Magic Dirt Discovered in Ireland
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Researchers analysing soil from Ireland long thought to have medicinal properties, recently discovered that it contains a previously unknown strain of bacteria effective against 4 of the top six superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics, including MRSA https://t.co/DV7jl47QWT pic.twitter.com/8fg2ojOoeh
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 14, 2019
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This is great news for Irish dirt eaters. I smell a campaign relaunch, Robert Francis!
7 Surprising Health Benefits of Eating Dirt
https://www.babble.com/body-mind/7-surprising-health-benefits-of-eating-dirt/
In the 1950s, a European pharma company discovered that a red Italian soil fungus found on the grounds of the Castel del Monte in Apulia could shrink certain cancers.
And that’s how Hodgkin’s lymphoma went from a death sentence to a six-month nuisance.
Magic dirt of the best kind.
Quick, get Raj Chetty over there to look at tax returns!
Can it cure cuckery, though?
Guinness is the best Irish medicine!
Ahaaa! So you take back everything you said and apologize to Amy Harmon or whomever the hell.
There’s a form of rock in Ireland administered orally that’s believed to endow high verbal IQ – it’s called the Blarney Stone.
Irish verbal IQ is pretty high anyway. While they aren’t producing tech/science geniuses and never have, I think they are probably the most loquacious and witty Northern Europeans, which is surprising when you consider their remote location, small size, and historically impoverished agrarian lifestyle.Replies: @Bill P, @Dan Hayes, @guest
But not effective against potato blight, or is it a byproduct thereof?
Also effective against snakes
The excellent “Lapham’s Quarterly” had an issue on Food several years ago which included a fascinating article on eating dirt. As I recall (that issue, like most, was “borrowed”) multiple benefits were possible.
I stopped subscribing because of mail theft somewhere down the line. The issues were mailed in clear polythene bags displaying attractive covers.
Grave diggers’ health insurance?
I know ones the my
Black Men are considered to be magic by Irish girls!
https://www.whitewomenblackmen.com/forum/threads/former-miss-ireland-emma-waldron.29592/
Muck of the Irish.
Interesting segue about drug discovery…
Pretty much every drug comes from one type of organism trying to kill another. Most of our antibiotics, for example, come from fungi. Since time immemorial, whenever a tree falls in the woods, or a squirrel dies, or whatever, some fungi show up and some bacteria show up and they battle it out about who gets to decompose the thing. Bacteria can divide much faster so by default they would win, but fungi have larger genomes, stored carefully in a nucleus, so they can code genes to make all sorts of chemical warfare agents against the bacteria. Hence, antibiotics. Penicillin coming from mold is the most famous example but most classes of antibiotics are from lead compounds that came from fungi. When I was a kid I thought it was amazing and serendipitous that an antibiotics was discovered from a common mold, but now I realize, well, where else would you expect antibiotics to come from?
We usually don’t use them as found in nature but make slight chemical tweaks to improve pharmacokinetics, reduce unwanted toxicities, improve oral bioavailability, etc., but the lead compound is almost always a natural product.
Lots of cardiac drugs are similar. For example atropine, a drug that speeds the heart and can be useful at treating some types of arrhythmias, comes from a plant that makes it in very high doses in order to kill any mammals that try to eat it. Purify and reduce the dose, use it in special situations, and it’s a useful pharmacologic agent.
This is also one of the myriad reasons that finding cancer therapeutics is so hard–no plant or fungi has an evolutionary reason to cure human cancer.
Early in my career there was lots of talk about either 1.) rational drug design, where you sit at a computer with a model of a protein and develop therapeutics from first principles, and 2.) combinatorial chemistry, where you figure out a way to create millions of slightly different compounds and then screen the hell out of them. While there were a handful of successes for both of these, for the most part they haven’t have much impact compared the old way. So biologists still gonna biologize.
"Flames engulfed 460 tons of lead when Notre-Dame’s roof and spire burned, scattering dangerous dust onto the streets and parks of Paris."
The NYT reports.<
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2019/09/flames-engulfed-460-tons-of-lead-when.htmlReplies: @SimpleSong
There is a lesson in this germane to topics here. For example, why allow ourselves to be overrun by immigration of different forms? In a world of biological competition, that is foolish. We know this, but the main message around the Western World is the opposite. It is as if we are bacteria being told, sold and forced to let fungi come in and take over.
In a fundamental way, that is what is happening. Fools forget that life is competition, as you have described.
As well as this studies that use DNA rather than culturing bacteria suggest that there are a lot of undiscovered antibiotic producers in soil that are from bacterial groups that have never been known to produce antibiotics,Replies: @SimpleSong
shit steam sandwich back in the USA – Don’t be such a jerk
New national crisis: Beyoncé didn’t win every Emmy! https://www.indiewire.com/2019/09/beyonce-homecoming-carpool-karaoke-emmys-variety-special-1202173230/
Pretty much every drug comes from one type of organism trying to kill another. Most of our antibiotics, for example, come from fungi. Since time immemorial, whenever a tree falls in the woods, or a squirrel dies, or whatever, some fungi show up and some bacteria show up and they battle it out about who gets to decompose the thing. Bacteria can divide much faster so by default they would win, but fungi have larger genomes, stored carefully in a nucleus, so they can code genes to make all sorts of chemical warfare agents against the bacteria. Hence, antibiotics. Penicillin coming from mold is the most famous example but most classes of antibiotics are from lead compounds that came from fungi. When I was a kid I thought it was amazing and serendipitous that an antibiotics was discovered from a common mold, but now I realize, well, where else would you expect antibiotics to come from?
We usually don't use them as found in nature but make slight chemical tweaks to improve pharmacokinetics, reduce unwanted toxicities, improve oral bioavailability, etc., but the lead compound is almost always a natural product.
