its working, simply because evolution has taken it into account during the process. And here comes the concept of something being "natural" to the organism. So we can say that stuff that is taken orally, is much safer than injected stuff. All through our evolution, we have been taking stuff orally. So a Vaccine is much more like throwing a spanner into our workings, than taking something taken orally. Similarly stuff that were part of our natural environment, during evolution can be considered as safer, as opposed to stuff that were not.
I think this is why mocking the concept of "natural", by saying, "Everything is natural, because it is found in nature", is embarrassingly missing the point..
It points to an interesting gap in discourse around vaccines.
One side (the mainstream) claims vaccines are effective and safe. The other side, claims that no, we do not in fact know that the vaccine is safe and therefore you should not get it and take your chances with the disease.
The problem is that we don't in fact know that the vaccines are truly safe for everyone, because mRNA technology (while incredible) is new, but from my personal interactions I've observed that most intelligent people see that getting the vaccine increases your expected quality of life given you've never had COVID before. However, those who don't believe this will take any claim made by the mainstream (vaccines are safe) as evidence that they are hiding something, further deepening their suspicions.
This is a feedback loop; the more people that refuse the vaccine, the more the mainstream will push for more vaccinations, causing more people to refuse the vaccine. All because the nuance of "we don't know that this is as safe as taking a walk in the sun, but we have solid evidence that it improves your E[QOL]" isn't easy to communicate.
More precisely, "the other side" claims that we do not in fact know the vaccine is safe, and points to all the other times "the mainstream" side lied to us as reasons to be skeptical: the US Surgeon-General told us "masks don't work", lying to manage supply, now they're critical; Biden said "get vaccinated, or wear a mask until you do", now the masks are going back on; Kamala Harris said she wouldn't take a Trump vaccine, now there's a big fight over mandates and passports; Fauci kept dangling a vaccine target just beyond what the country was tracking towards (there are articles where he's quoted as saying "I can nudge this up a bit"); Cuomo was hailed as some great leader despite sending covid-positive people into old people's homes (it was his sexual misconduct that finally sunk him).
Hesitancy around covid vaccines isn't the antivax of the previous generation, and responding as if it was won't help anything. Actually having an honest conversation with the public that you're more likely better off with a vaccine is not an easy concept to communicate (as you correctly point out), but it would be a good first step in trying to rebuild that lost trust.
It has definitely become partisan, but not all of it is inconsistent. For example Biden said "wear a mask until you do" before the massive rise of Delta and our knowledge that it causes breakthrough infection. Once we knew that, it made sense to start wearing masks again because we found out that vaccines will be less effective against Delta.
Cuomo was held up as a great example when it looked like he had done a good job, but then when screwups were revealed opinions rightfully began to change.
By all means let's point out the ridiculous partisan aspects of this debacle, or out & out screwups like initial mask guidance. But also recognize that in plenty of cases a change of stance is not partisan or contradictory, it's the rational response to new information.
The challenge is that guidance not regularly delivered with any caveats or margins of error. I think this is a mechanism to try to drive compliance up through a posture of confidence, but when the guidance ultimately flip-flops it just looks like either people are lying or they don't know what they are talking about.
WSJ, writing in March 2021: "countries such as Brazil risk becoming a breeding ground for potent versions of the virus that could render current Covid-19 vaccines less effective, public-health specialists warned." Biden's "wear a mask until you do" was in May - very irresponsible.
Yes, this is correct. For example, give most people most vaccines, and they will be fine. However, some vaccines will cause a few people in every 100,000 or so to develop ITP, which can mean a brief period of bruising and bleeding (as your immune system eats your blood platelets) that clears up with simple steroids, or it can mean longer term or even chronic illness, splenectomy, even death. We have zero way to predict this for any given person. The same is true of other "rare" reactions.
Yes, and even after 30 years you might still say, "but what about 50? What about 70? How do we know it won't contaminate our bodies after death and leach dangerous toxins into the soil hundreds of years from now when our coffins break down?"
