Bacteriophages suck. What some people never tell you is that the body treats phages as invaders and can very effectively get rid of them, they are not adapted to the human environment. These are only good for local treatments, sometimes...
Well, you actually want the body to clear things. That’s not a problem, it’s a feature. If the phage is able to target the bacteria before it is fully cleared, that’s all you need. Humans have been injected with phages and it has been shown to work. The Soviets actually did a lot of research on it, IIRC. The practical issue that is really challenging for broad phage therapy adoption is that phages are very specific to the bacteria they target. So, you can’t just get injected with any old phage and expect it to work. Instead, you need to catalog all the phages you find in a database and search for one that can target the specific bacteria the patient has been infected with. Phages are simply viruses that target bacteria. You’re awash in them all the time.
>you need to catalog all the phages you find in a database and search for one that can target the specific bacteria the patient has been infected with.
Most of the time the doctor doesn't know the exact pathogen you are infected with. He'll suspect a bacterian infection of some kind and prescribe a wide range antibiotic.
Doing what you suggest will require changing the way we do medicine. Which might not be a bad thing but requires some determination.
This is correct, it's called empiric treatment. If a patient comes in with altered mental status and neck rigidity, you don't have time to take a lumbar puncture and culture bacteria. I don't know anything about phage treatment, but from what the other commenter said, it seems like then you'd have to do some sort of PCR test as well. You simply don't have time for any of that -- your only choice is to blast them with vancomycin + ceftriaxone.
If you come into ED with GGP's symptom's, you might only have an hour to live. Hopefully for you it's bacterial and didn't pick up resistance from horizontal transference from a strep throat treatment that's trivial to culture and, while unpleasant, can wait a few hours to start treatment while the correct bacteriophage is readied.
Feels like it might be more practical to simply distribute phage therapy to a whole population targeting a known pathogen, like this year’s cold strain. Especially of the goal is just to reduce the use of antibiotics, not eliminate.
It's a good thing, unless the body clears off the phage first, leading to both reduced effectiveness and the body wasting immune resources. It does work locally, and one can probably engineer it today to work even better. But it seems to be destined to be relegated to a secondary cure. We seem to be able to keep finding new antibiotics with benefits like 'massive safety testing' or 'we know exactly how they work', or 'very easy to administer'.
that seems like a good thing. they only infect bacteria, not humans
phages are found in large quantities in mucus, where they seemingly contribute to the barrier function of mucus by preying on any bacteria that try go cross
To expand on what you wrote, the challenge with phages is that they’re highly specific to certain bacteria, in the same way that some viruses target gorillas and some target humans. We have yet to find broad spectrum phages. While humans have been saved from bacteria by phages, it requires identifying the bacteria strain, looking up appropriate phage that can target that bacteria, cultivating a dose of the phage, etc. So, yea, phages are highly effective, but there are practical challenges. As you say, antibiotics are lazy.
Ok, another naive question: Not suggesting we just eat a bunch of bacteriophages, but why wouldn't studying phage mechanisms / proteins for killing bacteria be equally useful?
I'm sure people are studying them. But as GP said, antibiotic are lazy. A doctor would much rather prescribe an antibiotic than do the work to match the specific bacterial infection with the particular phage to deal with it.
And since antibiotics still work (for now), there's not all that much money in phage research. If we do get to the point where we "run out" of antibiotics due to bacterial resistance, I imagine phage research will become a lot more attractive as a destination for research funding.
They're viruses, so they work by infecting bacteria and making the bacteria create more of itself.
Antibiotics are found by isolating a compound some i.e. fungi naturally produces. We figure out how to produce the compound and don't fill people with fungi to produce it. Bacteriophages are already the analogy to the compound itself.
So we should be investing heavily in creating and distributing all variety of bacteriophage for all our common bacterial infections. 20k deaths/year from MRSA in the USA alone, 120k infections/year in USA and many of the survivors are left with life-long complications.
We need to implement it! Steffanie Strathdee could save her husband's life because she was the director of UC San Diego’s Global Health Institute. "Regular" people deserve to live too.