Lots of cardiac drugs are similar. For example atropine, a drug that speeds the heart and can be useful at treating some types of arrhythmias, comes from a plant that makes it in very high doses in order to kill any mammals that try to eat it. Purify and reduce the dose, use it in special situations, and it's a useful pharmacologic agent.
This is also one of the myriad reasons that finding cancer therapeutics is so hard--no plant or fungi has an evolutionary reason to cure human cancer.
Early in my career there was lots of talk about either 1.) rational drug design, where you sit at a computer with a model of a protein and develop therapeutics from first principles, and 2.) combinatorial chemistry, where you figure out a way to create millions of slightly different compounds and then screen the hell out of them. While there were a handful of successes for both of these, for the most part they haven't have much impact compared the old way. So biologists still gonna biologize.Replies: @newrouter, @anonymous, @Buzz Mohawk, @Anonymous, @Dieter Kief, @PennTothal, @NickG, @Simon Tugmutton, @AKAHorace
> but most classes of antibiotics are from lead compounds that came from fungi.
“Flames engulfed 460 tons of lead when Notre-Dame’s roof and spire burned, scattering dangerous dust onto the streets and parks of Paris.”
The NYT reports.<
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2019/09/flames-engulfed-460-tons-of-lead-when.html
Pretty much every drug comes from one type of organism trying to kill another. Most of our antibiotics, for example, come from fungi. Since time immemorial, whenever a tree falls in the woods, or a squirrel dies, or whatever, some fungi show up and some bacteria show up and they battle it out about who gets to decompose the thing. Bacteria can divide much faster so by default they would win, but fungi have larger genomes, stored carefully in a nucleus, so they can code genes to make all sorts of chemical warfare agents against the bacteria. Hence, antibiotics. Penicillin coming from mold is the most famous example but most classes of antibiotics are from lead compounds that came from fungi. When I was a kid I thought it was amazing and serendipitous that an antibiotics was discovered from a common mold, but now I realize, well, where else would you expect antibiotics to come from?
We usually don't use them as found in nature but make slight chemical tweaks to improve pharmacokinetics, reduce unwanted toxicities, improve oral bioavailability, etc., but the lead compound is almost always a natural product.
Lots of cardiac drugs are similar. For example atropine, a drug that speeds the heart and can be useful at treating some types of arrhythmias, comes from a plant that makes it in very high doses in order to kill any mammals that try to eat it. Purify and reduce the dose, use it in special situations, and it's a useful pharmacologic agent.
This is also one of the myriad reasons that finding cancer therapeutics is so hard--no plant or fungi has an evolutionary reason to cure human cancer.
Early in my career there was lots of talk about either 1.) rational drug design, where you sit at a computer with a model of a protein and develop therapeutics from first principles, and 2.) combinatorial chemistry, where you figure out a way to create millions of slightly different compounds and then screen the hell out of them. While there were a handful of successes for both of these, for the most part they haven't have much impact compared the old way. So biologists still gonna biologize.Replies: @newrouter, @anonymous, @Buzz Mohawk, @Anonymous, @Dieter Kief, @PennTothal, @NickG, @Simon Tugmutton, @AKAHorace
Thank you for an enlightening comment – I hope you will continue …
Pretty much every drug comes from one type of organism trying to kill another. Most of our antibiotics, for example, come from fungi. Since time immemorial, whenever a tree falls in the woods, or a squirrel dies, or whatever, some fungi show up and some bacteria show up and they battle it out about who gets to decompose the thing. Bacteria can divide much faster so by default they would win, but fungi have larger genomes, stored carefully in a nucleus, so they can code genes to make all sorts of chemical warfare agents against the bacteria. Hence, antibiotics. Penicillin coming from mold is the most famous example but most classes of antibiotics are from lead compounds that came from fungi. When I was a kid I thought it was amazing and serendipitous that an antibiotics was discovered from a common mold, but now I realize, well, where else would you expect antibiotics to come from?
We usually don't use them as found in nature but make slight chemical tweaks to improve pharmacokinetics, reduce unwanted toxicities, improve oral bioavailability, etc., but the lead compound is almost always a natural product.
Lots of cardiac drugs are similar. For example atropine, a drug that speeds the heart and can be useful at treating some types of arrhythmias, comes from a plant that makes it in very high doses in order to kill any mammals that try to eat it. Purify and reduce the dose, use it in special situations, and it's a useful pharmacologic agent.
This is also one of the myriad reasons that finding cancer therapeutics is so hard--no plant or fungi has an evolutionary reason to cure human cancer.
Early in my career there was lots of talk about either 1.) rational drug design, where you sit at a computer with a model of a protein and develop therapeutics from first principles, and 2.) combinatorial chemistry, where you figure out a way to create millions of slightly different compounds and then screen the hell out of them. While there were a handful of successes for both of these, for the most part they haven't have much impact compared the old way. So biologists still gonna biologize.Replies: @newrouter, @anonymous, @Buzz Mohawk, @Anonymous, @Dieter Kief, @PennTothal, @NickG, @Simon Tugmutton, @AKAHorace
Fascinating comment. Now think how interesting it is that our form of life takes apart, modifies and uses those forms for our advantage. There is layer upon layer of order and complexity, but embedded in much of it is “one type of organism trying to kill another” of which you speak.
There is a lesson in this germane to topics here. For example, why allow ourselves to be overrun by immigration of different forms? In a world of biological competition, that is foolish. We know this, but the main message around the Western World is the opposite. It is as if we are bacteria being told, sold and forced to let fungi come in and take over.
In a fundamental way, that is what is happening. Fools forget that life is competition, as you have described.