At some point you have to decide to balance the risk in some way and make a choice. Or live your life in a perpetual state of epistemic uncertainty & indecision. In most cases people are fine doing this: very few people refuse to drive over the unlikely possibility of a fatal car accident, or live in a basement on the remote possibility that a tree or meteor will fall on their home.
Unfortunately in this case, politics entered the equation. People cling to epistemic uncertainty to justify consistency with their political allegiance rather than make a decision on the basis of balanced risk, because they they have chosen a balance point that would make them an agoraphobic recluse if applied consistently across their life.
I withhold that judgement for those who are reluctant due to the "emergency" approval (in the US) but plan to get vaccinated when fully approved (which Pfizer now has received). I might disagree, but I think a rational person could still balance their risk on that "emergency approval" point. So long as they also are consistent in their application of risk balancing to recognize that strong precautions to avoid infection were required in the meantime.
>very few people refuse to drive over the unlikely possibility of a fatal car accident, or live in a basement on the remote possibility that a tree or meteor will fall on their home.
That is because there is no media that is fear mongering on these things by reporting 24x7 on every car accident in gruesome details, and run reports on how driving in a car is very dangerous, when there is a chance that one of the thounsand other drivers that you come across on the road might be a crazed, drunk, distracted person that could hit you, support it with "statistics", and just because you survived the last trip, does not mean that you ll survive the next.
They will also run stories about these "anti-walk" persons who took a car or bike, but died in a horrible crashes.
The point is, everything is a line between risk and benefits, and when the risk and benefits are a matter of perception, media has great potential to come in and set where that line is..
As I said in comment above, we know that drinking water cannot be bad for us, because all organism drank water all through their evolution, and if it was bad in some way, natural selection would have selected those that incurred damages caused by water drinking...
But it didn't happen even after so many years, so we know that drinking water did not make us less capable.
Speaking anecdotally - here in central Texas, we have a few species of mosquito, and my reaction to a bite varies from a small bump that goes away in a day to intense swelling and itching. And it all seemingly depends on which type of mosquito bit me.
There are little infrared pens that you can get that do this without pain, just heating the area with IR to denature the proteins injected by the insect
I had a handful of marks/scars that lasted for several years on my legs after using one of these. I am sure it depends on the brand, but please be careful using these.
These are great. I find they are slightly uncomfortable/painful, but only mildly so and momentarily. Much more localized than something like a hairdryer or spoon though. Helps with wasp stings too.
This seems to vary from person to person. I personally think that it hurts a little bit for a few seconds, as do most of my friends that have the same device, but other friends call it torture. I guess their pain threshold is different. I gladly trade the 3 seconds of mild stinging for days of itching.
Please don't act like Amazon is the only shop around. They are a terrible shop, actively adversarial to their merchants and customers. They are chock full of fake reviews, they comingle inventory, and practice many dark patterns.
Most people think that Amazon sells all the products on their site - because Amazon designs their site to look like it. Even young people who are technically literate are fooled. This results in a lot of harm..
Thanks for promoting other options. When recommending books I use worldcat.org links rather than the more-exploitative for-profit vendors.
In the interest of making more art available to more people, independent of spending-money, I’d rather us collectively invest more in public libraries. To what degree do public libraries fund authors?
You're welcome. I am not sure but I agree, we need as much free information as possible. Libgen and scihub are invaluable! I don't know if libraries fund authors but that would certainly be a cool model to have.
I just bought something from amazon and it turns out it was coming from a seller in another country and i had to pay an extra £24 in import duties and carrier charges. Nowhere on the listing did it say it was coming from outside the UK.
I am sorry to hear that. Amazon's UI is purposely designed to make it difficult to notice this kind of information. Buyers are lulled into a false sense of assuredness.
