southsamurai

It really does!

Just the shift in cerebrospinal fluid in response to progesterone explains not just the obvious symptoms that come with that part of the cycle, it points to things like increased migraines, memory issues, and that’s huge.

Having a correlation shown like this could possibly revolutionize how women get care. Just the correlation. If there’s a definitive causation, just the ability to better customize hormone regimens in birth control could improve millions of lives.

Considering the extremes I’ve seen women in my life go through with no real ability to get predictable results from medical assistance relating to their cycles, this is fantastic news.

Well, I’ll throw my anecdote into the void here.

I never took ketamine as a depression, anxiety, or PTSD treatment , despite having dealt with the usual medication shuffle over the years.

But I did get my wisdom teeth removed and talked to “angels” as I woke up (it was just hallucinations, but the imagery was like movie angels), and had a six plus month remission of symptoms, followed by another three to five of reduced symptoms. Pretty fucking impressive to me, since I didn’t know when I went under what they were giving me, and wasn’t expecting anything other than waking up and saying dumb shit until the drugs cleared my system.

I’m not sure how that could be a placebo effect since there was no real public information bouncing around about ketamine for psychological conditions. I don’t doubt that it could be placebo effect, but I’d need it explained to me by someone a shit ton more familiar with how placebos work than I am. It was the best I had felt in a decade.

I know this much; if I ever get offered a theraputic dose in a safe place, I’m not turning it down

Go back and check the links.

I see what you did there, and appreciate it :)

Nah, IDGAF about it one way or another. You run into more jerks there than average, but that’s about it, so as long as block lists function, it’s all good

The paper was published last month https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07848-5

But I suspect this was not a new discovery as much as a new expansion of the information.

It’s both

For anyone coming along and not trusting the title, it is misleading.

Infrared is one of the things mosquitoes use to find a target.

They still use CO 2 detection as part of their methods, this is in addition to, not instead of.

Edit: the relevant section of text

*Each cue on its own – CO2 , odor, or infrared – failed to pique the mosquitoes’ interest. But the insect’s apparent thirst for blood increased twofold when a setup with just CO2 and odor had the infrared factor added.

“Any single cue alone doesn’t stimulate host-seeking activity. It’s only in the context of other cues, such as elevated CO2 and human odor that IR makes a difference,” says UCSB neurobiologist Craig Montell.

The team also confirmed the mosquitoes’ infrared sensors lie in their antennae, where they have a temperature-sensitive protein, TRPA1. When the team removed the gene for this protein, mosquitos were unable to detect infrared.*

In other words, they still use the previously known ways to find a meal, and this is how they work up close. That’s over simplified, but it’s the important part because it gives info on how to reduce being “bitten”. Loose clothing that covers the extremities diffuses the heat, making us “look” like we aren’t the right kind of target wherever the IR is spread out wrong to their antennae.

The article is actually a really good one, but the title is crap

Edit 2: the paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07848-5

Well, as others have covered, the us has engaged in imperialism directly, in the past, and indirectly even now.

But I don’t think that answers your question.

The “modern” US, and I use the word modern to represent the post ww2 era, has a very different place on the world stage than it did before ww2, though that place started shifting after the first world war.

You simply can’t ignore ww2 and the effects it had on global politics any time something like this comes up. Most of what we think of as the way things work go back to that time even more than the nations’ individual histories. There really wasn’t any nation that wasn’t deeply and radically changed by that.

After ww2, there was a global desire for peace and stability, with stability being the greater goal. The UN, NATO, all the major alliances and blocs stem from that.

Nukes played a huge role in major nations not being willing to just go out and conquer. It forced everyone to play a bit less overtly, so we ended up with proxy wars and coups and other fuckery when world powers wanted to extend their influence.

But, there’s also another big factor. You go out and conquer somewhere, you have to manage it. You take over Columbia, you now have to run Columbia, protect your ownership of it, and deal with the people there being your people. That’s a heavy burden for a world power. It’s one thing to maintain a small island as a territory (think Guam as an example); it’s a whole nuther thing to try and take over a nation that not only isn’t going to be done without worldwide resistance, but is harder to maintain control over because it isn’t contiguous.

The U.S. has a pretty major advantage by stretching across the entire continent. We’ve got entire oceans as borders, and entire nations that also stretch across the continent as neighbors. It’s a nation that’s damn near impossible to invade, blockade, or otherwise use direct methods against. Why would a nation give up those advantages by taking over somewhere else?

It’s way easier to use other methods to control other nations rather than own them. Fund groups inside the country that are friendly to your nation, let them take over the country, and profit (literally, since there’s a long history of the U.S. interfering with other countries’ governments for nothing other than capitalist gain).