When I was in Dublin many years ago, I called a friend who lived there and he asked me in his usual brogue, “Jim, would you like to see the bodies?” I thought, Wow…they have strip clubs in Ireland?
He was talking about St. Michan’s Church, which I believe is one of the few Protestant churches in the Republic. I’d never heard of it. It was sold to the Protestants by the Catholics three centuries ago and the catacombs in the basement went with it. The Protestants had a hard time making it financially in Ireland (as I recall, the church only had 15 members at the time) so they resorted to selling tours of all the caskets and tombs underneath the church, which pissed off the Catholics since most of the people buried there were nuns and priests, whose remains are still considered sacred to one degree or another.
My friend and I came late to the scheduled tour, so the elderly guide gave us a personal tour later, and allowed us to go into areas where larger groups weren’t allowed. These areas had simple wooden caskets stacked on top of each other, and apparently the weight and humidity over the centuries had broken many/most of them open and the remains inside were scattered about – not skeletons, but mostly intact bodies that had been interred centuries before, preserved to a remarkable degree due to the unique clay or dirt and atmospheric conditions. I can’t describe what it felt like to be literally stepping over the bodies of people who had been dead for 350 years. I remember that one nun’s foot still had a vaguely feminine shape to it. Magic dirt, indeed.
Correction: not sold to the Protestants but stolen by the Protestants!
BTW, there are plenty of Protestant churches in Ireland, many of them as spoils of Protestant conquest.Replies: @Anon
Magic dirt needed in county Galway, locals not sure they believe in the whole idea
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/silent-protest-held-in-oughterard-amid-direct-provision-centre-concerns-1.4018527
I shook hands with a Crusader’s skeleton in Dublin in 1965. Maybe the same place?
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/st-michans-church
“The Crusader was quite tall for the time, six and a half feet tall, a giant back then, and his legs have been broken and folded up under him to fit him into his small coffin. His hand stretches out of the casket slightly and visitors were once encouraged to give it a shake. Today, you are still allowed to touch his hand, but only lightly on his long-dead finger, lest you wrench his whole hand off.“
Also, fairly recently, the Crusader had his head stolen by someone, but the Irish Police got it back.Replies: @J1234, @anon
fucking assholes, lazy Americans in Santa Barbara and Irish circa 2019 are fucking useless fucking useless:
fucking assholes, Americans in Santa Barbara, fishing boat that should have been buried a long time ago – it was such a tired old fucking boat.
they are lazy people – I know this from seafaring families – we know who cut out.
It is.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/st-michans-church
“The Crusader was quite tall for the time, six and a half feet tall, a giant back then, and his legs have been broken and folded up under him to fit him into his small coffin. His hand stretches out of the casket slightly and visitors were once encouraged to give it a shake. Today, you are still allowed to touch his hand, but only lightly on his long-dead finger, lest you wrench his whole hand off.“
Also, fairly recently, the Crusader had his head stolen by someone, but the Irish Police got it back.
Story? If it is a good one, movie potential.
boats and ships are not things that are all good and all. God, man is stupid. Reg, you need to share your assholery, seriously dude, you need to do that
Sadly, the traditionally Irish lax attitude towards security has allowed for vandals to desecrate the mummies on more that one occasion.
And in the Steve-O-Verse, another hate crime hoax. This time it’s an insurance scam.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7462265/Police-Georgia-man-faked-racially-motivated-burglary.html
"Flames engulfed 460 tons of lead when Notre-Dame’s roof and spire burned, scattering dangerous dust onto the streets and parks of Paris."
The NYT reports.<
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2019/09/flames-engulfed-460-tons-of-lead-when.htmlReplies: @SimpleSong
Lead like ‘a promising lead’ not lead like Pb.
Christ these comments are just so much boomer drivel and tedious stereotypes
333% OT
Europe’s Biggest Gypsy Slum is in Slovakia
Lunik 9 is an old communist era housing estate built on the outskirts of Kosice in the east of Slovakia. Now it is better known as being Europe’s largest gypsy slum. Everyone told us not to visit because it was dangerous and so I had to go and investigate to see if it was as dangerous as everybody told me or if it was something different. What I found surprised and shocked me.
I have some magic dirt in my backyard by some fruit trees. Maybe I can sell this on ebay? I would not eat this dirt but others will. What does ebay show for magic dirt?
Seriously – This Irish magic bacteria must be what us pseudo farmers call mycorrhizal bacteria. My fruit trees are organic, as in never sprayed. I use minimal chem fertilizers. So I must have loads of great bacteria and dirt in their soil.
And the hits keep coming! This clown spray painted a full buffet of hate crime slogans but how come no noose or three or more? Thanks for posting. My scam hate crime lol for the week. Were they BBQ or soul food restaurants?
Pretty much every drug comes from one type of organism trying to kill another. Most of our antibiotics, for example, come from fungi. Since time immemorial, whenever a tree falls in the woods, or a squirrel dies, or whatever, some fungi show up and some bacteria show up and they battle it out about who gets to decompose the thing. Bacteria can divide much faster so by default they would win, but fungi have larger genomes, stored carefully in a nucleus, so they can code genes to make all sorts of chemical warfare agents against the bacteria. Hence, antibiotics. Penicillin coming from mold is the most famous example but most classes of antibiotics are from lead compounds that came from fungi. When I was a kid I thought it was amazing and serendipitous that an antibiotics was discovered from a common mold, but now I realize, well, where else would you expect antibiotics to come from?
We usually don't use them as found in nature but make slight chemical tweaks to improve pharmacokinetics, reduce unwanted toxicities, improve oral bioavailability, etc., but the lead compound is almost always a natural product.
Lots of cardiac drugs are similar. For example atropine, a drug that speeds the heart and can be useful at treating some types of arrhythmias, comes from a plant that makes it in very high doses in order to kill any mammals that try to eat it. Purify and reduce the dose, use it in special situations, and it's a useful pharmacologic agent.
