Slightly tied up at the moment, will comment in approximately an hour.

"The “most complicated therapy ever” tailors bespoke, genome-edited immune cells to attack tumors" — In First, Scientists Use CRISPR for Personalized Cancer Treatment 🧬

Paywall? Jump it here: https://archive.ph/VRhPp

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"A small clinical trial has shown that researchers can use CRISPR gene editing to alter immune cells so that they will recognize mutated proteins specific to a person’s tumours. Those cells can then be safely set loose in the body to find and destroy their target."

Hey team, if you're interested in progress studies, check out "The Progress Dashboard", an experimental proof of concept wiki of progress resources. The project concept is very much at the beta stage, so any positive or constructive feedback is most welcome.

Root Study: Foy, S. P. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05531-1 (2022).

>"The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time."

Want to learn more about progress studies? Dive into "The Progress Dashboard" for heaps of resources.

Building a better future for humanity requires understanding that civilization has made enormous progress over the last 200 years. Child mortality fell from 40% to 3.7% in 200 years, and life expectancy and average global wealth have grown enormously. We can't build a better future for civilization without understanding human progress, while also keeping at the forefront of the mind, "progress forward isn't progress completed."

To quote Hans Rosling in his seminal 2018 book Factfulness,

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"The solution is not to balance out all the negative news with more positive news. That would just risk creating a self-deceiving, comforting, misleading bias in the other direction. It would be as helpful as balancing too much sugar with too much salt. It would make things more exciting, but maybe even less healthy. A solution that works for me is to persuade myself to keep two thoughts in my head at the same time.
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It seems that when we hear someone say things are getting better, we think they are also saying “don’t worry, relax” or even “look away.” But when I say things are getting better, I am not saying those things at all. I am certainly not advocating looking away from the terrible problems in the world. I am saying that things can be both bad and better. Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator. The baby’s health status is extremely bad and her breathing, heart rate, and other important signs are tracked constantly so that changes for better or worse can quickly be seen.
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After a week, she is getting a lot better. On all the main measures, she is improving, but she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical. Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Absolutely. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world."

*Citation required.

>"After more than 9,000 years in cultivation, annual paddy rice is now available as a long-lived perennial. The advancement means farmers can plant just once and reap up to eight harvests without sacrificing yield, an important step change relative to "ratooning," or cutting back annual rice to obtain a second, weaker harvest."

Between 1961 and 2020, global rice yields have grown by 146%, from 1.87 tonnes per hectare to 4.61 tonnes per hectare. These increases in rice yields, largely driven by improvements and access to fertilizer and mechanized agriculture; have helped feed the world. 🥣

China's rice yield has improved even more dramatically over the same period, by some 245%, from 2.04 tonnes per hectare in 1961 to 7.04 tonnes per hectare in 2020.

Unlikely and maybe. Antibodies are like keys not bombs, they kill in very a specific and targeted manner. It would be difficult but not impossible to evolve blanket immunity. But some bacteria are multi-resistant. Check out the "watch this" link for more information.

Nothing, the war never ends. It's a litral arms race, but failure to continue winning would kill hundreds of millions. Check out the video "watch this" linked in the pinned comment.

Interesting side note: [As a young, healthy, and active cyclist] In January I woke up with a mystery infection in my elbow, (doctors still don't know what caused it, possibly a "micro-cut" that let in a one in a million bacteria); and I went from active outdoors person to being admitted to the ICU in septic shock within 12 hours, and spent two weeks in hospital undergoing two surgeries. Antibiotics, saved my life, just this year.

It might feel at first glance like this is superficial news; (pharmaceutical companies doing capitalist pharmaceutical things), but it's a big deal. Every new and promising antibiotic candidate is a big deal worth celebrating. 💊

>New antibiotic passes through the first phase of clinical trials with ease

The last truly novel antibiotic compounds that made it to the market were discovered in the 1980s, leaving a void of innovation that has lasted decades, with many experts worried about the very real possibility of an “antibiotic apocalypse”. ⬅️ Watch this:

>"The drug, called QPX9003, is a promising candidate for tackling Gram-negative bacteria which cause serious infections like pneumonia, urinary tract infections, peritonitis and meningitis." "Gram-negative “superbugs” are becoming increasingly hard to treat, as they develop resistance to most common antibiotics."

