You call oral immunotherapy "rare" and "unproven".
Rare, maybe.
Unproven, no, it does work, at least some:

https://www.nih.gov/news-event...

FDA approved oral immunotherapy:
https://www.aaaai.org/tools-fo...

I think it's also been demonstrated that pollen allergies (standard hayfever) allergies can be reduced via oral immunotherapy, perhaps more effectively than via standard injections.

--PM

Sorry about your allergy history and your continuing allergy to wool--but about wool--in my opinion you're not missing much! Contact with wool makes me itchy. Not rash, not allergy, just physically itchy.

Are you allergic to alpaca or llama fur? If not, those are probably a far superior substitute--though I can't say from personal experience.

--PM

The capsule was essentially giving off light in the gamma ray part of the spectrum. Seems like the easy way to find it is to use radiation detectors, which is what they did.

You just needed the right eyes to see this thing with--given that, it was as simple as looking.

--PM

Look up "Levelized Cost Of Electricity" (LCOE),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You see that gas, wind, solar are lowest cost, and of these, gas is the only one whose output you can control....

Great, so for fear of what is probably a mild risk of exposure to radiation, they're continuously irradiating two firemen with a lot of harmful heat?

Balance the risks here folks!

--PeterM

This thing is pretty radioactive, as an article says, about 10 X-rays worth of dose per hour at 1m distance.

I think there are radiation sensors that can pick this up. Just load one onto a truck driving the same route, have it record radiation dose and GPS position, and then just read it out at the end of the trip.

Do this several times and you'll probably pick it up, or so it seems to me---I really do think we have sensors up to the task, though maybe not integrated with a GPS and a recorder.

So, scientists have bred bees to be resistant to Variola mite:

https://www.science.org/conten...

Why not do the same approach here? Instead of vaccines, breed resistant varieties of bees? The generation time of bees is relatively quick, so it seems like this could be done.

Won't work through if there isn't any natural resistance to foulbrood.

We (the whole world) don't need a billion new hosts to generate new variants.

We also don't need the economic disruption that will inevitably follow from massive sickness in China, though I'm not sure this will be worse or better than the lockdowns that were done previously.

Rossdee,

    I'm OK with including the cost of the damage caused by emitting CO2 and holding that as part of the cost of fossil fuel energy for doing this comparison--provided the hidden costs of fusion power are also included in the cost of fusion....

We should have been doing that anyway as soon as it became clear that CO2 was causing damage, but our political processes apparently cannot be made to figure entire lifecycle costs correctly, either for fossil fuels, coal mining, solar cell manufacture/disposal, nuclear of any sort, wind power manufacture/disposal.

--PeterM

Hello,

    To expand on the other answer given in this thread:

    All the types of fusion plants that are being researched require very special and difficult conditions to produce net energy.

    The magnetic confinement fusion plants need very hot plasmas (millions to hundreds of millions of degrees), and if they escaped into the atmosphere not only would there be no deuterium and tritium for them to continue to burn as fuel, they'd instantly cool off and shut down--on a time scale of nanoseconds to microseconds.

    The inertial confinement fusion systems don't even burn continuously. You have to supply a huge amount of input energy to get a small amount of fuel to burn, and when that fuel is burnt, energy production stops. So they naturally shut themselves down without continuous input of energy and fuel. Think of a gasoline engine with spark plugs and fuel injection. Take away either the fuel injection or the spark plugs, and the car doesn't go.

So as the other poster said, there is absolutely *no* chance of a fusion plant setting off a chain reaction that burns up the planet, and he's correct that nuclear fusion bomb testing that was done in the atmosphere also demonstrates this as a non-risk.

--PeterM

For fusion to be economical, it not only has to generate more energy than you put in, you have to be able to have a lower price per kWh produced than alternative sources of energy--that serve the same purpose (i.e., base load, peaking, whatever).

Most fusion options these days, in particular ITER, need a steam-conversion step to convert heat into electricity. Coal and conventional nuclear also need a steam-conversion step to generate electricity from heat.

The argument I read is that any form of energy that requires a steam conversion step is going to cost more than direct conversion (no steam cycle) technologies: natural gas turbines burn the gas directly in a turbine to spin it like a jet. Solar cells directly convert sunlight into electricity. Wind turbines directly convert moving air into electricity.

Given what I've read, how is fusion energy, which requires exquisite technology, large capital investment in both the fusion plant and the steam conversion plant, going to produce electricity more cheaply than gas, wind, solar, tidal? Geothermal doesn't require fuel to generate the heat, so maybe it can be economically competitive.

Note that coal plants, which require steam conversion of heat to electricity, are being phased out in large degree not because they're polluting, but because they cost a lot compared to alternatives.

The whole argument is that even if you can get fusion to work, it's going to be uneconomical.

In light of this argument, how does fusion "win" as a competitor in the market?

You call the human immune system "smart", but I think that's the wrong word. There's no actual intelligence there. The reason that it hasn't targeted the antigen might simply be that the immune system has gone after the obvious surface antigens or the common ones.

I.e., it might not be smart so much as "greedy". It seeks the lowest hanging fruit, which might just be the most common antigens it sees from a particular virus, which might be easily mutable surface antigens. Guiding the immune system to antigens that are conserved amongst many flu strains might simply fail to happen by chance.

Furthermore, I think some people *do* learn to target these conserved antigens that don't mutate. Some people *never* seem to get the flu anymore.

So, elephants have 20 copies of the tumor suppressing gene P53. Elephants apparently are more resistant to cancer as a result.

https://www.nationalgeographic...

If we can gene-edit more copies of P53 into people, you might make yourself a cancer-resistant human, capable of living longer without cancer.

That said, the idea of brain degradation at advanced age scares me. What good is it to be alive at 110 if you have the mental capacity of a four year old, or below?

It seems completely pointless to me to live a long life if you're not also going to enjoy good mental and physical health.

--PeterM

Seriously, we can all help with this by reducing demand.

Cut beef largely out of your diet. It's not really sustainable the way it is done now. Switch to grass fed beef, which can actually improve soil and can be done in areas that are not very farmable. The problem is that 100 calories of grain can be fed to a cow to get 1 calorie of meat.

Pigs are moderately better to eat than cows, chickens are better yet. Not sure about farmed fish, haven't researched that.

Get most of your protein directly from vegetables. Maybe consider eating crickets?

Why not 100% lab grown blood instead of donated blood, unless you're self donating?

You can ensure very tight quality control on lab-grown blood, and you won't need all the infrastructure to recruit, take, treat, test blood you take from donors.

100% lab grown blood could:
Completely end blood shortages
Completely end blood-supply-borne pathogens
Completely end rejection of blood
Completely remove the necessity of typing the recipient (lab grown blood could be grown with none of the antigens that are problematic! Think O- with other minor blood groups gone too.)
Completely remove the need to have separate stocks of blood types
Completely remove logistics of recruiting, bleeding, testing, storing, distributing, shipping blood donations

So why the assertion that "blood will always rely on donors"?
Are you truly confident that the cost of it will never drop below the costs of all the considerations I bring up above?