Recent comments in /f/askscience

sciolycaptain t1_j9uoxo9 wrote

The current influenza vaccines are made by incubating the virus in fertilized chicken eggs. That step takes time. and hundreds of millions of eggs.

With mRNA vaccines, you can just throw templates, nucleotides, and enzymes into a container and get more mRNA for the vaccine (extremely oversimplified)

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Inevitable_Bar1607 t1_j9uoc63 wrote

You don't pee out the liquid you drink. The kidneys act as a filter for blood and one of their most important jobs is maintaining the right amount of water vs. saltiness in your body. Too much saltiness is bad, and too much water is bad. If you have too much water, the kidneys will produce more-watery pee.

Pee is yellow because of the chemical urobilin. People will say urea is responsible, but this is not true. Urea is the main component of urine (pee) but has no color. The color is urobilin. If your kidneys decide you have too much water, then your urine becomes more watery and this dilutes the urobilin, reducing the yellowness of the urine. Similarly, if you do not have much water at all, then the urobilin will be highly concentrated giving a dark yellow/orange color.

If your pee is red, you almost certainly are peeing blood, which means something very bad is happening in your kidneys or bladder. Pee can rarely be other colors - if your pee is green, your kidneys are filtering something blueish into the urine stream, etc. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

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Beat_the_Deadites t1_j9un7qy wrote

Sure, my example is way over-simplified, and group B will always have a higher mortality rate, which could be disastrous for them in a pandemic with a high death rate. But the survivors of that pandemic are going to think themselves extra special and try to repopulate the globe again.

Using the tools provided by Group A, of course.

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gwaydms t1_j9ulttt wrote

>2009 H1N1 outbreak

I caught that before the vaccine came out. It made me pretty sick (fever, chills, headache, dry cough). My symptoms were typical for that strain. And it was summer, not exactly prime flu season.

In those early days, brain and/or lung involvement was causing severe and even fatal disease and I didn't have that. I stayed in bed and just rode it out.

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BlueOmega169 t1_j9ulafx wrote

The development pipeline is substantially shorter, if you can produce an mRNA vaccine you can theoretically produce any mRNA vaccine. Once you have the genetic sequence of the strain you're interested in, preparing one mRNA transcript is (more or less) the same as preparing any other. The same is not true for protein expression or live attenuated virus preparation. Preparing the vaccine at scale faster means getting to testing sooner, and testing sooner means results sooner.

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Yancy_Farnesworth t1_j9ul5fz wrote

> Because a vaccine is already developed.

People really don't understand how much effort is expended annually to update the vaccine for flu season. The flu virus mutates really easily unlike COVID. It's why we have an annual flu shot. If someone is infected with multiple flu variants, the variants literally start swapping parts creating essentially a new strain. We've been developing new flu vaccines every year for decades. It's not just a few tweaks every year, it's literally a new vaccine every year.

The WHO is responsible for tracking flu strains going around the world and creating the vaccine for that year. This requires a lot of tracking of flu cases world-wide and analyzing the strains going around and creating a vaccine that targets the strains going around. And there are a lot of strains circulating, it's literally impossible to vaccinate against all of them.

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Ch3mee t1_j9uki9u wrote

I mean, in the simplest scenario, Group B wins. Simply because group A is self selecting themselves out by reproducing below replacement level. I mean, the whole name of the game is ability to reproduce successfully. If Group B is popping out kids like a mushroom releasing spores, then they're brute forcing the reproduction game.

Of course, nothing is that simple. If the devil-may-care attitude ends up with the group not getting a vaccine during a very deadly pandemic, they could be eliminated almost entirely.

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Ch3mee t1_j9uj9nh wrote

I was responding to a post saying there is already an H5N1 vaccine developed. I don't know if that's true, but its not that unbelievable it could be. My point is that if the H5N1 vaccine is already developed, then that significantly shortens the timeline. The lag just becomes the manufacturing ramp, but that can be retooled fairly quickly, and supplies can start moving almost immediately. The lag will be from the first people to get a dose to supply for the eventual demand. That can be slow, but with some planning and foresight, batches of vaccines can be deployed following patterns of outbreak. Basically, instead of months, vaccines could start hitting problem areas in days if there is already some inventory or weeks as production starts on an approved formulation.

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GeriatricHydralisk t1_j9uj5yb wrote

>Also, over half of the species are aquatic or semiaquatic.

Yeah, I could see the original sentence being "148 species of terrestrial mammals", especially for a book generally focused on human history. Or "terrestrial" accidentally got lost in revisions and drafts and proofs etc.

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Ebayednoob t1_j9uidgi wrote

I'm super curious as well, I've been digging into glutamate inhibition on neuronal NMDA receptors and found this while looking into cerebral spinal fluid flushes during REM sleep.

https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/37/12/1919/2416791

"These results demonstrate that sleep deprivation and subsequent recovery-induced changes in high-energy phosphates primarily occur in gray matter, and increases in phosphocreatine after recovery sleep may be related to sleep homeostasis."

It's not an answer, in fact it just brings more questions. Human sleep and the brain is a tough puzzle.

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