This is also one of the myriad reasons that finding cancer therapeutics is so hard--no plant or fungi has an evolutionary reason to cure human cancer.
Early in my career there was lots of talk about either 1.) rational drug design, where you sit at a computer with a model of a protein and develop therapeutics from first principles, and 2.) combinatorial chemistry, where you figure out a way to create millions of slightly different compounds and then screen the hell out of them. While there were a handful of successes for both of these, for the most part they haven't have much impact compared the old way. So biologists still gonna biologize.Replies: @newrouter, @anonymous, @Buzz Mohawk, @Anonymous, @Dieter Kief, @PennTothal, @NickG, @Simon Tugmutton, @AKAHorace
Thank you for a wonderful comment. You have a gift for explaining fundamental ideas in a clear and luminous way. It reminds me of the pleasure I got as a child from Isaac Asimov’s monthly columns. If you don’t already write about science for a popular audience, well, maybe you should. 🙂
Pretty much every drug comes from one type of organism trying to kill another. Most of our antibiotics, for example, come from fungi. Since time immemorial, whenever a tree falls in the woods, or a squirrel dies, or whatever, some fungi show up and some bacteria show up and they battle it out about who gets to decompose the thing. Bacteria can divide much faster so by default they would win, but fungi have larger genomes, stored carefully in a nucleus, so they can code genes to make all sorts of chemical warfare agents against the bacteria. Hence, antibiotics. Penicillin coming from mold is the most famous example but most classes of antibiotics are from lead compounds that came from fungi. When I was a kid I thought it was amazing and serendipitous that an antibiotics was discovered from a common mold, but now I realize, well, where else would you expect antibiotics to come from?
We usually don't use them as found in nature but make slight chemical tweaks to improve pharmacokinetics, reduce unwanted toxicities, improve oral bioavailability, etc., but the lead compound is almost always a natural product.
Lots of cardiac drugs are similar. For example atropine, a drug that speeds the heart and can be useful at treating some types of arrhythmias, comes from a plant that makes it in very high doses in order to kill any mammals that try to eat it. Purify and reduce the dose, use it in special situations, and it's a useful pharmacologic agent.
This is also one of the myriad reasons that finding cancer therapeutics is so hard--no plant or fungi has an evolutionary reason to cure human cancer.
Early in my career there was lots of talk about either 1.) rational drug design, where you sit at a computer with a model of a protein and develop therapeutics from first principles, and 2.) combinatorial chemistry, where you figure out a way to create millions of slightly different compounds and then screen the hell out of them. While there were a handful of successes for both of these, for the most part they haven't have much impact compared the old way. So biologists still gonna biologize.Replies: @newrouter, @anonymous, @Buzz Mohawk, @Anonymous, @Dieter Kief, @PennTothal, @NickG, @Simon Tugmutton, @AKAHorace
Thanks, interesting! Goethe, not least deeply into science, – he founded what would later become famous as Ernst Haeckels phylo-institute in Jena, once remarked, that the world is loaded with peculiarities (“die Welt stickt voller Merkwürdigkeiten”). – Hm, no reason for plants to fight off cancer. – But for organisms? Are there types of organisms, which suffer less from it than others?
J123:
Correction: not sold to the Protestants but stolen by the Protestants!
BTW, there are plenty of Protestant churches in Ireland, many of them as spoils of Protestant conquest.
Cops appear to be the only institutional force in the U.S. that hasn’t fully subscribed to the madness. 98 IQ cops keep solving hate hoaxes that Ivy League journalists find utterly convincing.
I mean, come on, who would have believed 50 years ago that they would be telling us men and women have no innate differences?
Good news for the New Black Irish, eh?
Ask a journalista, an it will tell you that the average cop’s IQ is low enough to detect the subtle perturbations that blur the lines between truth and hoax.
Yes there are. Naked mole-rats are immune to all types of cancer. You can read about them in Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Pretty much every drug comes from one type of organism trying to kill another. Most of our antibiotics, for example, come from fungi. Since time immemorial, whenever a tree falls in the woods, or a squirrel dies, or whatever, some fungi show up and some bacteria show up and they battle it out about who gets to decompose the thing. Bacteria can divide much faster so by default they would win, but fungi have larger genomes, stored carefully in a nucleus, so they can code genes to make all sorts of chemical warfare agents against the bacteria. Hence, antibiotics. Penicillin coming from mold is the most famous example but most classes of antibiotics are from lead compounds that came from fungi. When I was a kid I thought it was amazing and serendipitous that an antibiotics was discovered from a common mold, but now I realize, well, where else would you expect antibiotics to come from?
We usually don't use them as found in nature but make slight chemical tweaks to improve pharmacokinetics, reduce unwanted toxicities, improve oral bioavailability, etc., but the lead compound is almost always a natural product.
Lots of cardiac drugs are similar. For example atropine, a drug that speeds the heart and can be useful at treating some types of arrhythmias, comes from a plant that makes it in very high doses in order to kill any mammals that try to eat it. Purify and reduce the dose, use it in special situations, and it's a useful pharmacologic agent.
This is also one of the myriad reasons that finding cancer therapeutics is so hard--no plant or fungi has an evolutionary reason to cure human cancer.
Early in my career there was lots of talk about either 1.) rational drug design, where you sit at a computer with a model of a protein and develop therapeutics from first principles, and 2.) combinatorial chemistry, where you figure out a way to create millions of slightly different compounds and then screen the hell out of them. While there were a handful of successes for both of these, for the most part they haven't have much impact compared the old way. So biologists still gonna biologize.Replies: @newrouter, @anonymous, @Buzz Mohawk, @Anonymous, @Dieter Kief, @PennTothal, @NickG, @Simon Tugmutton, @AKAHorace
.