Quite and apparently everyone else thinks I deserved it for some reason! Fairly standard makita accessory, none of FFXtools, Axminster, Toolstop or even eBay had it in stock only place that came up in search was amazon. It was out of stock on amazon but was advertised in the side bar as available through a third party seller by the name of something like 'KAMAC Machine Tools' i.e. an english sounding name. If I'd investigated the company I would have found that they were in Italy, but the price was listed in Sterling and there was no text anywhere that led me to believe that this was an import. I know because I went back and screengrabbed the page after I got the bill from UPS. Its not worth my time to pursue it any further with Amazon, Startup Idea: an AI chatbot that I can deploy to argue with their AI chatbot about this.
HN downvotes 90% of my comments. I wouldn't take it to heart. It's not common for the herd mentality to do anything but pile on. Plus you have to keep in mind that many of the users here are employed by Amazon and are in perpetual self-denial of the unethical nature of their employer. The cognitive dissonance is necessary for them to avoid an actual understanding of how they enable it all, regardless of whatever division they may reside within ("I'm just an AWS dev. Pissing in bottles, what's that got to do with me?!!")
Then you factor in the astroturfing by contracted subsidiaries through shilled comments and votes/likes/dislikes all over the broader internet.
My advice is to get used to the downvotes. When there are few comments but many downvotes, it's pretty indicative of a poor attempt to suppress valid information. They have no counter arguments, just a supression button. Consider your task accomplished. ;-)
Depends what you take hiking with you...but I imagine at the minimum you have a fire method(matches? lighted? flint? etc) and metal object(pocket knife? belt knife? eating utensil?). Those will work well in a pinch, just don't heat it too much and have an impromptu branding session...
It does work on mosquito bite. Actually try putting anything (tolerably) hot at the place of mosquito bite. I don't have hair drier so I use just hot spoon. I guess this heat treatment somehow disintegrates the chemical released by mosquito.
Edit: posted this comment before reading other comments so didnt realize others have also suggested the same.
That’s a great trick. I was always told to use a metal spoon and get it as hot as you can stand it and press it the bite as much as you can and as long as you can stand it. Never thought about the hair dryer.
The hair dryer is much more controllable, you might severely burn yourself with the spoon (and need another trick to relive the pain ;)
For what it's worth my hair is so short I never owned a hair drier until I heard about this trick. So I bought a cheap one and it's only used in summer.
This is my solution as well. I find that an intense heating session will keep the itch at bay for up to 8 hours.
I think the hot spoon that others have mentioned is also worth a try as the circumference of the bite and spoon could keep non bite areas from burning.
Good trick - I use hot water, at hot as I can stand for both bites and poison ivy rashes, trying to minimize exposure beyond the affected area. Really calms it all down for hours after the zing of the hot water.
I visited my parents in the DC area, and there's been a bunch of people developing really nasty rashes from insect bites, I don't know if it's confirmed, but it seems to be attributed to an oak-mite[1]
I suspect wrong hypothesis there.... the variable is probably what other allergen is on you skin (or finger nails) and whether and how much you scratch it! Temperature is probably also a factor.
Totally! I leave in BC, the few mosquitoes which make it into my house despite nets usually give me big bumps that last for a few days and scratch like hell. When I get into the deeper woods, I get eaten alive, but these bites' effect seems to last only a few hours. Might also be the blood pumping though, but I do think that natural selection, even over a short variation of geo, results in such differences
My wife has 'skeeter syndrome' and the bites vary from normal mosquito bites to 3-4" wide, weeping bumps depending on where we were at when she got bit. Hawaii was the worst. WA state wasn't too bad.
We have some in Georgia but I don’t think there are as many species as Texas.
A mosquito has never left a mark or made me itch in my life. Poison ivy on the other hand…I could look at it and get a rash but not the go to the doctor rash.
I've found that washing the bite wound right away and taking an antihistamine like Allegra has helped keep the bite from swelling for me. Also adding tiger balm has helped with the itching.
Seems like a plausible explanation but how do you have any idea which species bit you in order to be able to draw a conclusion that there's a correlation?
Speaking personally - not always do I notice the mosquito.
