There are also several Chinese vendors offering reasonably priced injection molding machines now, but unless you're well-versed in the art of dealing with these vendors and DIYing your own support, they're not a great place to start.
If you just want to experiment, you can build or buy a manual lever-operated machine for under $500: https://busterbeagle3d.square.site/product/buster-beagle-3d-... These won't be powering any production runs, but if you're only interested in prototyping then they can be surprisingly effective.
You cant see in it because there's no light ? Maybe some crude analogy to the first cameras dark chambers ? French wikipedia says it entered our language during WWII to describe enemy military strategies we had to analyze by interacting with them rather than reverse engineer from specs. Black is the color of the night and mystery, white of the sun and openness. I find it insane this is misinterpreted as good/bad, with the mystery color being bad.
We're fighting hard in my company against the same people as usual now brigadding to stop saying black/whitelist, because it does nothing to help black people in America (we're in Asia), who suffer from problems which go well beyond even white people: they entered a cycle of self defeatism where every problem has an external source and therefore solution, to the point of complete apathy.
So when a chinese says "this system is a blackbox" I will not, me a European, tell him to say something else because americans cant fix their shit and now need to pretend me and that chinese guys are part of their problem. It's THEIR problem, they fix it, and for real.
Does anyone understand why a third dose of the same vaccine improves immunity to Omicron?
I'm willing to believe the empirical evidence that boosters make a meaningful difference, but I can't figure out intuitively why the same mRNA a third time helps to address this new spike.
From what I understand it is about affinity maturation. Basically, when you get an initial vaccine (or infection) your immune system learns how to recognize the antigen (the virus spike protein) and produces a bunch of antibodies to recognize it. But your immune system also preserves the spike protein in antigen presenting cells so it can continue to produce antibodies to recognize more features of the spike protein. Over time, your immune system learns how to produce a broader range of antibodies that are (in aggregate) more likely to recognize partially mutated versions of the antigen. That's the affinity maturation part.
So when you get a booster (or a breakthrough infection) your immune system kicks into gear again but now it produces a broader range of antibodies. In addition the number of antibodies produced from the booster is quantitatively much larger than from the first vaccine. So with a booster you end up with more antibodies but also a larger variety of antibodies that can recognize different features of the spike protein (including features that are consistent between variants).
That's my understand at least but I am not an immunologist.
> So when you get a booster (or a breakthrough infection) your immune system kicks into gear again but now it produces a broader range of antibodies.
Would/could it not also be the case for exposure to the virus that doesn't result in a breakthrough infection i.e. the body detects it and fights it off successfully? (I daresay you didn't mean to imply that, just checking.)
Maybe it is less about it being the 2nd or 3rd shot and more about how recently you received your last shot? I got my 2nd shot 7 months ago and we've already heard that protection fades over time, so maybe the booster just works because it boosts, not because it is really any different than my 2nd shot.
Firstly, YMMV, different people got different separations of different vaccines. The US doing Pfizer 3 weeks apart was the fastest. The UK gave out AZ and Pfizer. First at a 12 week interval, then shortened to 8 weeks
The question is: too quickly for what? My understanding is that
a) If the goal was optimal immunity in the longer term then yes, it might be overly quick.
b) But if the goal was fighting the raging pandemic that needed urgent actions right now as "the house is on fire", and you have a lot of vaccine doses, then no, maybe not too fast.
Finally, a lot of vaccine courses require more than 2 doses, separated by more than a couple of months. UK standard childhood vaccination schedule for instance. "Polio" is in there 5 times. Polio is a memory, but only because because to this day they don't mess around with vaccinating against it
I wonder if that's a factor in the Pfizer/BioNTech vs Moderna performance. Moderna had a higher dosage, but it was also 4 weeks between doses instead of 3.
If you assume an unlimited supply of vaccine then the shorter dose interval gets everybody to good level of sterilizing immunity as quickly as possible.