I think the famous abortion drug ” RU-486″ was given its name as the result of just such a shotgun screening approach. Pharma company Rousell-Uclaf (“RU”) screened thousands of slightly- modified compounds to find a progesterone blocker and found #30,486 worked…(hence “-486”)
Angry Birds was Rovio's 52nd attempt at a viral video game. But "REO-Viisikymmentäkaksi" wasn't as catchy as "Angry Birds". (The ordinal form is worse: REO-Viideskymmenestoinen.)
It's ironic that RU-486 is approved, and Thalidomide not (save for leprosy), as they pretty much do the same thing, to different degrees. But one is holy chrism for a secular sacrament.
Pretty much every drug comes from one type of organism trying to kill another. Most of our antibiotics, for example, come from fungi. Since time immemorial, whenever a tree falls in the woods, or a squirrel dies, or whatever, some fungi show up and some bacteria show up and they battle it out about who gets to decompose the thing. Bacteria can divide much faster so by default they would win, but fungi have larger genomes, stored carefully in a nucleus, so they can code genes to make all sorts of chemical warfare agents against the bacteria. Hence, antibiotics. Penicillin coming from mold is the most famous example but most classes of antibiotics are from lead compounds that came from fungi. When I was a kid I thought it was amazing and serendipitous that an antibiotics was discovered from a common mold, but now I realize, well, where else would you expect antibiotics to come from?
We usually don't use them as found in nature but make slight chemical tweaks to improve pharmacokinetics, reduce unwanted toxicities, improve oral bioavailability, etc., but the lead compound is almost always a natural product.
Lots of cardiac drugs are similar. For example atropine, a drug that speeds the heart and can be useful at treating some types of arrhythmias, comes from a plant that makes it in very high doses in order to kill any mammals that try to eat it. Purify and reduce the dose, use it in special situations, and it's a useful pharmacologic agent.
This is also one of the myriad reasons that finding cancer therapeutics is so hard--no plant or fungi has an evolutionary reason to cure human cancer.
Early in my career there was lots of talk about either 1.) rational drug design, where you sit at a computer with a model of a protein and develop therapeutics from first principles, and 2.) combinatorial chemistry, where you figure out a way to create millions of slightly different compounds and then screen the hell out of them. While there were a handful of successes for both of these, for the most part they haven't have much impact compared the old way. So biologists still gonna biologize.Replies: @newrouter, @anonymous, @Buzz Mohawk, @Anonymous, @Dieter Kief, @PennTothal, @NickG, @Simon Tugmutton, @AKAHorace
Great comment.
The brighter you are, the more you are enabled (and at times tempted) to confuse things. Being bright is just a pre-requisite to solving more complicated problems. Whether or not being bright and argue in a reasonable way works well depends – on – with the word of Philosopher Friedrich Kambartel who corrected Kant in this important hindsight: – Culture (= how much and in how many contexts taste and/or reason are held dear). Friedrich Kambartel’s point against Kant is this: There does not exist (=can not be) a formal solution for these problems – they are culturally tinged/formed at their core).
Btw. – your example has another interesting subtext: I think it sheds light on the reasons, why elites don’t like populism. One strong (nd quite sound) element of populism is, that it consists of corrections brought forward by rather 100 IQ points-people against rather above average IQ people. – The reason for that is, that 100 IQ people work more with real things, whereas above-average people work more with signs (=numbers, formulas, words, symbols).
And that's how Hodgkin's lymphoma went from a death sentence to a six-month nuisance.
Magic dirt of the best kind.Replies: @anonymous
sounds like you just made that up…
Cops are pretty good at solving crimes, because most crimes are repetetive, and cops spend a lot of their time in the company of criminals.
A few days ago I found a couple of broken eggs thrown against the outside wall of my house. (It was the day of the hurricane, although I live in Florida, not Alabama.)
I was thrilled to be the victim of a hate crime, but decided to call the police even though this was very, very trivial, because it was possible that this was the work of a serial egg chucker that I knew nothing about.
The cops immediately identified that there had been three or four similar incidents, asked me if I had seen a group of children on bicycles, and requested security video coverage from two of my neighbors who had cameras on the street. They also asked if I had any enemies (no) or knew of any suspects.
I mentioned a middle-schooler called C. who lives across the road and who seems rather emotionally needy and the cops immediately gave a good description of him and said that they knew who he was. At this time there was no reason to think he was a suspect in the ovarian crime, but the cops advised to immediately remove yolk residue from the car and walls, as it can cause damage to paint, which I had not thought of, and which shows that the cops knew all about eggs.
I said that this crime was not very serious, but the cops were quite serious about apprehending the offender(s) to prevent repeat eggery, although they also lamented that in our county there are many children, but few opportunities for diversion when school is closed, as it was for the hurricane.
A few days later, they arrested a 15-year old who had written out a 5-page plan on how to shoot up the local high school, which he later claimed was all a joke. However he is now in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice. No word on any connection with the eggs.
If you Bing or Google, you will find that this is a routine thing that 15-year-olds do, so again the cops are on top of it.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=15+year+old+shoot+up+high+school&pc=MOZI&form=MOZLBR
Your taxpayer dollar at work.
I was very impressed with their diligence and acumen.
I resemble that remark!
MacLeod is Scottish, not Irish. But I still laughed.
Motivated reasoning is a thing at every IQ level, and bright people are better at finding arguments to believe what they want to believe.
I mean, come on, who would have believed 50 years ago that they would be telling us men and women have no innate differences?
Populism is the argument elites are ripping off the populace (true in all times and nations), so of course the elite would hate it.
Correction: not sold to the Protestants but stolen by the Protestants!