If the other country doesn’t have an economic value, but have strategic positioning, or can serve as a puppet state or as a distraction, it’s still easier to just stage a coup, rebellion, or otherwise put the country in a condition that’s better aligned. It isn’t and wasn’t just the US engaging in this kind of activity, but the U.S. was pretty dominant on the western side of such activity. Our allied nations backed those plays, but the U.S. often called the shots.

In other words, the U.S. has never wanted or needed to conquer anywhere else after ww2. There were better ways to achieve goals.

Oooh! I was just talking about this with my wife, who I met gaming online. We’ve had the conversation with each other, and other people a lot, including cheaters.

So, most of the cheaters I’ve known tend to look at it as entertainment rather than competing. It isn’t that they want to beat other people, and think cheats are an acceptable way to do that. It’s usually that, regardless of their skill, they get bored with the slower pace of play, but still want to play.

I’m not saying it makes sense, or is acceptable, but that’s the most common explanation I’ve heard.

The next most common is the jerks. They do it either to mess with people, or to “troll” people that the cheaters think are too serious, or too invested or too “tryhard”, or whatever the excuse is. That kind of cheater does indeed wnat to ruin things for other people.

The next one that I’ve run into enough is the nerds that are just looking for ways to cheat as a hobby. They’re the ones that end up developing cheat tools, whether or not they let others use them. It’s about figuring out the game, its code, and how to manipulate it. Those players tend to stop using cheats once they’ve done what they wanted.

The other significant grouping I’ve run into are the ones that only cheat on PTW games, where they’ll say that if you can pay your way to winning, the game is already a cheat. I actually agree with them, but I just refuse to play those games, even if they’re otherwise very good. In theory, I would maybe cheat in those games if I knew for a fact everyone playing was cheating too.

I’ve actually done that once, but on a private server where nobody could play without an invite. It was actually kinda fun running an over powered character by virtue of a ton of free “pots” that would buff you in both pvp and pve play. Everyone was juiced up and one-hitting each other. Wouldn’t be fun all the time, but the free pots were only on weekends, and outright unavailable any other time.

And, I will sometimes run cheats in single player games for the same reason; it gives a different play experience that’s fun as long as you can turn it on and off.

But you’d be surprised how many people in all of those groupings will cheat if they think there’s other cheaters, no matter if there’s proof or not.

Osmotic pumps tend to be equivalent to a transdermal patch in how the substance spreads through the body, but bypasses the need to go through skin. So, faster initially, but otherwise the dose over time would be the same, assuming the transdermal patch was able to maintain dosage (they aren’t, there’s a drop-off).

And, just as you said, the entire dose is taken in without any degradation by digestion, or being bound in something.

What I have zero clue about is what difference it would make in terms of numbers. It is equivalent in speed of uptake to subQ or IM injection, which is essentially immediate, just with a slight curve at the very beginning, so tiny it won’t be noticeable to someone that experienced all those deliveries.

Vs IV, the initial release is slower with osmotic pumps, but the sustain of the pumps makes everything after that different.

Basically, the pump goes under the skin and leaks the substance into the intracellular fluids, to be taken up by capillaries into the bloodstream.

It was three different doses, 0.3, 1, and 3 mg/kg per day

It was also delivered via subcutaneous pump, which is usually done with a mind towards a gradual dosing rather than a single push of the total amount all at once.

The kind of pump listed in the article previously linked was an osmotic pump.

Here’s an excerpt from a different paper describing the various methods for substance delivery:

Osmotic pumps are internally implanted devices that use an osmotic displacement system to infuse a preloaded substance into an animal. Use of these pumps permits constant dosing without the need to handle an animal after the initial implant surgery. Extracellular fluid is absorbed at a constant rate by an osmotic salt layer immediately beneath the permeable outer membrane. As the osmotic layer absorbs fluid, it swells and puts pressure on an impermeable reservoir in the center of the pump. The reservoir then expels the loaded substance from the pump at a constant rate through a flow moderator. The outflow can pass directly into the tissue surrounding the pump, or a cannula can be attached to the pump to direct the flow into a blood vessel or specific tissue.

Osmotic pumps are cylindrical in shape and come in sizes small enough for mice. These devices are surgically implanted either subcutaneously or intraperitoneally. The flow rate is fixed, and the duration of action varies from 3 d to 6 wk, depending on the size of the pump and the delivery rate selected. Pumps cannot be refilled but can be implanted sequentially to prolong dosing.

I’m not up on the dosing levels in humans, So I I don’t have the ability to know offhand if 3mg/kg spread over the day is unusually high (pun partially intended) or not. There’s a section I can’t find easily (I’m actually dyslexic so it takes me a while to get through this kind of dense and complicated writing) where they mentioned having a higher dose as a point of comparison.