Yep. if you need to fight against a raging pandemic, then quickly as possible (as quickly as is tested to be safe, quickly as makes a significant difference) is the over-riding concern.
That implies we thought about it in the US, but we didn't really, and our public health people seem to be completely inflexible about everything. The schedule we used for vaccines is just what was done for their trials.
> The schedule we used for vaccines is just what was done for their trials.
There is a reason for that - what's being deployed is what has been tested. You could work out an optimal schedule, but that might take years of trials, and meanwhile people are dying.
My response was with respect to maximizing immuno response following vaccination. There is some evidence that larger spacing between doses increases response.
Because of the way your immune system works. Vaccines aren't medicine, they work by provoking an immune response. What happens after that immune response is triggered is way more complicated than just "molecule X get response Y", there are multiple stages of responses, and the deeper, longer span ones create a resilience against mutations as well.
It is extremely common for a proper vaccination regimen to require multiple doses, and it has entirely to do with how the immune system works.
From what I understand, the immune system has some capacity to anticipate mutations. The most basic function of antibodies is to stick to and neutralize the target, in this case the spike protein that the mRNA vaccine presents to the immune system via producing some copies in muscle cells. But the immune system doesn't just produce exact form-fitting duplicate antibodies, it also has something like a biological "fuzzer" that also produces antibodies to target anticipated mutations to its main target, the spike protein. Each time this system gets stimulated, it not only makes more antibodies and more memory cells to produce them, it also runs some more anticipatory mutations. So in aggregate, hopefully the increased quantity plus maturation of these various antibody tweaks produce enough antibodies that stick well enough to the virus to incapacitate or slow it down so that the other aspects of the immune system have time to react instead of getting overwhelmed. And it makes sense to have an antibody arms race like this since viruses mutate so fast. Obviously, this doesn't always work and viruses frequently out-mutate the immune memory, but the immune system is pretty smart.
By the way, if there are any actual scientists here that spot some atrocious mistake I've made describing this, please let me know. I find it really interesting to learn about but I'm certainly no expert.
Unfortunately as a result of original antigenic sin, the fact that the immune system has been trained for by a vaccine for a certain strain means that the body will respond to that strain, likely unable to mount a new defence for the different strain.
Mutations in spike proteins don’t completely change it’s shape so they render a percentage of antibodies infective vs that specific strain. A boosted immune response can therefore be less efficient but still useful.
To simplify, Vaccines provide long term protection because the immune system builds infrastructure to rapidly create antibodies after infection cutting days off of the immune response. That’s huge because the virus has less time to replicate in your body. Vaccines use multiple injections to increase how much infrastructure is built and the number of types of antibodies being produced. Also this infrastructure decays over time if you never see the strain again.
However, in the short term your body reacts like it’s infected actually flooding the body with the appropriate antibodies. This isn’t sustainable but can crush most infections before they go anywhere. Kind of a bonus turbo mode which can be really helpful if your say going to treat people infected with the disease.
The CEO of BioNTech said they don't know for sure but speculated that memory B cells may keep hypermutating after a third shot which could result in the improved effectiveness against Omicron. Or that's what I understood with my very rudimentary knowledge of biology.
After exposure to a pathogen the levels your body starts evolving antibodies against it. It also quickly ramps up antibody production, but ramps that down over time without additional exposure.
Having had a more recent jab will mean a higher quantities of antibodies. But more vaccinations also means your body has done more cycles of evolving better targeted antibodies against the threat. I assume that there's a certain level of diminishing return to the second factor, as well as questions about how much the extra work translates against a new variant. But the second effect exists alongside the first.
One of the theories is that the booster raises the levels of neutralizing antibodies. While the antibodies against the original strain don't work as well against Omicron, having more of them does help.
Vaccines can last your entire lifetime, but their effectiveness decays over time it largely depends on the disease and your risk of infection. Booster shots for various vaccines have been common for example, it’s recommended people take a Tdap booster every 10 years, Tetanus every 4-6 etc.