BTW, there are plenty of Protestant churches in Ireland, many of them as spoils of Protestant conquest.Replies: @Anon
If Irish papists were anywhere near as sectarian as the Ulster Prots used to think they’d have nationalized the medieval churches after independence.
Apparently, cancerous tumors are unknown in sharks. Hence the sale of shark cartilage tablets and shark liver oil in the, (sympathetic magic), belief that the said ‘dietary supplements’ ward off the ravages of cancer in the user.
Cops generally form an instinct – which is accurate – about the character of criminals and criminality. The nature of the job and the jaundiced world view that it induces leads to a certain intuition about people.
I went there. The castle is nice but the stone is a tourist trap, and while the locals are really polite (most of Ireland puts the US to shame in that regard, only people from Texas & Utah and really old upper-crust southerners have better manners) and would never tell you to your face, I’m pretty sure they mock the stone-kissers. I was going to kiss it for kicks but you have to get contorted into this weird backwards upside-down position by a feeble-looking old man (there’s a 30 foot drop below), so I thought, nope.
Irish verbal IQ is pretty high anyway. While they aren’t producing tech/science geniuses and never have, I think they are probably the most loquacious and witty Northern Europeans, which is surprising when you consider their remote location, small size, and historically impoverished agrarian lifestyle.
Nobel Laureate James Watson is quite proud of his Irish (not Scotch-Irish) heritage. This may explain his pugnacious personality!
Is there something to the connection between Catholicism and fine letters in modern literature? I dunno.
Becky strikes again.
Pretty much every drug comes from one type of organism trying to kill another. Most of our antibiotics, for example, come from fungi. Since time immemorial, whenever a tree falls in the woods, or a squirrel dies, or whatever, some fungi show up and some bacteria show up and they battle it out about who gets to decompose the thing. Bacteria can divide much faster so by default they would win, but fungi have larger genomes, stored carefully in a nucleus, so they can code genes to make all sorts of chemical warfare agents against the bacteria. Hence, antibiotics. Penicillin coming from mold is the most famous example but most classes of antibiotics are from lead compounds that came from fungi. When I was a kid I thought it was amazing and serendipitous that an antibiotics was discovered from a common mold, but now I realize, well, where else would you expect antibiotics to come from?
We usually don't use them as found in nature but make slight chemical tweaks to improve pharmacokinetics, reduce unwanted toxicities, improve oral bioavailability, etc., but the lead compound is almost always a natural product.
Lots of cardiac drugs are similar. For example atropine, a drug that speeds the heart and can be useful at treating some types of arrhythmias, comes from a plant that makes it in very high doses in order to kill any mammals that try to eat it. Purify and reduce the dose, use it in special situations, and it's a useful pharmacologic agent.
This is also one of the myriad reasons that finding cancer therapeutics is so hard--no plant or fungi has an evolutionary reason to cure human cancer.
Early in my career there was lots of talk about either 1.) rational drug design, where you sit at a computer with a model of a protein and develop therapeutics from first principles, and 2.) combinatorial chemistry, where you figure out a way to create millions of slightly different compounds and then screen the hell out of them. While there were a handful of successes for both of these, for the most part they haven't have much impact compared the old way. So biologists still gonna biologize.Replies: @newrouter, @anonymous, @Buzz Mohawk, @Anonymous, @Dieter Kief, @PennTothal, @NickG, @Simon Tugmutton, @AKAHorace
An interesting segue indeed! I trained as a biologist myself; I remember reading a paper many years ago speculating on the reasons that life appeared and then, having appeared, differentiated so rapidly into so many forms. The authors suggested that competition was the key: before life, big molecules subsumed smaller ones; after it, this predator-prey relationship was one of the principal forces driving evolution of ever more complex organisms. In your example, fungi can be regarded as quasi-predators and bacteria as quasi-prey, this relationship being intermediated by competition for resources.
Fungi have always fascinated me: in my lifetime they have been accorded their own Kingdom, for they are neither plants nor animals. Even now little is known about their chemistry and life-cycles, but we do know that without fungi most trees, especially broad-leafed trees, and hence forests, could not thrive. The underground ramifications of basidiomycete hyphae are believed to act as an information highway, which may account for observations that trees can “react” to things happening to neighbouring trees (such as being damaged or attacked by pests) and may even co-ordinate such phenomena as the precise timing of flowering and leaf-fall.
If you use chemical fertilizers, you’re not organic. That’s the rule.
There are plenty of Protestant (Church of Ireland) churches in Ireland. Usually the oldest church building in each town due to conquest. Was kind of surprised to discover this upon visiting. The nicer Catholic Churches were mostly built post-1600s, while the Church of Ireland has many medieval buildings in its possession. The Church of Ireland cathedrals in the larger/more populated counties, appear to be attended and not just relics either. I think they attract liberals leaving Catholicism, based on the signs I saw outside some of these churches. There are even a few evangelical churches & signs in some surprisingly remote areas of NW Ireland like Donegal/Mayo, not sure what the story is behind that. I think the Republic of Ireland is probably like 8-10 percent Protestant (speaking of people who actually attend church not the irreligious who make up like 40 percent of the population, similarly to the US).
The article provides a decent (and fair) account of one of the largest XIX Century Protestant missions to NW Ireland. “Soup taker” is a term of abuse from those days.
Your last paragraph is good and true. Is what I see in the real world over here in USA.
And the first shipment of Somali’s is arriving in three…. Two….
REALITY! PROVES BLOOD AND SOIL, EUROPEANS SPRANG AS GENETIC SPECIFIC DIVERSITY FROM THEIR LAND OF ORIGIN. SO IT MAKES SENSE THOSE OF IRISH GENETIC HERITAGE IN THAT VILLAGE, HAVE SPECIFIC DNA IMMUNITY BORN FROM THEIR UNIQUE NATIVE SOIL. FACT.