You and I remember pre-AI famous works. "Hey, I'm pretty sure Odysseus took a long time to get home". Somebody goes and prints 50 different AI-generated versions of the _Odyssey_, how are future generations supposed to know which is real and which is fake?
That's definitely true. History has been thoroughly manufactured by humans. Naively, I thought the storage of computers might preserve first-hand accounts forever; it might, but it might not be discernible.
No, but it was a bad example because I was thinking only of the authorship point of view.
A better example would have been the complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir. We're pretty sure it's real; there might still be people alive that remember it being discovered. But in a hundred years, people with gen AI have created museums of fake artifacts but plausible, can future people be sure? A good fraction of the US population today believes wildly untrue things about events happening in real time!
Anecdote: my wife wanted to trade up from a 3 to a Y. We won't so long as Elon is involved.
I also have an "Occupy Mars" shirt. It was one thing to bandwagon onto some topical events by a CEO who was touting Tesla's 100/100 lgbt friendliness rating and progressing toward human exploration, then one seig heiling and throwing the whole government into disarray and betraying our allies.
Personally the "Occupy Mars" thing rubbed me the wrong way when it came out. The message seemed to be "don't worry about inequality or the rise of the oligarchy because it'll get humans to Mars."
In the last 30 years, which other nominee for president by one of the two parties that matter has made addressing the struggles of working class America the center of their platform?
No, they're the byproduct of a failed educational system and culture of unearned entitlement. They expect others to save them from drug addiction while doing every possible to prevent help. And they only have this power because of the Senate represents land instead of people.
We also require arc-fault breakers in the electrical code for new construction despite even their first-order effects being negative. We're drowning in over-regulation and the most prominent people pretending to care aren't going after the real problems.
Arc-fault protections are required primarily due to lobbying by receptacle and panel manufactures, not because they provide a real benefit. The number of people injured due to arc faults is vanishingly low, and a better solution to the majority of applications is to replace the NEMA 5-15 receptacle with almost literally any other (or at least improve upon the design). A more fitting comparison might be ground-fault circuit protections, which do very much have real benefits in all required situations without any drawbacks, while being very cheap to implement (effectively, a current clamp driving a relay).
On the other hand, feeding 7.2kV down a wire handled by very normal people in very normal (read: adverse; wet, humid, non-careful) conditions without any passive protections, relying on the portable (car) end to perform all of the shock safety is laughable at best. A bug in the car’s charging circuit (hardware, firmware, or software) and whoops, the chassis has 7200V to ground when the cable gets plugged in during a rainstorm.
Engineering safety regulations and guidelines are written in blood. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is either ignorant of the dangers involved, or narcissistic to the point of believing they are immune to danger.
The car can't have the ground-fault circuit; it must be in the stationary part.
The article does point out they believe non-galvanically-isolated can be as safe in practical usage; similar to half of Japan outlets are all protected by GFCI and don't use a ground, yet have a similar safety record. The authors built a system using the motor as an inductor and the inverter as a step-down buck regulator to charge the batteries, back in the 90s; they know what they're talking about.
> Engineering safety regulations and guidelines are written in blood. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is either ignorant of the dangers involved, or narcissistic to the point of believing they are immune to danger.
Not sure how you square this with your opening paragraph.
Construction with decades old regulations and fast paced technology is a pretty different environment from electric vehicle development where regulators are (usually) actively trying to make things easier.
If you’re not being facetious, a unit of currency, minted out of metals of varying preciousness throughout the ages in the shape of a circle, usually imprinted with the monarch or head of state on one side and a symbol on the other.
If you’re being facetious, you’re probably aware that “coin-op” refers to any simply-operated payment terminal, as you’d find in a do-it-yourself car wash or parking meter (that doesn’t rely on some stupid phone app). In the past, you inserted the aforementioned coins into a slot, which it counted and provided you with some amount of time of use based on the amount you insert (coin op = coin operated). Nowadays, while there are still coin-op terminals (even in the western world!) they’re being replaced more and more by a pin-pad for processing credit- or debit-card transactions.