But I have noticed often enough to note the difference. For me, the smaller, more stealthy mosquitos give me the small, temporary bump, but the larger more noticeable ones like the tiger mosquito or what we call zebra mosquitos (I think they are actually western encephalitis mosquitos (!)) have a more dramatic reaction.
The Author Summary seems to provide a more plain-English description:
"Mosquito saliva proteins have numerous effects on the immune system, and we describe here the use of mice with a humanized immune system to study the effects of mosquito bites on human cells. Our results show that the number of immune cell types affected is much larger than previously described, and some immune responses to mosquito bites can be detected up until 7 days post-bite. The biological significance of these changes remains to be determined, but it might explain how some pathogens, such as viruses, can spread through the body in these cells, replicate to higher extents, and even remain in some tissues for far longer than detected in blood."
They're using stem cells to provide mice with "humanized" immune systems. The mosquito saliva is interacting with more types of immune cells than previously thought and remain active for longer than thought. The effects of these interactions is still unknown, but may be part of how bacteria, viruses, etc. carried by mosquitoes infect humans.
Cytokines are signaling molecules used by the immune system, there are around 20 of them with names like IL-4 and IL-10. The IL stands for inter leukin (signal between white blood cells).
T Cells start as B Cells and then graduate from Thymus school after rigorous coursework (mainly don’t target and attack self). Most T helper cells stay as Th0 or undifferentiated. Th1 are specialized for inter cellular pathogens (bacteria and virus), Th2 broadly speaking are specialized for intra cellular pathogens (helminths and parasites).
Pathogens that have been around for a while like bacteria, virus, helminths, and parasites have evolved to push back against immune systems to varying degrees.
I think it's so interesting how this guy asked pretty rudimentary questions and got such an amazing response. I wish the tech community could be just as nice to newcomers.
Regarding understanding this as a good or bad effect, I think this is still an open question and further research is needed. My take away is that the rush to eradicating mosquitoes may have unintended consequences as we don't fully understand how symbiotic they are in the development of the human immune system.
Right. Our war for the survival of species is not with mosquitos but with the viruses they can carry. If only we could make them incapable of carrying. But then, viruses probably find other, even more disgusting ways into our bodies.
"If there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it's that life will not be contained... life will find a way". On the other hand, human progress moves way faster than evolution [eat that Darwin!]. That's amazing, but at the same time absolutely horrifying.
Years ago, I became immune to having reactions to mosquito bites after getting bitten over a hundred times in a 20-hour timespan by at least 3 types of mosquitoes, one of which was Aedes Aegypti (the stripey bastards that carry Dengue Fever).
I always knew that the redness, itching, and swelling was an autoimmune response to the introduction of certain proteins present in mosquito saliva, so I'm wondering if it's possible to override that response by introducing enough saliva (with myself as a prime example), and what the wider implications of that are.
I became immune too, as a kid I decided to "make peace" with mosquitos. I stopped caring so much about being bitten, and soon after stopped getting bumps and itchiness. I guess this happened just because I was bitten enough to adapt, but I still wonder if there was some psychological interplay.
Sometimes I'll get a minor bump if in another country, must be a response to different proteins in the foreign mozzie saliva.
Mosquitos are the closest thing to a predator that we have. They're by far the animal that kills the most humans (outside of other humans), and it's been that way for at least 10s of thousands of years.
We already know that billions of humans have genetic mutations that specifically are there to protect us from mosquitos. So I'm not surprised that mosquitos have specific adaptations made for us either.
True†. This is a great insight. So...why wipe them out? Don't you think we can learn from them? I know people are not advocating for wiping out every mosquito, only the killer ones. But still, from a purely predator dynamic, we should at least make sure we know all there is to know about this 'apex predator' (possibly a stretch, but), before we wipe them from the face of the Earth, no? :p ;) xx
†I actually think we are symbionts. But people commonly just don't understand enough about how everything works to clearly see the benefits we get yet.