So even back in the 60’s you were an islamophobe,
Well…humans are resistant to cancer. Seriously.
Think about it–dogs and cats typically start to get cancers around 10 years of age or so, along with lots of other problems related to age. At that age humans haven’t even sexually matured and cancers are extraordinarily rare.
The root cause of cancer is that every time cells divide they make a copy of their DNA and some errors are introduced and when enough errors accumulate either the cell dies or goes rogue and becomes cancer. Now things like radiation increase this error rate but even in a pristine environment the copying process itself introduces errors. You can’t get around entropy.
So organisms that are big (elephants–lots of cell divisions) or relatively long lived (humans) tend to have a lot of tricks that their cellular machinery uses to minimize errors in copying DNA. Humans have lots of these tricks already, some of which we understand, some of which we don’t. Cats and dogs have fewer. Mice have even fewer.
That’s why you are constantly reading about how cancer has beeen cured in mice, and then it doesn’t work when applied to humans. We already have those tricks built in!
It might also be that saintly people don’t decompose. Don’t know why or how. We have such mummies, keep them in open air, but they don’t ever rot
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/910-agriculture
Can it cure the pestilence of urban blight in Minneapolis? It’s been infested by bipedal locusts and the river is filling with the blood of the afflicted. https://www.lewrockwell.com/political-theatre/minneapolis-slides-downhill/
Pretty much every drug comes from one type of organism trying to kill another. Most of our antibiotics, for example, come from fungi. Since time immemorial, whenever a tree falls in the woods, or a squirrel dies, or whatever, some fungi show up and some bacteria show up and they battle it out about who gets to decompose the thing. Bacteria can divide much faster so by default they would win, but fungi have larger genomes, stored carefully in a nucleus, so they can code genes to make all sorts of chemical warfare agents against the bacteria. Hence, antibiotics. Penicillin coming from mold is the most famous example but most classes of antibiotics are from lead compounds that came from fungi. When I was a kid I thought it was amazing and serendipitous that an antibiotics was discovered from a common mold, but now I realize, well, where else would you expect antibiotics to come from?
We usually don't use them as found in nature but make slight chemical tweaks to improve pharmacokinetics, reduce unwanted toxicities, improve oral bioavailability, etc., but the lead compound is almost always a natural product.
Lots of cardiac drugs are similar. For example atropine, a drug that speeds the heart and can be useful at treating some types of arrhythmias, comes from a plant that makes it in very high doses in order to kill any mammals that try to eat it. Purify and reduce the dose, use it in special situations, and it's a useful pharmacologic agent.
This is also one of the myriad reasons that finding cancer therapeutics is so hard--no plant or fungi has an evolutionary reason to cure human cancer.
Early in my career there was lots of talk about either 1.) rational drug design, where you sit at a computer with a model of a protein and develop therapeutics from first principles, and 2.) combinatorial chemistry, where you figure out a way to create millions of slightly different compounds and then screen the hell out of them. While there were a handful of successes for both of these, for the most part they haven't have much impact compared the old way. So biologists still gonna biologize.Replies: @newrouter, @anonymous, @Buzz Mohawk, @Anonymous, @Dieter Kief, @PennTothal, @NickG, @Simon Tugmutton, @AKAHorace
A nice comment but bacteria are the source of more antibiotics than the fungi. The Actinomycetes (as in the paper Steve mentions) are the bacterial group that have given us the most antibiotics.
As well as this studies that use DNA rather than culturing bacteria suggest that there are a lot of undiscovered antibiotic producers in soil that are from bacterial groups that have never been known to produce antibiotics,
Yep, same place. The elderly tour guide made it sound like he was doing us a special favor by allowing us to step among the remains, but I’m getting the impression a lot of people have been allowed to do that. I also kind of “mis-remembered” the condition of the remains. Looking at the online pictures I see they were more skeletal than I remember them being. The lighting wasn’t real good.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/st-michans-church
“The Crusader was quite tall for the time, six and a half feet tall, a giant back then, and his legs have been broken and folded up under him to fit him into his small coffin. His hand stretches out of the casket slightly and visitors were once encouraged to give it a shake. Today, you are still allowed to touch his hand, but only lightly on his long-dead finger, lest you wrench his whole hand off.“
Also, fairly recently, the Crusader had his head stolen by someone, but the Irish Police got it back.Replies: @J1234, @anon
How does that happen? I know, it’s a stolen item like any other stolen item, but it sounds humorous.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/st-michans-church
“The Crusader was quite tall for the time, six and a half feet tall, a giant back then, and his legs have been broken and folded up under him to fit him into his small coffin. His hand stretches out of the casket slightly and visitors were once encouraged to give it a shake. Today, you are still allowed to touch his hand, but only lightly on his long-dead finger, lest you wrench his whole hand off.“
Also, fairly recently, the Crusader had his head stolen by someone, but the Irish Police got it back.Replies: @J1234, @anon
Also, fairly recently, the Crusader had his head stolen by someone, but the Irish Police got it back.
Story? If it is a good one, movie potential.
I may be reaching someone far afield here, but is this not, in its own way, a validation of Orwell’s famous quote about how, if there is hope, it lies with the proles?
That’s how WD-40 got its name.
Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd attempt at a viral video game. But “REO-Viisikymmentäkaksi” wasn’t as catchy as “Angry Birds”. (The ordinal form is worse: REO-Viideskymmenestoinen.)
It’s ironic that RU-486 is approved, and Thalidomide not (save for leprosy), as they pretty much do the same thing, to different degrees. But one is holy chrism for a secular sacrament.
Skullduggery.
