Date: 2022-05-13 11:44 am (UTC)
nancylebov: (green leaves)
From: [personal profile] nancylebov
The SIDS result may not be that useful.

****


This is a really promising finding!

I think it's worth the caveat, the study's numbers do not so far show this butyrylcholinesterase assay being useful in screening for SIDS risk. But looking further along this line of work could lead to other measurements that can make a useful test, or possibly even treatments.

Why am I saying not so far shown to be useful? Table 1 and this plot: the two populations (SIDS cases and controls) overlap a lot in BChe levels.

Attempting to use this for screening, if we set a threshold to detect 50% of SIDS susceptibles (50% miss rate, not great obviously), and screen 100,000 U.S. newborns, we'd catch 16 SIDS susceptibles, miss 16, and also flag 23,000 others incorrectly as susceptible. Of the positive tests, 99.93% are false positives. Not useful as-is to parents or doctors. But this paper will surely spark a lot of research.

(By my math: SIDS median 5.2, which is 23% of the way up CDF for the control's 7.7 ± 3.6 sigma.)
posted by away for regrooving

https://www.metafilter.com/195304/Researchers-Pinpoint-Reason-Infants-Die-From-SIDS#8247103


Date: 2022-05-13 01:10 pm (UTC)
haggis: (Default)
From: [personal profile] haggis
In addition to questions over the effectiveness as a screening tool, we don't know what interventions would prevent SIDS once we have identified higher risk babies.

AIUI, the safe sleeping campaigns have massively reduced the rate of SIDS over the last 20 years. Have those interventions made the same underlying condition more survivable or are there multiple risks/conditions that can lead to SIDS?

Date: 2022-05-13 04:49 pm (UTC)
mellowtigger: (pikachu magnifying glass)
From: [personal profile] mellowtigger
There's a rather long thread on Twitter on the caveats for this study.
https://twitter.com/ColdOneder/status/1524941362411479043

I was disappointed to hear the disclaimers. I was really hoping they'd finally nailed the answer to a distressing problem.

Date: 2022-05-13 11:57 am (UTC)
aldabra: (Default)
From: [personal profile] aldabra
Why are we not using genetic engineering to make new fruit out of currently inedible precursors? We have such a small sample of possible fruit space, and it would be way less risky than buggering about with things that currently by and large work. If you accidentally make a toxic gualtheria berry it doesn't matter because we weren't eating them anyway, but if you can stop them tasting of hospital disinfectant and make them six times bigger they might be great.

Date: 2022-05-13 04:52 pm (UTC)
mellowtigger: (dna mouse)
From: [personal profile] mellowtigger
It would help just to add human required nutrition to easily grown existing plants. I mean, why not add B12 to strawberries (which grow almost anywhere). The genetic code exists only in bacteria anyway, so it should be a very convenient target for CRISPR tech.

Date: 2022-05-13 05:15 pm (UTC)
channelpenguin: (Default)
From: [personal profile] channelpenguin
Yes! Getting a plant source of enough B12 going would be a really really worthy cause.

Better also do it with something drought-tolerant! (I have just planted strawberries, and the instruction leaflet reminds me that the fruit is 80-90% water).

FYI, it has effectively not rained here in Vorpommern (N Germany) for 2 months, perhaps more. Only humidity + cold nights giving us dew has kept any plant life going at all! Now nights are warmer... but fear not; I have 12 days holiday soon, so it's BOUND to rain then :-).

Date: 2022-05-14 02:52 am (UTC)
adrian_turtle: (Default)
From: [personal profile] adrian_turtle
You mean like the genetically engineered vitamin A in golden rice?

Date: 2022-05-14 06:21 am (UTC)
channelpenguin: (Default)
From: [personal profile] channelpenguin
Was gonna mention that. That was in the 60s or so? I can't recall if golden rice has the "active" vitamin A rather than the carotene found in other plants - which the body converts to Vitamin A. Vit A is fat-soluble, requires fat to make use of, so if I were to tweak that in plants, I'd use a nut or seed (or maybe oats - they are relatively high in fat for a grain). But rice was chosen for the obvious (half the world lives on it) reasons!

The guy in the room next to me in 1st year at Uni ended up in hospital with vitamin A deficiency after less than 3 months eating only potatoes!

B12 is a special case. Humans WILL die of pernicious anaemia without it (though only after years if stores in the body are adequate) and it is only found in animal/fungal,bacterial sources. Some people can't absorb it well from food which can lead to deficiency even in an "adequate" diet. So it would be so cool to get that in quantity from a plant.

