Great art isn't necessarily about popularity / wide appeal, though. In fact, the art that isn't of wide, general appeal, is what stands to benefit the most from this kind of benefit.
Both are broad spectrum antivirals, but completely different mechanism.
DRACO "is a chimeric protein with one domain that binds to viral double stranded RNA (dsRNA) and a second domain that induces apoptosis when two or more DRACOs crosslink on the same dsRNA." (Ridder et al 2011). This article is about packaging mRNA for a set of 10 interferon-stimulated genes that express multiple proteins that target various stages of viral replication.
When you get a viral infection, immune cells make a signalling protein called a IFN-1 (Type I Interferon) cytokine, and this flips a boolean flag to True on a bunch of genes (interferon-stimulated genes or ISGs) that produce a bunch of proteins (hundreds) that control the infection. ISG15 is one of them and its role appears to be to downregulate and to limit the inflammation.
The paper title refers to a ISG15 deficiency, meaning if you are dificient in ISG15 that inflamation limitation goes away. But the paper is actually about how in people that naturally have a ISG15 deficiency, there is an always-on low level expression of some of these pro-inflamation genes. So they take that as a safe level.
The did RNA sequencing on experimental ISG15 deficient cells and from heatlhy individuals, identified the mutations, narrowed down to 10 genes (antiviral ones not inhibitors) that in combination significantly inhibited viral replication. They stuck the RNA for such genes in lipid nanoparticles such that they enter host cells, whose ribosomes happily read the RNA like a turing head reads a tape in base 20 and produce proteins encoded by these genes, similar to how the mRNA vaccine works.
So why not dose with the IFN-I directly? Three referenced papers show its "poorly tolerated with significant side effects" and all those downregulators that get expressed limit the inflammation response.
Disclaimer: IANAB (not a biologist) corrections might be due..
This is typical of "why not just one drug/treatment" for something big like viruses, cancer, etc.
I think we'll never have this "one shot," but continue to find tailored treatments for individual conditions. There's no way out of this complexity with "one simple trick," which seems really appealing to the people who determine what gets popular in social media and seemingly politics now. Its just going to be boring and grueling academia and medical trials that are hard for the layperson to understand, hence the important of funding these programs. The recent right-wing election wins and thus a right-wing government cutting all manner of medical grants is supported by the "one weird trick" crowd. Hopefully, the USA will have better leadership in the future to get us back to actual science and to find actual new treatments.
Already, even on HN, the top comments are conspiracy-culture coded, "but, but this one company bought the patent and disappeared with it!" Sigh.
Cool. Could we train a "potential oncoprotein" classifier on Orthrus embeddings? IMO self serve diagnosis and detection is a far larger market than synthesis.
This is a really interesting direction. There is this big field of Cell Free (cfRNA) cancer detection. We talked to a few people in the field and think that embedding sequences for this direction could be really valuable. One challenge here is that it's hard to set up evaluation tasks since the public data is scarce
Maybe we can crowd source data. My platform, currently in beta, has ai assistants for compute infrastructure and biology and will soon let people to do self serve research on their own omics data using models like yours. So there could be a monetization path too if enough people start looking their own cell data (which they might once they fully understand the risks of engineered pathogens, and certainly will when the risks materialize and start hitting home). Email in bio if you want to brainstorm.
That would be really cool. Navigating SRA and mining out reasonable $ relevant tasks is a huge bottleneck.
I find it takes a large amount of effort to parse what the authors are doing, whether the data is high quality, and how to pre-process it in a way that makes sense for the task at hand.
Would love to chat more about how you're thinking of evaluating quality of these agents.
> It added 2,300+ satellites in the one year period ending Jun 2025.
Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting already. Do not quote me on this, but its a insane amount (i though it was around 2k) of the first generation that they are deorbiting. If there is a issue, its not the amount of sats in space, but more the insane amount of deorbiting StarLink is doing.
Starlink wanted to put up insane numbers, but a lot of their fights contain a large percentage of replacement sats.