As well as this studies that use DNA rather than culturing bacteria suggest that there are a lot of undiscovered antibiotic producers in soil that are from bacterial groups that have never been known to produce antibiotics,Replies: @SimpleSong
Well, there is certainly inter-bacterial competition that leads to the synthesis of antibacterial compounds; the same competitive pressures are at play. Practically speaking I think vancomycin for example was isolated from a soil bacteria and not a fungus, and I think the tetracyclines were as well. But in terms of doses prescribed/tons produced/lives saved the penicillins and the cephalosporins are most of the market and those are both from fungi. Fluoroquinolones and sulfa are pure synthetics, I believe, and after the classes already mentioned the remaining antibiotics are pretty much just a rounding error in terms of market size.
The fungi derived classes are so popular because their side effect profile is so much more benign than the other classes and their effectiveness is so much greater, which makes sense since they were honed to kill prokaryotes and be benign to eukaryotes. In contrast, for the bacterial-derived compounds (or the synthetics) the lack of mammalian toxicity is purely coincidental, so not surprisingly the ratio of bacterial toxicity to mammalian toxicity is not as favorable. Hence you have lots of classes of antibiotics derived from bacteria that don’t work terribly well and are primarily reserved for cases of antibiotic resistance.
Thanks for your informative answer Simple Song. So while there may be more bacterial antibiotics, tmore of the most important/useful ones are from fungi ?
Sequencing of genomes and amplicons from environmental DNA and metagenomic libraries suggests that there are a lot of undiscovered bacterial antibiotics. Is this also true for fungi ?
Hence you have lots of classes of antibiotics derived from bacteria that don’t work terribly well and are primarily reserved for cases of antibiotic resistance.
Thanks for your informative answer Simple Song. So while there may be more bacterial antibiotics, tmore of the most important/useful ones are from fungi ?
Sequencing of genomes and amplicons from environmental DNA and metagenomic libraries suggests that there are a lot of undiscovered bacterial antibiotics. Is this also true for fungi ?
Easygoing fellows that they are, they’re not known for losing their heads.
LOL
I use tons of wood chips as mulch. They have made the soil under and right by the fruit trees very black. So I am very organic my Redneck Friend. Don’t panic, go organic. I am laying down potassium sulfate granules for them (fruit trees) soon.
https://www.historyireland.com/18th-19th-century-history/edward-nangle-the-achill-island-mission/
The article provides a decent (and fair) account of one of the largest XIX Century Protestant missions to NW Ireland. “Soup taker” is a term of abuse from those days.
Irish verbal IQ is pretty high anyway. While they aren’t producing tech/science geniuses and never have, I think they are probably the most loquacious and witty Northern Europeans, which is surprising when you consider their remote location, small size, and historically impoverished agrarian lifestyle.Replies: @Bill P, @Dan Hayes, @guest
Wasn’t Claude Shannon of Irish descent? Don’t know where else that name would come from.
Bill P and S. Anonyia:
Nobel Laureate James Watson is quite proud of his Irish (not Scotch-Irish) heritage. This background accounts for his cantankerous anti-PC utterances.
Irish verbal IQ is pretty high anyway. While they aren’t producing tech/science geniuses and never have, I think they are probably the most loquacious and witty Northern Europeans, which is surprising when you consider their remote location, small size, and historically impoverished agrarian lifestyle.Replies: @Bill P, @Dan Hayes, @guest
S. Anonyia:
Nobel Laureate James Watson is quite proud of his Irish (not Scotch-Irish) heritage. This may explain his pugnacious personality!
Blimey
https://www.babble.com/body-mind/7-surprising-health-benefits-of-eating-dirt/Replies: @bruce county
Them Haitians sure look healthy.
According to Wiki, he was descended from pilgrim John Ogden.
And here I thought Paddie only used bog muck for hovels and setting the damned British on fire. Who knew it was making them medical Supermen.
Irish verbal IQ is pretty high anyway. While they aren’t producing tech/science geniuses and never have, I think they are probably the most loquacious and witty Northern Europeans, which is surprising when you consider their remote location, small size, and historically impoverished agrarian lifestyle.Replies: @Bill P, @Dan Hayes, @guest
They say the same of Jews and even blacks. Maybe it’s true, but what all three have in common is that they’re latecomers to modernity. (Well, blacks are nevercomers.) They need a while to stop jawin’ on the porch with the “XXX” jug and get to business.
Is there something to the connection between Catholicism and fine letters in modern literature? I dunno.
I think they are referred to as the “Incorruptibles”. I think St John Vianney is claimed to be one.
“Were they BBQ or soul food restaurants?”
I think one restaurant was pizzeria and the other a bakery/cafe. They were in a really dumpy strip mall. I suspect both will turn into grimy Chinese or Vietnamese restaurants. There is a higher profit margin in stir frying up greasy mystery meat and expired produce pulled out of the Piggly Wiggly dumpster.
Fertilized no doubt with many “points” of poteen.
Magic water discovered in Kentucky:
Capital City Museum, Frankfort, Kentucky
Ever since some German biologist couple, while holidaying in Norway, discovered Ciclosporin (in the wild) Norway have always lobbied the UN for an ‘originator fees’ for these things. No success yet.
Very interesting. Thanks for the information. The old tour guide we had told us his church was the only Protestant church in Ireland…I thought he was talking about St. Michan’s, but he must’ve been talking about the denomination, though it sounds like that’s probably not accurate either. The other thing he said was that St. Michan’s was where G.F. Handel practiced the organ part of The Messiah before its debut performance in Dublin. I think that’s probably true.
I am still astounded that that boat is an old boat (which just killed 35 people) that should have been not: “old boat graveyarded” – very weird thing , all over the world, btw. The deaths of these tourists should not have happened.