Hacker News: Smileyferret

New comment by Smileyferret in "Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice"

Smileyferret — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 06:00:44 +0000

Interesting article, but in the full paper their key figure (Fig 2) shows their treatment group of n=3 mice completely responded to the bacterial treatment, but their methods say they treated n=5 mice? Could be an honest mistake but that’s a little concerning for data manipulation.

Also agree that using a PD-L1 mab feels like it’s for show especially considering the cancer model they’re using (Colon-26) was shown to be substantially less responsive to PD-L1 inhibitors…

Not the world’s best paper imo

New comment by Smileyferret in "American Heart Association says melatonin may be linked to serious heart risks"

Smileyferret — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 19:53:16 +0000

This is an abstract that hasn’t been peer-reviewed… based on prescription data for an over-the-counter medication. This will be horribly inaccurate because it will miss all the folks who just buy the medication on their own and never have it documented.

These TriNetX studies are usually garbage because they’re entirely dependent on how accurate/up-to-date the medical record is.

New comment by Smileyferret in "Unconditional cash transfers reduce homelessness"

Smileyferret — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 23:18:11 +0000

“The specific bias in the current context is the tendency for the public to think that homeless individuals will increase spending on temptation goods (alcohol, drugs, cigarettes) when given the cash transfer compared to people who are not homeless. This bias can favor the provision of paternalistic forms of aid over more agentic forms of aid, thus presenting a barrier to the cash transfer policy.”

Earlier in the paper:

“Our preregistered screening criteria were: … [history of homelessness less than 2 years and] nonsevere levels of substance use (DAST-10), alcohol use (AUDIT),and mental health symptoms Colorado Symptom Index (CSI) based on predefined thresholds. These screening criteria were used to reduce any potential risks of harm (e.g., overdose) from the cash transfer.”

… Are you kidding me? Talk about hypocrisy.

New comment by Smileyferret in "A Bacteriophage-Based, Highly Efficacious, Needle-Free, Mucosal Covid-19 Vaccine"

Smileyferret — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 01:05:23 +0000

Some interesting bits:

> We recently reported the development of a “universal” phage T4 vaccine design platform by Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) engineering that can rapidly generate multivalent vaccine candidates.

> Intriguingly, the T4-CoV-2 vaccine induced high levels of Spike-specific serum IgA antibodies (endpoint titers up to 62,500) when administered by either the i.m. [intramuscular] or the i.n. [intranasal] route. This is notable because IgA stimulation is not commonly observed in traditional vaccines…

> … significantly elevated percentages of CD4+ T cells producing IFN-γ were detected in the i.n. group (1%) in comparison to the i.m. group (0.55%) of vaccinated mice (P < 0.001 between i.n. and i.m.). These data indicated an enhanced Th1-mediated immunity induced by i.n. administration of the vaccine.

> … high titers of mucosal sIgA antibodies were elicited by i.n. vaccination (endpoint titers up to 12,500), in addition to high levels of systemic immune responses as described above. In contrast, i.m. immunization failed to produce sIgA, which is not unexpected.

A Bacteriophage-Based, Highly Efficacious, Needle-Free, Mucosal Covid-19 Vaccine

Smileyferret — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 00:53:58 +0000

Article URL: https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/mbio.01822-22

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32372901

Points: 10

# Comments: 3

New comment by Smileyferret in "AI predicts if and when someone will experience cardiac arrest"

Smileyferret — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 02:59:16 +0000

I don’t disagree with you that much of medicine is hand-waving and voodoo magic, but arrhythmias due to scar tissue likely have a similar mechanism to other well-studied arrhythmias. Overall I think that cardiology has some of the more scientific explanations of its pathophysiology than other fields. Scarring simply interrupts smooth conduction of impulses throughout the myocardium and makes it more susceptible to arrhythmias. If you want to see a similar mechanism explained, check out this video:

https://youtu.be/j8pVU9snSH4

New comment by Smileyferret in "Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day"

Smileyferret — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 22:45:23 +0000

Not necessarily. Believe it or not, dexamethasone (another corticosteroid) is actually a second-line treatment for this disease because it reduces endogenous cortisol production without binding too tightly to the mineralocorticoid receptor in the kidneys.

New comment by Smileyferret in "Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day"

Smileyferret — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 19:34:58 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_mineralocorticoid_exc...

We actually learned about this in med school last week, but I never thought it actually happened to people... Licorice contains glycyrrhetinic acid which inhibits the conversion of cortisol to cortisone. If you have too much cortisol floating around because of this, that cortisol starts activating receptors in your kidneys that are normally activated by aldosterone. This in turn increases your sodium resorption and potassium excretion, so you get high blood pressure and low potassium which can cause arrhythmias. It's called the Syndrome of Apparent Mineralocorticoid Excess and is a usually genetic problem with the enzyme that breaks down cortisol.