And they are getting bigger ... v1.5 is like 300kg, the v2.0 mini (ironic as its far from mini compared to its predecessors) are 800kg.
So before StarLink launched 60x v1.5's but now they are doing 21x v2.0 Mini's per launch.
The technology has been improving a lot, allowing for a lot more capacity per satellite. Not sure when they start launching v3's but those have like 3x the capacity for inner connects/ground stations and can go up to 1Gbit speeds (compared to the v2's who are again much more capable then multiple v1.5s).
So what we are seeing is less satellites per launch but more capacity per sat. This year is the last year that they are doing mass 1.5 launches, its all now going to the v2.0 "mini" (so 3x less sats).
Satellite constellations in LEO tend to have short design lives of 5 years or so, but the net change in operating satellites since that 2021 graphic is huge: Starlink alone has over 8000 in orbit now (plus another 1200 deorbited). The later generations of Starlink are bigger, but the launch cadence increases...
Which was a very outdated number even back when this article was published two years ago
I'm not sure what the exact number was in 2023, but according to [1] it was 6718 at the end of 2022. With that kind of growth, quoting two year old numbers isn't all that helpful
Not sure if number of satellites matters so much at this point. As India has already demonstrated that they can launch 100s of them on one rocket. Which means they can very cheaply put them into space as needed.
If you are trying to create satellite internet in low earth orbit (for reduced ping/latency) the satellite moves faster than the earth spins, and the user on the ground loses point to point contact. So there has to be another satellite already over the horizon before the first one goes out of view. Wiki says Starlink sats travel at about 340 miles above the ground.
The easiest alternative to implement is having the satellites in a geostationary orbit so that they are always above a single spot. The altitude necessary for this is higher than 20k miles, and results in very bad ping/latency. Inmarsat is one of these, and I had a chance to use it in the past. It was slow and laggy, as the realities of physics would suggest.
So more satellites means more potential coverage of the globe, or increased capacity over existing coverage regions, or both. It seems very important.
The Indian satellites in the article weighed on average around 6 kilograms. A starlink satellite weighs 227 kg. You can put more telecom equipment in 227 kg than in 6kg. A better metric than #of satellites is probably total mass of satellites, to make broad comparisons more meaningful.
This really isn't all that much if you pause to consider it. For example. Lets take the larger possible number of 7500 plus 2,300 plus the 4,550 satellites noted up to 2021. That's a total of just under 15,000 satellites. Most of those are fairly small objects, at the most about the size of a typical mini-van, with most being quite a bit smaller than that.
Now, all of this is spread over a three-dimensional topography that's much larger than the total surface area of the Earth, and because their orbits are, as mentioned, three-dimensionally occupying various altitudes, the size of the total topography they move through is enormously larger than just one single surface area in square kilometers of a single hypothetical sphere X km above the Earth's surface. In the least case, even if all existing orbital satellites were stationed at the lowest possible orbital altitude, that's still quite a bit bigger than the 509 600 000 square km of the Earth's total surface. (too lazy to calculate the specific increment in this moment)
Across all of that, just 15,000 objects that are individually smaller than your average family sedan.
For comparison, the island of Manhattan has approximately 116,000 buildings crammed into it. If you spread those more or less equi-distantly from each other across the whole of the Earth's surface, water or air, there'd still be a tremendous amount of empty space between them. That's nearly 10 times as many objects individually much larger than any human satellite, across a much smaller surface area than what's occupied by our orbital satellites.
(Yes, I know we also have a shit-load of other inert junk zipping around up there at tens of thousands of KM per hour, but even if that stuff, most of which is very tiny, were included, we're still talking about an enormous amount of empty space between objects)
But apart from all the other stuff you mention, you’re missing an important point: these things move. And unless all objects are synchronized (which they are not) they occupy a whole orbit, not only their actual volume. If two orbits intersect, the objects occupying those will eventually collide.