These are much preferable to having to use a website or an app, make an account, verify your account, add you personal information, add your vehicle and plate information, add your credit card information, etc. for each different network you’re trying to use, be it parking, car washing, or in this case, car charging. In the past (or present, for the majority of the population), you could drive up to a gas station, pay with some form of currency or card, and receive fuel. The parent was suggestion that maybe, people don’t want to have to deal with more complexity than that while charging their vehicles, especially when travelling to different cities/counties/countries, which are the most likely times they would need to use not-at-home charging (and also the most likely times they’d encounter a new network, and have to go through the rigamarole of new app/website, account, details, etc). By just putting a coin-op (or if you insist on pedantic precision, pin-pad-op) receptacle, someone can pull up, plug in, pay, and be on their way in 30 seconds or less.
Why reinvent the wheel and do anything else, which would take more effort in the best case scenario? If you insist on some godforsaken phone app, make that an option, but I imagine you’ll find most people won’t use it unless forced to.
The first sentence explicitly says 'outlet', which means not a cable even though the post doesn't use the word 'cable' until later.
When you say "all about coin-op" you are still doing an incorrect simplification of "coin-operated 120V outlet".
I know they forgot to repeat the word "outlet" on point 4, but even then they didn't just say coin-op, they said coin-op 120V. It's referring back to the first sentence, and 120V itself has implications of not being one of those beefy EV cables (and the only 120V cable alternative to a grossly underutilized EV cable is like a C13, and a dangling C13 that plugs into your car is a pretty silly interpretation).
Ahh, I didn't realize "outlet" referred to just the socket, thanks. In that case, isn't the GP describing pretty much a level 2 AC charger? Those don't come with cables (at least here).
Pretty much. They're saying put in really cheap and reliable power sources with a cheap and reliable funding mechanism. And put them everywhere. Only go to level 2 if it's just as easy and reliable as level 1, prioritize ubiquity over speed.
L1 charging isn't really appropriate anywhere except at home or something like an airport parking lot where cars may be plugged in for a significant amount of time.. like 24h+. It's very slow.
It's 7 mph of charging. The average car is driving 60 minutes per day, and if there are chargers everywhere that's 161 miles per day of charge if it's plugged in when not driven.
That covers everything the existing system doesn't already.
The 7mph claim is inflated. The rare EV gets more than 5 mi/kWh in any situation, especially highway driving, and your L1 charging is getting you roughly 1 kWh/hr.
> The average car is driving 60 minutes per day
This is a sleight of hand. Non-average situations arise all the time.
Your proposal is ridiculously burdensome and not especially helpful.
Of course. We already have blanketed the country with level 3 charging. You can reach 99% of the country solely using Tesla Superchargers. The non-average problem is solved.
What we need to solve is the "can renters buy EVs knowing they will always have reasonably-priced place to charge" problem.
12 and 16A L1 chargers are common which is 1.44 and 1.92kW respectively at 120V. Its not 100% efficient but they definitely deliver more than 1kW to the battery.
Owning an EV, I can confirm your numbers. I'm in a 240V country, but level 1 is still pretty slow. It's great for the home, but I'd want at least 3-phase AC charging when I'm out.
EVSEs are more fragile, more prone to vandalism, so more costly to keep running.
240V could use the same wires and double available power, but existing portable chargers never draw more than 16A from 120V, so people can't screw it up.
We need a constitutional convention to fix the legislative branch. People in Wyoming should not have 10x the representation as people in California. Without the complicity of the legislative branch Trump's power would be limited much more.
We need mixed-member districts and eliminate the senate<->state connection and/or repeal the 17th amendment. Bicameral is no longer suited for the world we live in.
Unfortunately short of a revolution, there is no realistic way to pass any kind of meaningful constitutional amendment in the US. And it's hard to imagine that fact changing, which makes me pessimistic for the long term future of the country.
Their AI is atrocious though. F.ex. Endless Space has a mechanic that to take over a planet, you to have to put this bomb upgrade into a ship. The AI just... doesn't. Their fleet meta sucks, their individual ship designs suck. All harder difficulties do is generate larger piss-poor clumps of ships which attack without any strategy.
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