The actual paper published is about smaller doses.

The publication itself, which seems to be legit, and well done.

Haven’t had a chance to read all of it, but it isn’t badly executed by a quick scan.

Edit: I’ve had a chance to read it in full.

About half of it is over my head. Just don’t have the biochemical background to be able to interpret much of the metabolites they were measuring.

That being said, that stuff isn’t actually important for casual interest.

Here’s the key points I found:

First, the study was mice only. While mice are excellent for this kind of work, you can’t guarantee things will be a 1:1 result in Holland p.

Second, the study was for low dose levels, and only delta-9 thc, with no other cannabinoids being used at all.

Third, the study was relatively short, with 42 days being the longer end.

Fourth, and this is the cool part, changes in the relevant metabolites and brain samples had benefit at the 14 day mark. So, if this does translate to human effects, short term, low dose use of delta-9 may be a valuable option. That’s years away before this could be confirmed as valid for humans, but the effects were significant.

All of that means that just smoking weed, you aren’t going to duplicate the conditions of the study. If you’re taking in enough to get high, you’re at a higher dose than the study, and that may cause an opposite effect long term.

This is a very focused experiment, with well defined limits and goals. The information gained can not be used as an indicator that smoking herb as an adult human will give any benefit, much less what is in the title of the article.

Think of this study as step one in maybe ten steps you get to the point where it would be useful for indicating benefits in humans, assuming everything went right along the way.

Decentralization. It’s a good thing

I’m aware, just surprised.

Looking at it from the outside, but also as an old fart, the whole history of the star wars universe is broken up, fragmented. At any given point along the way, it didn’t feel like that. It’s only stepping back out of being a fan that it becomes evident (to me).

Like, there were a ton of problems in the original EU, and some of that got compounded after the prequels came out (and the books after that). But, reading the comics and books as they came out, it was easier to not notice those issues. It wasn’t like you could truly binge everything easily, the longer time passed. So you’d have blurry memories of the parts you watched/read previously.

But now, after the old canon has been discarded entirely, and you can dig up synopses easily, while those flaws were there, they mostly were stable. With all/most of that being disconnected now, but only the stuff disney wants disconnected, that stability is gone.

I think that even new fans without the baggage of a lifetime of immersion in the universe are going to end up disappointed by sloppy management of things. Great stories are awesome, even if they’re essentially “alternate universes”, but unless that’s up front, it’s just a little daunting to buy the books and try and be invested in them as part of star wars.

In other words, I think they’ll bank on short term sales and end up with a sloppy, mismanaged mess that fans will regret buying into, no matter how good individual books are.

Being real, I’m legit surprised they expect anyone to buy into this.

They’ve already dumped the extended universe once, which is fine by itself. But they’ve followed that up with dubious continuity and decision making for their movie universe.

So, why am I (or attentive anyone else) going to buy new books? Are they going to be up front and call all the books, comics, or other new EU material a “what if” that can go away at the whim of whatever CEO is in charge?

Again, that’s fine. I’m completely okay with a company deciding what is and isn’t canon for their products. I just want honesty

Preach!

My block list is long enough it lags my browser when I try to scroll through it.

Lmao! It’s horror stories like those that got me banned from the dinner table for a year.

Ehhh, I think it better to say that it can work. It really depends on the degree of constipation, the reason for it, where it is in the large intestine, and the state of the feces.

But it will absolutely not be like squeezing out toothpaste if the person is constipated enough to need to try it in the first place. If the poop is firm enough to have difficulty exiting the anus, it won’t be a gentle push and then out comes the poop all easy like. It will absolutely help, though I would say that digital dilation of the anus would be a better option, and even that only after something like a suppository has failed to give relief.

I’m kinda 50/50 on trying an enema before trying the more direct methods like this, or digital dilation. They can work, but I’ve seen them fail to clear a blockage and end up just messy. Most of the time, a glycerin suppository is going to do a gentler, better job of helping the rectum clear than manual assistance of any kind.

But gods, anything is better than having to clear the impaction manually. Nobody enjoys that. When you have to essentially dig the feces out, everyone involved is going to be in some degree of pain. And even that’s better than the rare instance that requires more complicated intervention. Which, in my twenty years wiping butts and helping clear them out, I only ever had one patient need anything more than manual intervention. And that guy was on enough opiates to knock a horse out, so it isn’t a common thing.

No bullshit though, the first time I had to clear an impaction, I didn’t throw up, I didn’t have to take any breaks, but holy hell did I cry after. I’m a big dude. My fingers are kinda huge as well. So there was no way for it to be a gentle, easy experience. There was a great deal of discomfort for the patient. Poor guy was not exactly happy he was cleared out, though he did later say that it was better.