Date: 2022-05-14 06:24 am (UTC)
channelpenguin: (Default)
From: [personal profile] channelpenguin
Though the easy "2 birds with one stone" is to keep chickens (which eat ANYTHING) and eat their eggs - which have A,B12 and the necessary fat. Just keep them out of your actual crops!

Date: 2022-05-14 02:23 pm (UTC)
mellowtigger: (gardening)
From: [personal profile] mellowtigger
Nice! I skimmed this document. Farmers had good questions, like is this an upland variety that can be grown without irrigation? I didn't see an answer to that question. I was just being curious.
https://www.goldenrice.org/PDFs/GR_FR_Story%20Board.pdf

I've tried the upland Blue Bonnet variety here in Minnesota. I'm sure it sprouted, but I've always lost track of it amongst the several other grasses that grow here, so I've never actually harvested any to eat. :(
hairyears: Spilosoma viginica caterpillar: luxuriant white hair and a 'Dougal' face with antennae. Small, hairy, and venomous (Default)
From: [personal profile] hairyears
It depends on the aircraft.

We'll talk about that, and some interesting boundary cases, in a moment.

It also depends on knowing the flight manual, or having someone on-hand who does, and has sufficient experience as an instructor to 'talk you down': and that person isn't me. I've never flown solo and I've only ever landed a glider under instruction...

But I spent many years listening to entertaining breakfast-table stories from student pilots; and, a few times, this type of story has come up.

The answers aren't reassuring, even for the extreme case on the 'safe' side, the Antonov An-2. It's a postwar Soviet biplane intended to support forestry work in undeveloped areas of Russia, and it's probably the slowest aircraft ever to go into commercial service.

It might actually be the slowest aircraft, ever, unless we talk about hot-air balloons.

It has no published stall speed, and the flight manual tells you that if you haul back on the stick all the way, it will descent 'at parachute-descent speeds' and you will survive the landing, even if the undercarriage doesn't.

Even with the full 1-ton payload or 12 passengers: this is a real, honest-to-god grown-up aeroplane in commercial service and thousands of them are still flying.

Not in 'The West', though, because there are none of the modern navigational aids required for an airworthiness certificate.

It's a very forgiving aircraft with, I am told (and I should check this), very slow and predictable control responses.

I'm a little alarmed that the light aircraft used in that story was, in the pilot's experience, so jumpy: I'll put that down to his total inexeperience... But it might be generally true of all light aircraft: even basic trainers.

So it may well be that the nervous and tense overcontrols and overcorrections of a complete novice place a safe landing out of reach (or, at least, at very high risk) in even the most forgiving and predictable of light aircraft.

Let's not take this to the extremes of (say) a high-performance private jet. They do have the slow landing speeds required for short fields, and you might land it safely if you can line up on a long, wide runway with zero crosswind: but if it happened to me, I'd ask the Control Tower for a heading to one of those dry lake beds they have in Nevada.

Assuming I'm in Nevada.

I don't think I could line up on a runway, maintain my heading, and manage a safe descent - even with a continuous talk-me-down from. an instructor taking me from instrument to instrument (horizon, attitude, airspeed, altitude) and guiding my actions on the controls: there is so much to do, all at once, and I do not believe that I can do them all at once without practicing the necessary aircraft-handling skills until they are down to the 'reflex' level where I'm no longer thinking of my actions on the controls, I'm thinking of the aircraft.

There's a well-documented number of hours' of flight instruction and practice that is known to be required in irder to get there, and I haven't put those hours in.

I haven't put *anything like* those hours in.

...And that's for basic training aircraft, which are designed to support the skills-development of inexperienced pilots.

Modern commercial aircraft are another matter. Some of them do indeed land themselves, but that needs some setup work (no flight is completely hands-off) and the pilots I've asked were very doubtful, or even dismissive, of the idea that a complete novice could safely engage the auto-landing systems.

So now we come to the extreme (ish) case of the most common passenger jet in revenue service: the Boeing 737. It has a very, very high landing speed and the consensus among pilots and instructors is that only a lottery-winner's luck would let a novice never-taken-the-controls non-pilot land it and walk away.




Edited (Spelling) Date: 2022-05-15 09:27 am (UTC)

July 2025

S M T W T F S
   1 2 3 4 5
6 789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 7th, 2025 08:11 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios
OSZAR »