Cheat codes for life

In computer games, a “cheat code” is a special code or series of steps that gives you extra powers in the game. In real life, here are a whole bunch of techniques that can give you extra powers. Some examples (with more details in the article):

When you get lots of rejections you stop fearing it. This makes you unstoppable.
The world wants you to be normal. F*ck being normal. That’s when being extraordinary becomes impossible.
Working for yourself means you can earn less income than a normal salary and still make more due to tax reasons.
Everything in life has a tax. Example: attracting a few haters is the tax on being a writer. Pay the tax and don’t complain.
Not knowing what to do and taking action anyway is a superpower.
The person we lie to the most is ourselves.
Experiment in life so you take a few risks. A risk that can’t bankrupt you is a good one.

https://medium.com/mind-cafe/cheat-codes-for-life-i-know-at-36-that-i-wish-i-knew-at-26-294f6e865db5.

View at Medium.com

Candy corn tweets

Huffington Post has thoughtfully collected tweets about candy corn for us, just in time for Halloween: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/candy-corn-tweets_l_63471414e4b08e0e607f66bd. (You’ll have to click the link to the actual tweet for some of them.) Some examples:

Me: Sugar is evil and I’m not putting that shit in my body.
Also me: IT’S CANDY CORN SEASON LET’S SNORT SOME

🌽🌽🌽

FACT: Candy corn is made out of melted down traffic cones.

🌽🌽🌽

Candy corn is the gateway candy to black licorice.

And…

The most important part of not liking candy corn is telling people.

CRISPR versus AIDS

AIDS is a particularly difficult infection to treat because it actually infiltrates, and becomes part of, the patient’s own DNA. It’s not easy to edit our own genetic blueprint. But we have new techniques…

In 2019, researchers at Temple University and the University of Nebraska found that using Crispr to delete those regions eliminated HIV from the genomes of rats and mice. A year later, the Temple group also showed that the approach safely removed viral DNA from macaques with SIV, the monkey version of HIV…

The Excision trial will eventually enroll nine participants and test three dosage amounts to determine which is most effective.

Layperson-friendly article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/a-bold-effort-to-cure-hiv-using-crispr/.

Detailed report: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19821-7.

By the way, CRISPR techniques (CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) are something we learned by studying bacteria, which can be attacked by viruses. They evolved a way to recognize and destroy viral genetic codes, a crude immune system. Researchers first discovered the repeats in 1987 (see Wikipedia), and studied these for years, eventually resulting in a Nobel Chemistry Prize in 2020 for Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.