[Macros]

They've announced a 6 week hard lock down in NI.

In.....you guessed it a week and a half a time.

In the interval, some pubs are open. Cause that ain't going to be a shit show at all.

Fuck people

[Malankazooie]

[Aptorian]

Macros, on 17 December 2020 - 04:14 PM, said:

They've announced a 6 week hard lock down in NI.

In.....you guessed it a week and a half a time.

In the interval, some pubs are open. Cause that ain't going to be a shit show at all.

Fuck people

Same thing here in Denmark. The country is in sorta lockdown but they're trying to avoid restricting travel and family gatherings because the politicians don't want to be the administration that cancelled Christmas.

Meanwhile we hit 4000 infected in a day and hospitalisations are climbing. We're juuust about where we hit the peak in April and it's not slowing down this time.

[QuickTidal]

Aptorian, on 17 December 2020 - 04:27 PM, said:

but they're trying to avoid restricting travel and family gatherings because the politicians don't want to be the administration that cancelled Christmas.

This seems to be the case in a lot of places. These goddamn politicians are LITERALLY putting their own careers ahead of the safety of their constituents. Same thing here. It's clear as fuck that Doug Ford doesn't want to hard lock us because he's afraid of pissing off his base (they are the anti-mask morons and shit) and being labelled as the cold hearted bastard who cancelled Christmas.

Just do it. holy fuck. We will all get over it.

[Aptorian]

It could still happen, the administration warned that all tools could be needed in the coming weeks. If the rate of effections are higher tomorrow or on Monday, I think they might close all travel but we'll see.

One thing is for sure I don't see the the shut down lifting before February earliest. Meaning I'll probably be sent out to assist at a testing facility in January.

[Mezla PigDog]

Same in England. It's so frustrating. In summer Johnson said we were looking at a normal Christmas. He said this based on zero data. So then he had to keep a promise he shouldn't have made in the first place. If he had just said all year that we are looking at a boring ass Christmas for this year but in the grand scheme of things that's not so bad (and maybe even reflect on the true meaning of Christmas!) then there is a totally different situation to manage.

We're going up a tier where we live but it doesn't change anything other than my lunch plans on Sunday.

I heard my first news about vaccines recently that made me more nervous. In the UK the government are underwriting any indemnity the vaccine manufacturers may suffer due to adverse events. Knowing medical device manufacturers professionally and knowing what some of them try to get away with when they are liable for their own bills makes me wonder.

On balance I think I'd still take one but I'm kinda glad I'm not at the front of the queue.

This post has been edited by Mezla PigDog: 17 December 2020 - 10:38 PM

[Malankazooie]

This may sound like an ignorant question, but I'm dumb about this sort of thing. So a couple of vaccines have been approved, yeah? If you were allowed to choose, which one would you take and why? The efficacy is negligible so I'm zeroing out that as a reason.

[Tsundoku]

Yeah good question for the bio nerd squad - is there enough info out there at this point to determine which is best?

Obviously noone has any long term kind of data, which makes me a bit wary. Maybe I'll wait a year or so ...
Then again with my employer I may not get a choice but there has been zero from them on this subject so far that I have heard.

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 18 December 2020 - 12:06 AM

[Gwynn ap Nudd]

My only preference so far on the vaccines is based on the storage requirements, as I noted up thread. I live in a large metropolitan area and am within five minutes of one of the locations likely to be designated an inoculation site for the Pfizer vaccine. Let the ones with less stringent storage requirements go to the more rural areas. The Canadian government has pretty much said that's what's going to happen anyway, with the Pfizer vaccine being sent to a limited number of urban areas and the Moderna one being sent to the Territories and rural areas. So, in the end, I probably won't get a choice.

[Maark Abbott]

Mezla PigDog, on 17 December 2020 - 10:37 PM, said:

Johnson said... based on zero data.

This would seem a very succinct summary of not just his administration's handling of Covid, but of his administration in general.

[Primateus]

Today Denmark crossed the 1000 dead threshold.

[Aptorian]

Also hit the highest number of daily infections and highest number of hospital admittance.

I'm starting to think I'll be celebrating Christmas alone. Even if the administration doesn't close down travel cross country, I don't think I want to sit in a (probably crammed) train and a bus for 3 hours and risk getting sick and worse, getting my stepmom sick.

[QuickTidal]

A very good friend of mine who works temporality in a LTCH has been given his first dose yesterday. Today he says it's a sore arm and that's it.

[amphibian]

Malankazooie, on 17 December 2020 - 11:29 PM, said:

This may sound like an ignorant question, but I'm dumb about this sort of thing. So a couple of vaccines have been approved, yeah? If you were allowed to choose, which one would you take and why? The efficacy is negligible so I'm zeroing out that as a reason.

Someone I follow says they strongly prefer the Pfizer vaccine. I will ask about the reasons why.

