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HopeOfTheGunblade

@HopeOfTheGunblade@kbin.social

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HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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That's just his hands. That's why he's so sensitive about them.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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I'd be very interested in hearing a hypothesis from you that explains all of the data rather than less than half of it.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Sorry, let me rephrase that and see if it's more easily parsed:

What is it you think is going on here, and how does your explanation explain these three authors' situation?

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Ah. If that's the case, you might want to work on your own phrasing. There's a strong implication in your initial statement that you have a hypothesis, but you wanted to be coy with it, so I attempted to draw you out. I was hoping it was something interesting.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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I don't know how anyone can watch the Quicksilver segments from the X-men movies and not be hot for speed.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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I mean, okay, relatable, but people with superspeed rarely seem to be suffering for using it? I suppose w could be talking about bounded speed, where you get access to superspeed but have to train for it...

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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I already can't concentrate on anything. Checkmate, atheists!

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Born deaf, the 1-year-old boy had never responded to sound or speech before. But after receiving an experimental treatment injected into one of his ears, he started turning his head when his parents called his name. Five months later, he spoke his first words.

The boy is one of six children with a type of hereditary deafness who are part of a gene therapy trial in China. Five of the children can now hear, according to results reported today in the scientific journal The Lancet. The news follows an announcement this week that yet another child born with profound deafness can hear after receiving a similar treatment developed by US drugmaker Eli Lilly.

“It’s remarkable,” says Lawrence Lustig, a hearing loss expert at Columbia University who was not involved in the trial. “We’ve never had a therapy that restores even partial hearing for someone who’s totally deaf other than a cochlear implant.”

The children were all born with a mutation in a gene that makes a protein needed for hearing called otoferlin. We hear things when sound waves in the air cause the thousands of sensory hair cells in our inner ears to vibrate and release a chemical that relays that information to the brain. Otoferlin is necessary for the release of this chemical messenger. Without it, the ear can’t communicate with the brain.

More than half of hearing loss cases in children are due to genetic causes, and otoferlin mutations account for 1 to 8 percent of those, affecting about 200,000 people worldwide.

The treatment the children received works by delivering a working version of the otoferlin gene to the inner ear. The cells of the inner ear then read this gene and produce the protein. In the US and Europe, a handful of these cutting-edge therapies have been approved, including one for a type of inherited blindness. Given just once, they’re designed to correct disease-causing genes—hopefully permanently.

For the deafness treatment, researchers at the Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai collaborated with a team at Mass Ear and Eye, a Harvard-affiliated hospital in Boston.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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To get the new genetic material into cells, they engineered harmless viruses to carry it. Doctors carefully injected a tiny amount of liquid containing the viruses into a part of the children’s inner ears called the cochlea, a spiral-shaped chamber that contains hair cells. The first patient in the trial received the gene therapy in December 2022. Researchers followed the participants, who ranged in age from 1 to 6 years old, for 23 weeks after treatment.

While the gene therapy did not give the children a “normal” level of hearing, they went from not hearing anything under 95 decibels—about as loud as a food processor or motorcycle—to perceiving sounds of around 45 decibels—the level of a typical conversation or the hum of a refrigerator.

“The families are very, very excited,” says Yilai Shu, a head and neck surgeon at the Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University and an author on the paper. For some of the parents, it’s the first time they’ve heard their children say “mama” or “baba” (Chinese for “papa”).

Other children in the study had previously received a cochlear implant in one ear and had already learned to speak. In those cases, doctors injected the gene therapy into their other ear. Cochlear implants are surgically implanted devices that stimulate the auditory nerve to provide a sense of sound to its wearer. The implants don’t reproduce natural hearing, though. The resulting sound can be robotic or distorted. And when they’re switched off, the wearer can’t hear at all.

With gene therapy, researchers are aiming to provide a natural sense of hearing. When they followed up with patients after the injection, they turned off the cochlear implants to assess how well the therapy was working in the children.

“They became more engaged and responsive. It’s like a change of personality,” says Zheng-Yi Chen, an associate scientist at Mass Eye and Ear, who co-led the study.

One child’s hearing didn’t improve at all. One explanation, Shu says, is that the child had preexisting immunity to the type of virus used to carry the new gene into the inner ear cells—meaning the treatment would have been destroyed by their immune system before it could take effect. It’s also possible that the dose was too low to be effective, Lustig says.

Several companies are pursuing gene therapies for this same cause of deafness. Boston-based Akouos, which was acquired by Eli Lilly in 2022, has treated two subjects in a clinical trial that began last year. Eli Lilly announced this week that one of those participants, an 11-year-old boy, could hear within 30 days of receiving an otoferlin gene therapy.