Yes. This is the idea behind Kessler Syndrome - that the accumulation of clutter in Earth orbit could lead to an "ablation cascade" as more and more things collide and more and more debris is created from those collisions leading to Earth orbit becoming too hazardous to traverse.
"A 1 kg object impacting at 10 km/s, for example, is probably capable of catastrophically breaking up a 1,000 kg spacecraft if it strikes a high-density element in the spacecraft. In such a breakup, numerous fragments larger than 1 kg would be created." https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/library/a-technical-asses...
I believe I described it badly or you misunderstood me then. What I was referring to in my mention of three-dimensionality is that the area in which all of them orbit isn't a single flat plane over a sphere shape. It's actually several flat planes layered on top of each other, with an obviously ever greater surface area the higher you go. Thus you have LEO, MEO and GEO satellites all sharing orbital space but at different heights so to speak. I'm aware that any given satellite generally flies along a fixed altitude (though as far as I know their latitude along that altitude can shift enormously)
I suppose each satellite has its orbit defined by the elliptical path (4 parameters). Like for GEO you can have many satellites in a single elliptical path.
You can also probably have different satellites on different ellipses whose paths intersect with each other, but the timing is such that they never collide.
What you say is important of course, and it's what makes me less than sure in my assessment. It was after all more of a mental exercise in appreciating just how vast an area of space this relatively tiny quantity of objects is spread across.
To give one further perspective example here: a single large bulk container ship can carry up to 8,500 car-sized units.
This means that even if every single one of the maybe 15,000 satellites in orbit were the size of a car (most of them are much smaller actually), all together, they'd fill no more than the storage spaces of two bulk container ships with lots of room to spare at that.
This, spread over a multi-layered area as vast as our orbital space, means that even with their constantly moving at incredible speeds, and all the junk out there scattered between the satellites themselves, there's an enormous amount of emptiness between it all mitigating against impacts being very likely or frequent at all.
After all, of the 8,070 or so Starlink satellites in orbit right now, there's little mention of more than a few having been knocked out by debris in orbit. It seems that solar storms are their much bigger worry and cause of mishaps.
As the saying goes, space is huge, sometimes more than our brains can easily comprehend. This applies even in the comparatively tiny orbital regions of it that we use daily.
The mental exercise is fine for realising that satellites don't look as big as pictures of satellites in graphics, it's just missing the point that if you don't want to hit a 20cm x 20cm x 20cm cube that moves at 17,500 mph and has slow and limited capability to adjust that movement you need to allow it quite a bit more space, and be able to predict its movement accurately relative to yours. Especially if any collision means thousands of pieces of shrapnel that continue to move at 17500mph for decades or more, whilst potentially being too small to track but large enough to do a lot of damage.
Trains take up a negligible fraction of the mileage of the lines they operate on and rarely cross other lines, but signalling is still critical.
All of these are useful things to keep in mind of course, and they're why I put forth my consideration as a thought experiment for perspective, not so much as an absolute assertion. Orbital space is complicated, and the the ramifications of accidents are extremely unique compared to those that apply in a terrestrial context, but I still stand by my point about it being absurdly big enough that a sense of proportion is needed in worrying about something like Kessler syndrome.
To those downvoting a completely innocuous comment like this and my other replies below, which simply put forth a thought experiment for the sake of debate, without asserting anything at all controversial: Grow an adult brain, no? idiotic as the downvote feature is in general, one would at least assume that the self-professed "intellectually above-average" readers of a site like this would use it better than 12-year-old rage-lords on a 4chan thread.
I thought people were dosing themselves with a base amino acid. Duh. Theanine is an amino acid found in green tea, but not a base amino acid, ie doesn't form proteins. Can cross the blood-brain barrier and can certainly modulate brain function.
Not to be confused with:
* Thiamine:
Vitamin B1, a molecule your body does not produce so you a get it from a food source. Needed for biochemical pathways that convert carbohydrates into energy. Not an amino acid.
* Thymine:
One of the four nucleotide bases in DNA, pairs with Adenine.
Synthesized in the body from the pyrimidine synthesis pathways
reply