The nutshell summary is "it is better tolerated and equally effective".

This post has been edited by amphibian: 18 December 2020 - 02:07 PM

[Malankazooie]

DeepMind AI protein folding. What is it? Why is it important? What will its impact be? What will it mean for medical research? Will we see a surge in innovative therapies? Will it spin off and become impactful in other industries? What does the future hold? Reading the excitement about it and the possibilities, is the hype warranted?

[Macros]

What?

[Mezla PigDog]

Malankazooie, on 18 December 2020 - 06:09 PM, said:

DeepMind AI protein folding. What is it? Why is it important? What will its impact be? What will it mean for medical research? Will we see a surge in innovative therapies? Will it spin off and become impactful in other industries? What does the future hold? Reading the excitement about it and the possibilities, is the hype warranted?

If it is as accurate as they think it might be then it is massive. It will speed up research and drug design massively. Protein function is dictated by shape. Everything in your body is done by proteins. You can quite easily figure out the linear sequence of a protein from the DNA sequence but you can't guess how it will fold because it depends on loads of funky stuff in the cell. You have to make masses of protein to be able to see it enough to see how it folds but the process of making it puts it into an artificial environment so it folds differently to how it would in the cell. And it takes ages. So it's a pain in the ass, slow and inaccurate. If you can do it by AI then it is monumental.

[Mezla PigDog]

Tier 4?! I thought they only went up to 3.

[Gorefest]

I'm sure it is not the only similarity between the UK government and Spinal Tap.

[Cause]

Mezla PigDog, on 19 December 2020 - 11:39 AM, said:

Malankazooie, on 18 December 2020 - 06:09 PM, said:

DeepMind AI protein folding. What is it? Why is it important? What will its impact be? What will it mean for medical research? Will we see a surge in innovative therapies? Will it spin off and become impactful in other industries? What does the future hold? Reading the excitement about it and the possibilities, is the hype warranted?

If it is as accurate as they think it might be then it is massive. It will speed up research and drug design massively. Protein function is dictated by shape. Everything in your body is done by proteins. You can quite easily figure out the linear sequence of a protein from the DNA sequence but you can't guess how it will fold because it depends on loads of funky stuff in the cell. You have to make masses of protein to be able to see it enough to see how it folds but the process of making it puts it into an artificial environment so it folds differently to how it would in the cell. And it takes ages. So it's a pain in the ass, slow and inaccurate. If you can do it by AI then it is monumental.

My understanding is that it still requires significant experimental data to help build its model. The holy grail of biochemistry though is solving the protein folding problem. If we could predict how a sequence of protein would fold into its 3D shape we would basically be on the cusp of being able to design enzymes that do what we want. Understand any virus and how it works just by reading it’s genome. Solve the enzymatic mechanisms of enzymes that are perhaps targets for drug therapies. Sadly the variables are astronomical and we don’t even know what they are all

Protein folding is governed by (just to name a few)
Protein sequence (the sequence is both the code, the blueprint and the building blocks. Imagine a computer in which the hard drive is also the pc case, the monitor, the battery all at once)
Levinthals paradox (protein folding is highly controlled, if proteins sequences just sampled every possible 3D conformation that was possible it would take a million years, clearly their are mechanisms which limit its options and lock it down correct paths)
Hydrophobic effect (is the protein folded in water, lipids, combination?)
Translation speed and tRNA concentric a in a cell (if the mRNA code is translated to protein code too slow or too fast protein might fold incorrectly)
Molecular crowding (cells are insanely crowded compared to test tubes, having to much room to expand into might cause misfoldeing)
Chaperone proteins (some proteins need other proteins to act as scaffolds to guide correct folding)
Wuarternary structure (some proteins will only fold correctly if they are folded alongside and bond to another monomer unit of themselves or a different protein, in its absence it will misfold and not work)
Post translational modification ( a protein that folds correctly might still need another protein to come along and cut a part off, or add sugar molecules or change a functional group of an amino acid. Until that step is folded correctly to its instructions but remains worthless. Part of its code is kept somewhere else. These secondary, tertiary etc steps provide additional methods of control allowing protein concentrations and activities to be finely regilated)

This is also than an incomplete picture too. For a long time we thought proteins were all important. They are the machines that do all the work. However we are learning more and more how complex and how important regulation of genes are. After all a human and a chimpanzee are 99% identical. However by turning some genes on for longer, making more proteins that code for and others on for less you can get drastic different outcomes. Some dna we now know doesn’t even code for protein, which was once thought to be junk dna that does nothing. We know now that it can code for segments of code that do nothing but bind to other segments of code to deactivate them for example.

So this is a big step forward but we are lifetimes away if it’s even possible to even get close to what they did in the one Spider-Man movie where spider and the lizard are running computer models to determine if nw therapies would work on computer mice. In theory such a thing is possible. In practice....