Imagine if dirty needles started flying around randomly targeting children. It constantly shocks me that mosquito eradication is controversial, let alone not one of the highest priorities of society.
Imagine if the human immune system had evolved to require small innoculations of pathogens to develop antibodies in preparation for larger infectious infiltrations down the line.
Mosquitos are part of the food chain and a LOT of animals (reptiles, birds, spiders, bats, etc) depend on them. Eradication is an extreme solution with extreme consequences.
It seems like eradication is a blunt instrument approach to the problem. We know that some people are much more likely to get bit. How can it be so hard to determine the differing factor?? To your point (and ignoring the extreme solution), why have we not put the requisite energy towards solving this problem?
On the other hand, it shocks me that people are so eager to manipulate the environment by disposing of a key species in the food web.
I get the arguments for both sides. I’d like less people to die from mosquitoes as well. I’d also like bats, fish, amphibians, birds, reptiles, etc to have an abundant source of food.
We in the West eradicated entire ecosystems in order to get rid of Malaria. Eradication is only controversial when most of the victims are in the third world.
Some people's attitude is that these people (poor, far away, 'wrong' skin colour, etc.) might as well die for our beloved Nature.
Ok.. do something, do something... how about we use cutting edge genetic modification technology to eliminate categories of life from the biosphere? Then afterwards we can talk about ethical implications and deal with unexpected consequences as the technology proliferates
We still don't know enough about mosquitos to the point that we could "surgically" remove specifically those that bite humans. Remember, there are over 3000 known species of mosquito. Imagine if some alien race was like: "we need to kill all humans", and then proceed and eradicate all the apes and monkeys as well?
>We still don't know enough about mosquitos to the point that we could "surgically" remove specifically those that bite humans.
We know enough to do just that - surgical removal is exactly what the gene drive solutions do. Even if we didn't, mosquitos are minor compared to the species being killed merely for profit.
>Imagine if some alien race was like: "we need to kill all humans", and then proceed and eradicate all the apes and monkeys as well?
I'd be a bit more concerned about the human part. I don't think I'll be available to care about the apes and monkeys. (Besides, the aliens are just being thorough and rational, and decided to make sure that we don't get evolved again. +1 for the alien team).
> We know enough to do just that - surgical removal is exactly what the gene drive solutions do.
We still don't know the long-term implications of CRISPR applications on the entire species. However, it's already underway. Scientists are doing it and studying them in a lab setting. There's hope.
There are over three thousand known species of mosquito. And only just a few of them specialized in biting humans. From the planet's point of view, none of us (including our children) are that important or even special.
Eradicating all mosquitos would have much bigger consequences for the planet and perhaps would be worse than the sudden disappearance of 90% of all humans.
I have always avoided bug spray because I was convinced it would give me some kind of immunity. It kind of worked in that mosquito bites barely itch anymore, but after reading this it doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.
When I was a kid I couldn't care less about mosquitoes and during the summer most of the kids' legs and arms had mosquito bites and deep scratches, but for some reason some kids were never bitten regardless of where they'd hang out or sleep.
Not sure whether it's a good thing or not but now I am extremely cautious not to get any bites. This summer for example I avoided the backyard almost completely for this reason, with some exceptions when I covered myself in mosquito repellant spray. The mosquito candles I tried last time weren't very efficient in my case.
I'm O negative and have always seemed to get the worst of it when out when friends.
I recently took up cigar smoking (yes i know) and anecdotally have found that I don't get bit as often if I've been smoking recently...to the point of watching someone six feet from me get destroyed while they avoid me completely. My father-in-law has been smoking for 50+ years and they ignore him.
+1 to those. I was shocked to actually have a repellent that really worked. When I bought two years ago, I had gotten a puppy and would work in my back yard so he and my other dog could hang around outside, chewing and messing around. Summer came and the mosquitoes were awful. Stick one of those under my chair, and I'd go from 10+ bites a minute to 1 bite per hour, if that.