And in October, Regeneron’s Decibel Therapeutics in Boston reported improved auditory responses in one patient as part of an ongoing clinical trial. Otovia Therapeutics in China and Sensorion of France are working on similar treatments. The Fudan University trial reported today

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Biden told rich donors, "If you pay more in taxes, nothing will fundamentally change." That is, the union will not fall because they didn't get tax cuts. Don't be disingenuous about what actually happened.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Thanks for the exact specific quote. I got lazy.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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You know, I'm even willing to let it have all of December. But any incursion before the last day of November needs to be met with swift and severe retaliation. Scorched pine tree shit.

Is there a scientific ,logical or theoratical answer to the "what comes first chicken or egg question ? I know it's suppposed to be a paradox but i wanted to know if there is one. if there is share ?

EDIT : It seems as no one understood what i was talking about and maybe its my fault for not elaborating . I always thought chicken was a metaphor for this paradox and not really meaning chicken as a specific spiece . So my question is how did the ancestor of chicken came to be if it was born (egg) wouldn't it need a parent or...

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Eggs existed long before the chicken, or the species that gave birth to the chicken. What's in that egg doesn't matter, when it's the latest in a long line of eggs, the contents of this egg can't precede eggs.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Mmm, hungwy!

Yes, it's bad lip reading not real, but it's real in my heart, dammit!

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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So, he was able to make Florida pretty awful for non cis het people; he actually cared to forward the culture war and people get hurt in war. I became less afraid of him as a candidate when Disney stripped the power from the board he took over and he very obviously with his dick in a vise opted to tighten the vice.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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I approve of this humorous framing.

‘I’m not ready, brother’: US man to be put to death months after botched execution attempt ( www.theguardian.com )

Kenneth Smith, 58, is facing execution by an untested method that has never before been used in capital punishment in the US. It’s a technique that has been rejected on ethical grounds by veterinarians for the euthanasia of most animals other than pigs: death by nitrogen gas.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Okay so this article, and the one it links back to, make much of the "rejected by veterinarians" line, but it's incredibly unclear as to why. Carbon dioxide would be an awful way to go, but I don't understand why, of someone is going to be killed (and not just killed but having their pattern erased when it could be preserved, known time of death in a controlled facility is a best case for cryo), nitrogen hypoxia is considered bad instead of a best option. Can someone explain this? As I understand it your get giddy and happy, then pass out, then die. Why is that unethical, if you've already decided the killing is ethical?

Fox News Isn’t a Kingmaker. If it were, Ron DeSantis would be the Republican front-runner ( www.theatlantic.com )

As the 2024 Republican presidential field began to stir three years ago, Fox News tried to make Ron DeSantis happen. From the week of the 2020 election through February 2021, the network invited DeSantis to appear 113 times, or almost once a day, according to the Tampa Bay Times. In an email uncovered by that newspaper, one Fox...

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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That...

Was the argument? That instead of making DeSantis, Fox followed the viewers?

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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No I mean... your argument is the post. So if it's spurious, so is your post.

A War on Blue America. In a second term, Trump would punish the cities and states that don’t support him ( www.theatlantic.com )

During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president—with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends—to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out...

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Can you unpack that a little? What exactly was done by Joe Biden personally, that you are calling "direct genocide", please?

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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They didn't even give him rope! The man got his own damn rope manufactured in China, planted a seed, watered it for 20 years, and then hung himself!

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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It was as interesting as observing that a handgun kills cancer cells, and have we tried that? It was never not incredibly dumb.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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A lot of people went doctor shopping to get it. It wasn't just happenstance that most of the people who died here got it.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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I've ever had this thought. The problem is that over time people would be born into those places, and educated into being terrified of other places and "consensual" to their ongoing abuse, and that wouldn't be at all okay.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Yes, only significantly more so.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Fiction, unlike reality, must be believable. Reality is under no such obligation.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Well, they still have to make it stick.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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I'm always impressed at the people who think that:

The president can do whatever the fuck he wants

Joe Biden, the president, cannot prosecute Donald Trump

It's a wild pair of thoughts to hold.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Well, I certainly won't be voting for Hunter Biden!

What was he running for, again?

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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Not left, or right, but forward! It's a scam, mate. Same as no labels.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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I watched interview on mainstream media about the forward party. Yang refused to be nailed to any position, and wouldn't say that maybe self-described Nazis shouldn't have a place in his party. So, it wasn't that the establishment is trying to hide it, they just aren't a thing of any substance.

HopeOfTheGunblade ,
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We know that, and we hate it, but that doesn't make the problem go away. Shit sucks for us, too, and getting yelled at for it doesn't make anything better. It's why a lot of us will just limit our circles to people who understand from direct experience, and not make plans with people who don't have the 'flake' trait.

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