The flu vaccine is a special case as it’s changed every year.
In the original use of the vaccina virus against variola (smallpox) infection, symptomatic smallpox could present after vaccina exposoure of at least five years past.
"Smallpox vaccination provides a high level of immunity for three to five years and decreasing immunity thereafter. If a person is vaccinated again later, the immunity lasts even longer. Studies of smallpox cases in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated that the fatality rate among persons vaccinated less than 10 years before exposure was 1.3 percent; it was 7 percent among those vaccinated 11 to 20 years prior, and 11 percent among those vaccinated 20 or more years before infection. By contrast, 52 percent of unvaccinated persons died."
> Is it not just timing? I thought the effectiveness of the vaccines only lasted around 6 months
No, it is not (just) timing.
"Three doses gives better protection than two doses ever did" (1)
Immune response is very complex (2) and we're not experts; but we should not measure it in just 1 number: that gives the impression that the response is a range from "high alert for this recent threat" through to "threat forgotten" - effectiveness did not last that long.
There are there are other states as well when the threat is "on file" in the immune memory. Another exposure months later influences this process. My guess is that the evolved heuristic is that "a threat that recurs more is worth remembering better".
My understanding is that they've studied people with 2 vs. 3 shots, both groups having received their most recent shot in a similar timeframe to account for that.
If I had to guess, I would expect another anti-COVID jab in 2022. I expect 1 injection in 2022, maybe in autumn, of a mRNA vaccine, against a strain such as Omicron, that is not original COVID-19-alpha. Not a firm prediction, just a guess at what's IMHO most likely.
You really think the CDC and other govt and NGO organizations, as an international coordinated group effort, are in bed with pharma companies, plotting with them to falsify data and craft false recommendations, just so those farma companies can make more $$? I mean, I actually do think that pharma companies are vile, have successfully gained significant regulatory capture, and can influence policy through their own messaging and lobbying, but this wouldn't be influence, this would be coordinated and crafted disinformation across many many parties, most of whom don't work for pharma at all.
Honestly this theory seems like absolute crazy talk. Especially when perfectly reasonable explanations exist like the fact that immunity from vaccines wanes over time.
When given option 1 (crazy, complicated, far fetched, zero evidence) and option 2 (simple, makes sense, lots of independent scientific parties agreeing), and you pick options 2... ???? I'm confused about how you pick #1.
It’s a valid opinion. The principle is regulatory capture and it happens when a regulatory agency isn’t competent and effective enough to remain independent in its acquisition and evaluation of knowledge. Likewise, the “capturing” is not malicious but happens when the pharmaceutical company persuasive over time, or, in extreme situations, when it appears to have the only solution. This can be exacerbated by inherent limitations to the industry in question, e.g. the difficulty of conducting long-term medical trials in an emergency. Regulatory capture is a natural drift and so believing it has occurred does not require believing in a conspiracy.
(I haven’t studied whether it’s happened in the case of Pfizer boosters.)
In the case of covid vaccines there's plenty of real world data and lots of governments, universities, etc. running different studies all the time. Pfizer would be stupid to fake some initial data because it would be very quickly found out once real world results didn't stack up. For example, this thread you're commenting in is about research from a prestigious London university which found 3 jabs provides better protection than 2.
It wouldn't shock me at all to find out examples of pharma companies including Pfizer acting that way, but in this particular case of Covid vaccines there is evidence and plenty of reason to believe that it's not the case and you don't have any counter evidence, so no it's not a reasonable opinion it's just a conspiracy theory.
For sure. I don't think regulatory capture would be about faking data, rather, interpretation to the end of best improving public health (in this case) at the appropriate cost. Again, theoretically.
Don't think of it as a top-down conspiracy. Think of it as an alignment of perverse incentives.
New variant comes out, CDC is pressed to propose a solution. Pharma companies come in and say "here's a study we did ourselves showing that our own product provides some improvement." CDC recommends pharma product for lack of any better ideas.
