Beryl

joined 2 years ago
[–] Beryl 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

That's not soup, that's pasta with extra sauce.

[–] Beryl 7 points 8 months ago

Not to defend Musk, but the payout would be in stock options, so it wouldn't really cost Tesla any cash. But that volume of new shares would probably devaluate other shareholders' portfolio even faster that Musk's erratic leadership already has in the last couple years.

Besides, NO ONE deserves this kind of money. Ever. This level of payout shouldn't be normalized. I mean the guy doesn't even work full time for that company !

[–] Beryl 64 points 8 months ago (3 children)

That's an awfully worded title

[–] Beryl 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The article you linked to is about suppressyn, an originally viral protein that's been integrated in human DNA and is as far as I know only expressed in placenta. There suppressyn helps fight viral infections by competing with some families of viruses for the binding of a membrane receptor (ASCT2) that these viruses use as a way to recognize and attach themselves to target cells.

It seems NCLDV infects unicellular algae and protists, with at least some of the family members relying on phagocytosis by the host, and many of them displaying fibrils on their particles. And though the binding mechanisms probably differ between different viruses of the NCLDV family, I really doubt these host organisms express ASCT2.

[–] Beryl 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Nope, I looked at DNA length, that's what the kb or Mb in my previous post is about. Kb stands for kilobases, each base or nucleotide being one of those A, T, C and G that constitute DNA. Biologists mesure the size of a genome by counting these bases. Average size for a virus is around 10,000 bases or 10kb (sources say 7-20kb) and they don't get much smaller than 3.5kb.

[–] Beryl 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Nope, sorry. That's not how immunity works.

[–] Beryl 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Won't you please think of the shareholders?

[–] Beryl 36 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (8 children)

According to the paper this article is based on, the family of viruses they study, called NCLDV (for NucleoCytoplasmic Large DNA Viruses), are about 1 μm in diameter, which would indeed put them up there with the largest viruses like Pandoravirus or Pithovirus, which are also around the micrometer mark, and I believe are also part of the NCLDV phylum.

Those viruses are about the size of a bacterium. In fact they are so large that they weren't immediately identified as viruses. Here's something to give you a sense of the size of common viruses :

However, I don't know how they come up with that 1500x factor (which doesn't appear in the source paper), since in size, it's more like 10x bigger than your average virus (~100nm). Even considering genome size, common viruses genomes are about 10 kb or so, wheras Pandoravirus is the biggest at 2.5Mb. So that would be closer to a 250x factor at best.

For reference, SARS-CoV2 (of COVID-19 fame) is about 100nm in diameter and has a genome size of 30kb.

[–] Beryl 10 points 8 months ago

Much better title than the clickbaity one they went with for the video.

[–] Beryl 5 points 8 months ago

Exactly. Or maybe inject the bleach directly in the body, as some of the most stable geniuses have suggested.

[–] Beryl 25 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

TL,DR : CO2 concentration in air is easily measured and has been used as a proxy to monitor the level of potentially infectious particle people would release in a room while breathing. The idea is the more people breathe, the more they release CO2 and also possibly infectious particles.

It turns out that CO2 also plays an important role in buffering the pH of the aerosolized particles in which viruses like SARS-CoV2 travel from one person to the next. Dissolved CO2 is slightly acidic and prevents the particles from becoming too basic, which would destroy the virions. Thus higher CO2 concentrations in ambient air significantly extend the survival of the airborne virus and therefore the average time these particles remain infectious.

A CO2 concentration of just 800ppm (parts per million), while usually considered a value consistent with a well ventilated room, is nevertheless enough to significantly extend the lifespan of viruses. This means we should strive to lower CO2 concentrations in rooms as much as we can during epidemics.

[–] Beryl 30 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

Economics actually says it's far cheaper overall to stop polluting right now than trying to mitigate it in the distant future. But that goes against the short-termism our economic indicators are built around. The line must go up, and shareholders need their maximized profit next quarter. Meanwhile pollution will only become more of a problem the further away in the future you look. And that sounds like a problem for future us.

view more: ‹ prev next ›