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.

The Quest for Fuel in World War II

An interesting (to me, at least) overview of how vital oil was in all theaters of WWII.

Millions of pages have been written about the tactics and strategies of World War II, but relatively little about how almost every major decision of that conflict was conditioned by the need for one commodity without which no modern army can operate – oil.

You may not be aware of these tidbits (emphasis mine):

Though it varied from campaign to campaign and unit to unit, as much as 70 percent of German supply transport remained horse-drawn throughout the war. There were 5,375 horses assigned to each infantry division. In fact, as the war dragged on and petroleum became even more critical, horses became more important to the German war effort rather than less.
…
An appropriate postscript to Japan’s defeated drive for oil occurred shortly after its surrender, when a detachment of U.S. sailors went to arrest Gen. Hideki Tojo for war crimes. He attempted suicide, and it took two hours to find an ambulance with enough fuel to take him to a hospital.

http://www.eiaonline.com/history/bloodforoil.htm. 4,900 words. (By the way, this appears to me in very tiny print. Use the “+” button a few times to enlarge.)

How not to launch

The preliminary report of the investigation indicated that three of the first stage angular velocity sensors, responsible for yaw control, were installed in an incorrect orientation. As the error affected the redundant sensors as well as the primary ones, the rocket was left with no yaw control, which resulted in the failure. Telemetry data also indicated that a pad umbilical had detached prematurely, suggesting that the Proton may have launched several tenths of a second early, before the engines reached full thrust.

Realtime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUhK5vnSigo (1 minute)

Slo-mo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqW0LEcTAYg (2 minutes)

Bellingcat: Why Ukraine is winning the information war

Partly due to “open-source intelligence (OSINT)”:

In 2014 (Eliot) Higgins used Kickstarter to found Bellingcat (the name refers to resourceful mice tying a bell to a cat), a nonprofit, online collective dedicated to “a new field, one that connects journalism and rights advocacy and crime investigation.” Three days after its launch, a Malaysian passenger jet was shot down over the part of Ukraine held by Russian troops. Bellingcat proved the culprit was a Russian surface-to-air missile, by using largely the same array of tools—including Google Earth, the social media posts of Russian soldiers, and the passion of Eastern European drivers for posting dashcam videos—that hundreds of volunteer sleuths are now using to document the Russian invasion of Ukraine in granular detail….

In Ukraine, Russia has been outflanked. Its attempts to establish a pretext for invasion by circulating video evidence of purported “atrocities” by Ukraine were exposed as frauds within hours by Bellingcat, fellow OSINT volunteers, and legacy news media outlets that have picked up reporting tools the open-source crowd hands around.

https://time.com/6155869/bellingcat-eliot-higgins-ukraine-open-source-intelligence/. About 3,500 words.

Cure for leukemia?

From February 2022:

Two people with leukemia achieved remission over a decade after being infused with CAR-T cells, immune cells that had been modified in a lab, according to a new study. The findings suggest that this approach could be a long-term therapy for leukemia — and some researchers describe it as a possible cure.
Chimeric antigen receptor or CAR-T cell therapy may be a “curative regimen” for chronic lymphocytic leukemia, according to the researchers, who announced their findings in a news briefing this week. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia accounts for about a quarter of new cases of leukemia.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/02/health/cancer-t-cell-therapy-remission-study/index.html

and discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30192209.

How to reduce Facebook tracking

Let’s face it. You’re not paying for Facebook, right? Therefore you are not the customer. You are the product.

Facebook even tracks you when you are on non-Facebook sites so they can sell your information to advertisers.

Here are seven steps to stop Facebook tracking, starting with the nuclear option. ((Each step has details in the article.))
1. Quit Facebook and Instagram
2. Change these Facebook privacy settings
3. Limit app tracking on your phone
4. Bolster your Web browser
5. Block more app trackers
6. Obscure your email
7. Tell companies to stop selling your data

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/29/stop-facebook-tracking/. About 1,400 words.

Deepfakes

Artificial intelligence programs can modify video to show actors speaking a fluent foreign language…

This AI makes Robert De Niro perform lines in flawless German

…The technology has been used to create fake celebrity porn and damaging revenge-porn clips targeting women. Experts worry that deepfakes showing a famous person in a compromising situation might spread misinformation and sway an election.

Article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/robert-de-niro-speaks-fluent-german-in-taxi-driver-thanks-to-ai/.

Why battery costs have plunged

The average cost of lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars and other products fell by 6 percent (adjusted for inflation) since last year. Since 2010, these costs have declined by an amazing 89 percent.
…Until recently, the high cost of batteries made battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) much more expensive than conventional gasoline-powered cars. But when batteries cost less than $100 per kWh, unsubsidized BEVs will start to be cheaper than conventional cars. At that point, BEVs could start to rapidly gain market share from conventional cars.

Why this has happened, does demand make prices go up or down, upcoming battery technologies, and related points:

https://fullstackeconomics.com/untitled-2/

Making chips: 20,000,000,000,000 parts

That’s twenty trillion. You have no idea how much goes into making a modern microchip.

Long Answer: If a company wants to make the most advanced chips in the world, they need to purchase an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tool from ASML, which has a monopoly…
One EUV tool requires:
5,000 suppliers provide 100,000 parts, 3,000 cables, 40,000 bolts and 2 kilometers of hosing. The tool weighs about 180,000 kilograms (200 tonnes), and ships in 40 containers spread over 20 trucks and three cargo planes…. That is just one tool. To make a chip, a factory needs 200+ tools… The mirrors guiding this light are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimeter.

https://semiliterate.substack.com/p/why-cant-china-just-reverse-engineer. (Note, “BLUF” at the start means “Bottom Line Up Front.”)

Book review: The Checklist Manifesto

Medicine knows too much; even decades of medical training are insufficient for a doctor to know everything…. Patients are subjected to many interventions, most of which are complex and carry some risk; the average ICU patient requires roughly 178 daily care tasks (having worked as an ICU nurse myself, I believe it!), so even getting it perfect 99% of the time leaves an average of about two medical errors per day.

How do humans deal with this complexity? In other areas, especially the field of aviation, one solution is… checklists. And yet implementing these still has issues…

…Part of the change being introduced was a social one: nurses were responsible for documenting that the doctor had carried out each step, and had a new mandate – and backup from management and hospital administration – to chide doctors who forgot items.

Which, it turned out, made all the difference. In the first ten days of the experiment, the line infection rate went from 11% to zero.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dtmmP4YdJEfK9y4Rc/book-review-the-checklist-manifesto. About 1,500 words.