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Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of peopleâs bodies.
Vast amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans.
In March, doctors warned of potentially life-threatening effects after finding a substantially raised risk of stroke, heart attack and earlier death in people whose blood vessels were contaminated with microscopic plastics.
The study, published in the journal Toxicological Sciences, involved dissolving the tissue samples and then analysing the plastic that remained.
The human testes had been routinely collected by the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator and were available following a seven-year storage requirement after which the samples are usually discarded.
Recent studies in mice have reported that microplastics reduced sperm count and caused abnormalities and hormone disruptions.
Quantum foam has been a mainstream thought for some time. It is referenced extensively in Michael Crichton's 1999 novel Timeline in which a sort of multiverse time travel is achieved by scientists using some vague method based on quantum science.
So I wonder, even if it's only appearing very briefly it's still going to exert some small gravitational effect. And who is to say the density of quantum foam is perfectly evenly distributed through the universe, within, through and between galaxies?
Could this be an alternative explanation to dark matter?
Would be nice if we could measure quantum-foam activity depending on gravity well intensity. Let's say somewhere around Venus and Pluto to compare (sun's well).
Correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand it mass and energy is equivalent no? And it also still baffles us as to why rest mass and resultant mass from energy should be equivalent at all?
Btw, wasn't there an experiment with a laser vibrating a nano-particle with nearly lightspeed, separating the particle & anti-particle pair before annihilation, creating matter from nothing?
I read the article but I'm still confused how this works.
My understanding is the herpes virus DNA is integrated into our own. So once the gene editing molecules snip at the herpes virus damaging it, how does the chromosome get put back together?
Is it actually sniping at two places in the herpes genome in a way that the two ends match up and reform while cutting out a section in the middle?
Meganucleases can work in quite a few ways. Typically speaking cleaving describes a process in which a section of genome is removed (cutting in two places), but not always. The article doesn't go into too much detail of the specifics of the meganucleases used in this study, but the literature they cite might.
My understanding is the herpes virus DNA is integrated into our own.
I'm not sure about the technique here (I'm sure part of the process puts it back together), but I just wanted to denote that this is how all retroviruses work - they infect a cell and incorporate themselves into the DNA, which is then replicated by normal cell processes.
Our DNA is littered with the corpses of many such remnants, and if we can figure out how to stop Herpes, it would be a path to also stopping HIV.
That's a really good question, the article doesn't go into specifics.
Then the bodyâs own repair systems recognize the damaged DNA as foreign and get rid of it.
This is somewhat ambiguous. It could mean that human DNA polymerases see the damaged DNA, scroll backwards and forwards to the START and STOP codons, and break the bonds to snip out the bits of viral DNA. Then endogenous DNA ligases patch the ends together. It could mean that it affects DNA in the viral particles themselves (but from the context in the article I don't think this is the case). Or it could be the case that the process triggers apoptosis to eliminate the infected cells entirely; I don't think this is the case because then you have necrotic tissue all over the place, and given that we're talking about herpes viruses this means fragile skin in tender places... ouch. That's kind of like using thermite to roast a marshmallow: Fun but overkill and potentially hazardous.
Worth noting: this is 90% effective for HSV-1, but not tested on HSV-2. That's on their radar for research. It's nonetheless a breakthrough, and the Hutch has pulled off some interesting things in the past, so I'd imagine they'll get there.
To a certain degree, as they mentioned in the article regarding the casimir effect. While one cannot keep out the quantum foam entirely, it can be restricted to specific wavelengths by altering the volume of the space.
Consider this fact, some light waves like radio are large enough that a lot of matter is essentially invisible to their propagation; the radio waves just pass right by without any interactions. This becomes a similar problem when we try and measure such small quantum phenomena like zero-point energy. The quantum energy could be so small that they're invisible to our detectors, but are in fact still there - the two scales simple cannot interact in a measurable way. So, there'd like still be some quantum energy, just less and less until our detectors could not interact with the incredibly small quanta for measurement.
Nope, they actually appear and disappear. The idea is that even in vacuum there's a certain amount of background energy and that energy can randomly turn into matter-antimatter pairs in what is basically the inverse of matter-antimatter annihilation.
What is the ontology of a concept or idea? If nothing doesn't exist materially but strictly conceptually, does it not exist or is there a different term one should employ to refer to it? đ€
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