Contramuffin @ Contramuffin @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

There's actually debate over whether America was actually named after Amerigo Vespucci. My understanding is that it was likely just a coincidence that his name is so similar to America. As I understand it, it was actually named after a tribe of native Americans. But native Americans don't pass the Republican scale of whiteness, so they'll probably try to rename America anyways. I'm calling it now: they're going to rename it to Trumpia

wouldn't the obvious answer be cancer

Sure, but that's a bit of a teleological reasoning. Not to mention, there are many ways to avoid cancer without removing stem cells from the vast majority of a species' life history. Beyond that, people are also concerned about what specific mutations led to mammals' inability to keep stem cells around, because this knowledge would directly help with our ability to generate stem cells in the lab.

examples

Intestinal and stomach cancers, for instance, have a lot to do with the stem cells in the intestinal/stomach lining. You can also debate whether the progenitor of skin cells counts as a stem cell. In general though, I think this statement is really just a slightly-more-detailed restatement of the general observation that tissues that experience a lot of turnover are more likely to develop into cancer

That depends on what you're referring to. Quick caveat, I'm not an expert in regenerative biology, but I have studied it somewhat.

The trick is that the healing that you're referring to, it's not really healing in the way that you're imagining it. The skin doesn't really quite grow back in the same way. Instead, there's more collagen than there normally would be (we would then call that scar tissue). In essence, we're not really healing, our bodies are just doing a patchwork fix. The presumed reason is that our bodies figure that it's not going to cause any problems before we die from other causes. This is really quite true of other tissues as well. The liver is known to be able to grow back, but if you look at the microstructures, the regrown stuff is missing a lot of the nuances that the original had. Our bodies expect us to live 70-ish years, and so they don't care about anything that could happen after that.

In order to truly, really regenerate, you'll need stem cells. Some animals are remarkably good at keeping around stem cells and regenerating, but somewhere along the evolutionary line, mammals lost the ability to use stem cells. It's still an ongoing area of research about why this happened and whether we can generate stem cells in the lab and whether we can manipulate stem cells to our benefit. It should also be pointed out though that, by its intrinsic nature, stem cells divide and don't specialize into any roles, so it's very easy for them to go cancerous. In the few spots where mammals do keep stem cells around, their division is very tightly controlled, and even then they are the source of the most common cancers in humans

Vestigial may not be the correct word. We do use our nails quite a lot for finer manipulation of tools

You might need to be more specific on what you're asking

Acrylamide is also a persistent neurotoxin, meaning that it can't be flushed out of your body and any acrylamide that you collect in your body will just continue to collect

Beyond that, it's not even a social concept. People naturally attribute more weight to their first time doing anything. That's not a social pressure or a social concept, that's a logical conclusion of the fact that, till that point in their lives, they have not experienced anything resembling it.

People remember their first time riding a bicycle, their first time leaving home, their first job, etc. Are all of these social constructs too?

No, I'm responding to regular people. Your immune system is way less effective than you think, hence the wrong common sense part.

Not entirely true. Vaccines induce the adaptive immune system, which is slow but precise. Getting sick for real induces the innate immune system, which is god awful and you should not be relying on it. S. pneumoniae causes pneumonia because the innate immune system goes overdrive and kills you before it kills the bacteria. COVID-19 induces cell-innate inflammasome activation and leads to a cytokine storm, which then leads to even more damage to the lungs as the immune cells come in. Both diseases have effective vaccines that do not do anything close to this.

Deadly diseases tend to be deadly not because of the microbe itself, but because the innate immune system overreacts and kills you in the process of fighting off the disease.

Getting vaccinated diminishes the role that the innate immune system plays when you get sick, since the B cells responsible for producing antibodies for the disease are already mature. Having available antibodies also allows the immune system to rely on the complement system, which allows it to detect and kill invading microbes way earlier than otherwise.

The immune system is strong and defends your body against germs.

The immune system works 100% of 50% of the time. Immunology is the best way to convince someone that it's a miracle that they're still alive. Anyways, get vaccinated. Don't rely on your immune system to figure things out

More of an antimeme than a BHJ imo

Oh, that's what those were for? Never knew

Lemmy.world, by political ideology, is most similar to old Reddit. Namely, you're most likely going to find generally-left-of-center people. Several other instances (namely lemmy.ml) are known for being significantly more left-leaning, basically hard communist.

As is tradition for left-leaning people, there's a lot of infighting. .world people think that .ml people are tankies. .ml people think that .world people are corporate bootlickers. Both sides accuse the other of heavy-handed censorship.

Basically, I wouldn't worry about it. It's just your standard leftism infighting.

I think people tend to have a very narrow view of what goes on around them. And frankly, I don't think that's really a bad thing. Everyone does it. It's just a fact of life. But we have to account for it. Talking about big-picture issues doesn't work when people are focused their narrow view of the world. Even if they agree with the issue, they won't be riled up and take action. I think there's 2 takeaways to this:

First, regarding talking to the people around you: narrow your focus. Focus on things that affect them directly, or frame things in a way such that they interpret it in a way that affects them. Don't talk about concentration camps, talk about Trump retroactively rescinding birthright citizenship and how that might affect their lives (especially effective if that person happens to be an ethnic minority or is in a relationship with one). When talking about anti-immigration policies, focus on ICE arresting American citizens because they didn't look American enough. You don't have to convince people of everything, you just have to convince people of enough that they feel personally concerned.

Second, regarding yourself: it's easy to think that all Americans are similar to the people that you're with. Society is a bell curve. You don't need to shift the entire bell curve to the left to exact change. You just need to stretch it out leftward - pull the left leaning people more to the left. Trump didn't win by convincing leftists to be right-leaning, he won by convincing the right-leaning moderates into shifting right. Consider the audience and pick arguments that would be most effective against that particular audience. Be more direct toward more left-leaning people. Republican? Sow seeds of suspicion toward Trump. Moderate? Make them fear for their way of life. Left-leaning moderate? Maybe we should punish the rich. Leftist? Hell yeah socialism baby

She would have had to be Frankenstein if she somehow had her living husband's heart. Taking out the heart does tend to have the property of leading to death

To give more detail: Proton uses a hacky workaround called fsync. Fsync was developed by the Wine developers but was explicitly not merged into Wine because, by their own admission, this is a really hacky workaround and it's definitely not the right way of doing things.

For games, using fsync is far better than not using anything, and so Proton uses fsync. Apparently there's recently been concern that the fsync workaround is going to become a bottleneck in modern games (not entirely sure the reasoning why), and so the Wine developers pushed for the development of NTsync, which is basically fsync if it weren't a hacky workaround. NTsync alleviates the bottleneck that fsync creates, making it more robust, less hacky, and more futureproof.

In short, don't expect any noticeable performance increases, but Proton might work more consistently and it might improve performance for future games

My favorite is spinosaurus! The fact that it is fully aquatic is so interesting!

Only semi /s

I don't understand how what you said isn't burying one's head in the sand

I really liked Porgy. I'm currently doing Divers but I honestly don't really quite know what's going on. There's very few descriptions so I don't really know what things do. I assume the colored icons next to items indicate some sort of elemental ability but I don't know what they are or how they're used

Chubbyemu was talking about how the mushroom is just the fruiting body of the fungus, similar to flowers in a plant. The only purpose of the mushroom is to reproduce and spread spores.

Also, the video was about poisoning by eating too many toxic mushrooms