Apparently neurotoxic, and not meant to be applied directly to human skin. Wouldn't hang around this product. Unless there was an actual risk of contracting malaria otherwise.
You might be on to something. I got a fever and was sick for a while after being bit by a lot of mosquitoes last year. It could have been a coincidence, but I'm still going to try to avoid getting weird illnesses from their bites from now on.
This is actually the main idea behind the "Bug Bite Thing" product I came across recently. It acts as a suction tube to remove mosquito saliva from the bite and therefore minimize the immune inflammation at the site.
Naturally, as soon as it came in the mail, I have yet to get a mosquito bite since.
"We detected both Th1 and Th2 human immune responses, and delayed effects on cytokine levels in the blood, and immune cell compositions in the skin and bone marrow, up to 7 days post-bites."
I wonder if this could be a treatment for cytokine storms caused by things such as the spanish flu.
It would be quite ironic if The Great Filter turned out to be the xeno equivalent of mosquitoes spreading some unstoppable virus. Or if mosquito saliva contains the proteins(s) to unlock some medical breakthrough like some immune system stimulant that obsoletes antibiotics, or cryo-sleep. I try to keep those possibilities in mind whenever I get carried away with my fantasies of an anopheles genetic bomb, but durnit, those bites do have a convincing way about them to persuade one to a "kill 'em all" disposition. Thanks for the paper, it was a very neat read.
Agreed. It boggles my mind that people are willing to just assume that all of the unknowns balance in our favor when it comes to wiping out mosquitoes. How many species has the human immune system had to adapt to more than mosquitoes? Yes they kill a lot of people, but its entirely possible that by normalizing the immune response against wide swaths of the planet they save a lot more.
> … mosquito and sandfly saliva have also been shown to enhance infectivity and disease progression
I wonder if it was mosquitos that have evolved to make disease they are carrying more infectious or it's the pathogen that evolved to take advantage of the mosquito's biology to make the host more likely to become infected. Regardless this is fascinating.
This seems like the more sensible approach - to understand/learn how to protect ourselves from malaria/dengue/etc. rather than gene-drive systems to eradicate (certain types of?) mosquitoes.
When I get bitten in Southeast Asia, the bites last at least a week. That is not the case in North America. I have surmised most people for an immunity to bites where they grew up.
I remember sitting in Kautokeino bus with an older Sami man. Dozens of mosquitoes just sat on his forehead just waiting for something edible. I was only semi-edible with DEET. But an Italian couple was totally. It was incredible to watch, I wish I had a camera. Blood bath and genocide.
There is a joke about mosquitoes in Northern Norway that goes like this:
Two mosquitoes caught a soldier and one asked the other: should we eat him here or bring back home? To which the other mosquito answer: No, lets eat him here lest we want one of the big mosquitoes come and take him.
Source: close friend who served next to the Russian border.
I was south in Troms and down there they were so small we could easily kill them with a shovel or something ;-)
Yeah, the mosquitoes in northern Norway can be brutal. I have family in the region and was invited on a fishing trip to one of the large salmon rivers. The air was thick with HUGE mosquitoes and after a while I gave up trying to keep them away. A blood bath indeed.
He's giving an anecdote. Mosquitos would land on a native man but not bite him. Some mosquitos bit him(timonoko) but he had DEET on so not many did. An Italian couple got very badly bitten and spent the trip trying to slap and genocide all of the mosquitos.
I was trying to point out that Mosquito saliva produces somekind of deterrent and antigen. It takes only few bites and days to adapt with suitable genetic background. But Italians were offended and it turned into flame war.
I mostly agree, there is an omission of "edible" after "totally" that makes it read confusingly. However, I find the last sentence - "blood bath and genocide" - to be very out of place, to the point where invoking "genocide" to talk about some mosquitos getting swatted feels quite inappropriate.
https://www.caryinstitute.org/news-insights/media-coverage/h...
Utterly fascinating. Our bodies are so much more complex than I could have imagined.