You can reasonably imagine getting this result whether or not the booster actually provides more than a marginal improvement.
Are all these studies and conversations from or led by pharma outsiders? If so can you provide any evidence of that? I mean it sounds like people are starting with a strongly held belief that there is a conspiracy and everyone is evil/corrupt (true of pharma I admit), then accepting, rejecting, and constructing arguments and evidence just to suit their preexisting beliefs which in turn have simply been constructed to serve their own goals and world views. Whew, well maybe this theory of why people believe what they do about covid and govt is me constructing self serving conspiracies. Shit is complex, but yeah this is my theory because otherwise I'm completely baffled that mostly smart people seem to be acting so completely irrationally.
You start off with a small group of "vaccines cause autism" crackpots, and they're irrelevant. Because vaccines still cause R < 1 if 90+% of people get them even if some single digit percentage of crackpots refuse.
But the crackpots are really loud and refuse to be defeated by science or logic. So some genius decides that what we need to own the refuseniks are vaccine mandates.
From a human psychology perspective, this was an incredibly bad idea. Because now you've gone from fighting seven lizardmen crackpots to fighting millions of regular people who don't believe in non-consensual medical treatment and can point to a long list of historical precedent for why that's a bad idea.
They literally changed the dictionary definition of "anti-vaxxer" to include people who oppose vaccine mandates:
So now that you've put millions of people on "the other side," they are, by human nature, going to follow confirmation bias into being more likely to believe anything that helps "their side." So now large numbers of people start to believe that vaccines are dangerous and people should be afraid of getting them and they're less effective than claimed and they're only getting pushed by greedy pharma companies to make money, because that's what helps "their side" so they're more inclined to believe that it's true.
Conversely, the other side dismisses the possibility that any of those things are true for the same reason, even if some of them might be.
Yup. I'm twice vaccinated but still labeled as an anti-vaxxer because I show skepticism towards for example vaccinating young kids and I'm outright against vaccine mandates, to the point where I will refuse any boosters just out of principle.
> You really think the CDC and other govt and NGO organizations, as an international coordinated group effort, are in bed with pharma companies, plotting with them to craft false recommendations, just so those farma companies can make more $$?
You believe this based on what real world evidence? Or is it just your feelings?
Because if you're not using logic to take your current position then it'll be impossible to use logic to convince you otherwise and nobody should waste their time.
Perhaps, but without any actual statistics or expert claims to back it up, this doesn't seem to me a sound rationale against which to take risks with our health.
Agreed. Came right from the CEO. What else was he suppposed to say? "Skip the booster, it barely helps."? Imagine the public panic, as well as the stock market panic.
This article briefly mentions SARS-CoV-2, but at length it discusses Ebola and others quite a bit more. This article isn't about what happened with COVID-19, but about whether we should have BL4 labs at all.
In my opinion, we absolutely should. Awful diseases like Ebola are effective at what they do, so they're great places to learn about molecular biology and genetics. It seems feasible that we can manage the risk well enough to get a net expected benefit.
I love this idea, particularly empowering people to move without feeling like they need electrical assistance.
If this is to become a widespread product, I think it needs to address two linked issues:
(a) the product appears to be tuned to the specific weight of an individual, so that the counterweights/springs are neutral in use. Changing between individuals (or changing weight should the individual gain/lose weight) should be easy to do and hopefully transparent.
(b) the product can't be accessed if it is on a different floor. Without the weight of a user, if unlocked, it would skyrocket upwards. I don't want to lock into the paradigms of an elevator, but the user needs to be able to access the product even if another user moved it.
Unfortunately, the only thought I have to solve these issues is to electrify it, or perhaps a clever hydraulic system. In any case, I think with batteries, it need not consume power from the grid.
While electric or hydraulic would be the easy way to make it move on its own when it's on the wrong floor, but not the only way. I'm sure that a system with a rope, pulley, and latching could be used to move it up or down just fine, albeit a bit more slowly. For moving from the higher to the lower level, one could design a setup so it just ratchets itself down with gravity, just clicking down a few cm at a time instead of just releasing and falling down, and this could also serve as a bit of a safe/speedy descent mode if the user can't do the whole motion one day. For ascending, just releasing the catch and pulling up on a pully/winch with a ratcheting mechanism would get it up there fine.
I really like these designers' ethos of not using electricity, and it'd be best to keep that intact as capabilities are added.
I think it currently stores energy in a spring, hence helping the user go up and recovering energy on the way down.
I was just suggesting that if the energy can be stored in a battery or hydraulic accumulator, it's easier to change the "counterweight" force. In both cases, I think it can be done without any net assistance from the electrical grid.
Legally, I think there's not a problem with even the strictest interpretation of "you need this, but we aren't paying for it". In many small business manufacturing settings, the typical arrangement is that operators buy their own toolboxes without reimbursement (i.e. wrenches, screwdrivers, even endmills). Strikes me as a dumb way to scare away potential workers, but alas I don't make the rules.
I've worked as a mechanic in the distant past, at a muffler and brake chain. The shop-provided tools were the most neglected and carelessly handled, often unable to even be found (the torque limiting sticks for safely reinstalling lug nuts w/impact in particular were always MIA).
It's probably desirable to have the employees put some skin in the game for a variety of reasons. Not only will they care for their tools more, but they'll use them more appropriately, not destructively in the wrong applications. What's good for the tools is likely good for the quality of work/outcomes.
I do understand having skin in the game, but at the same time it pushes away candidates, particularly during this labor shortage[1]. And it has disparate racial impact, because oppressed minorities are less likely to have the finances to invest in their own tools.
My thought is that any good company should be able to create emotional skin in the game (i.e. caring) without needing financial skin in the game. If a company isn't there, it needs to sell its mission better and link the availability of tools to that mission.
[1] if you subscribe to the view that there is no shortage but only an unwillingness to pay fair wages (which is totally valid if there are no upfront costs to getting a job), consider that after months of losing savings to a pandemic, candidates may literally not have the cash to buy tools needed for a new job, so in this case it is truly a shortage of candidates with the ability to get the tools
What jobs are you imagining have such difficult/steep tool requirements?
My experience was auto-mechanic, and that strikes me as exceptionally high in the required tools department. They were willing to put up with my being tool-less for like two years before replacing me when an old-timer showed up looking for work, with a freezer sized toolbox in the bed of his truck, and I was clearly not committed to the career having still not invested in even a toolbox.
Construction workers and framing carpenters can start out with very little. A lot of the work is just labor. Back when my dad owned a concrete construction company he would bring most of the durable larger tools in quantity.. stuff like sledge hammers, pickaxes, shovels, those were shared. But the individuals were expected to bring a hammer for nailing/disassembling the framing, and steel-toe boots for OSHA compliance b.s. If you started out without even a hammer you'd just be a grunt then buy a hammer a week later, though someone would probably loan you one if you were that destitute. I think there were more barriers in the area of the union and trade school requirements, but not for a laborer AFAIK.
This also applies to wardrobe in nearly every job — professional clothing can be arbitrarily expensive. Even retail workers usually have buy their own plain clothes in the one allowable color.
The flip side of workers taking better care of their own tools is that their tools also actually get used.
When I worked construction (many years ago) you could always spot an inexperienced bullshitter who showed up looking for work on the crew by the fact that his tools would be all shiny and new.
I guess the pro tip there is that if you don't have much experience and want to work construction, take your brand-new tools and beat up on them a little bit before going to look for work. :-)
Why do you feel bad about it? Sounds like you're reducing overall CO2 emissions. I understand that you are the "reader" in this article, but if you did start heating your own apartment then demonstrably everyone would be worse off (except your neighbors, who might need marginally less heating)
I think they often benefit one specific person in the company, who happens to be the decision maker, and don't hurt the overall company obviously enough that anyone stops them.