Hey team, I'm a progress studies researcher and progress proponent; if you enjoy my content, you're welcome to follow the majority of my work on the blue bird platform (before Elon tanks the platform)

Did you open the op-ed before commenting? 🤔

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" (with the exception of mince)"

>"It delivers a dose of radiation that’s over 300 times higher than traditional radiation therapy in just a fraction of a second. This induces something called the “FLASH effect” — a not-entirely-understood phenomenon in which the radiation still attacks the tumor, but doesn’t harm surrounding tissue."

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>"Ultimately, the researchers believe FLASH radiotherapy would be most useful for treating cancers in the brain, lungs, or gastrointestinal area, as the tissues around those tumors are particularly vulnerable to damage from traditional radiation therapy."

The stakemato. Can you even imagine Stakemato sauce. 🌭

All beef (with the exception of mince) should be rare to medium-rare, no exceptions. Now let's crisper up an indicator strip or color change for medium rare. I'm totally over asking for rare and getting medium, or asking for medium rare, and getting cooked AF.

Hey team, r/Futurology, can we get an agriculture flair?

>"Using the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR, researchers are altering crops and animals to add desirable traits and remove undesirable ones." From "Boosted Tomatoes" to "Super Grains", and from "Climate-resistant cattle" to "Fast-growing beef", genetic engineering (GE) foodstuffs is the future of human agriculture; to paraphrase Mark Watney from The Martian, civilization is "going to have to science the shit out of this.”
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"Some cattle in subtropical and tropical areas have a rare, but naturally occurring genetic variant that causes them to develop a “slick” haircoat. Because this coat is shorter and lighter than the standard coat, those cattle are less prone to heat stress, which can be both deadly for cattle and costly for farmers. 🐄

Instead of trying to produce beef cattle with this trait this old-fashioned way, through imprecise selective breeding, Reombinetics used CRISPR to give beef cattle an inheritable form of the variant, leading to a line of slick-coated beef cattle. At the time of the FDA’s ruling, it said it expected to have meat from its heat-resistant animals ready for consumers within two years."

Hey team, I'm a progress studies writer and communicator; if you enjoy my work, you can follow along on the blue bird platform. 🐤

Quaise Energy, a Boston company, is using tech from nuclear fusion experiments to reach new depths. *"12 miles down", that's 19 kilometers for team metric.

>"Quaise Energy, a startup based in Boston, is taking a third approach: digging deeper—and using more heat—than any company has before. To do so, it’s refashioning a millimeter-wave drilling technique from nuclear fusion experiments."

Globally installed geothermal capacity has grown by 982% between 1975 and 2020, and an astonishing 70% since the year 2000. 📈

While the theoretical potential of geothermal energy is enormous, the technology still accounts for less than 0.2% of the global power supply.

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"Quaise’s chief executive officer, likens it to “a big cousin of the microwave in your kitchen”—only with 1,000 times more power. “It’s a fairly mature technology,” he says. “We just use it for this purpose.”

Building a better future for civilization requires believing a better future is possible as a fundamental prerequisite.

>“On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” — Thomas Babington Macaulay, Review of Southey’s Colloquies on Society, c. 1830 📈

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>"Over the last 200 years, the lives of average people in every country have been radically transformed and improved. In our modern day, we are living longer and are more prosperous than ever before — in both high-income and low-income countries. And while progress forward is by no means progress completed nor a guarantee of progress to come, the remarkable improvements in global living standards serve, not as a high water or finish line, but rather as a source of inspiration and hope."

From #1. Life expectancy to #3. Indoor air pollution, and from #7. Safe water and sanitation to #6. Literacy, here are "9 astonishing ways that living standards have improved around the world"

Indeed.

Well, there's some good news hidden in the data. Cancer rates will continue to rise, this is largely due to an aging population with a high life expectancy. On average, cancer is still a +50 disease. The fact that we're still making progress with an aging population is indicative of more progress than it looks. Travel back 100 years, and cancer rates were not as high, not because it was a synthetic chemical-free world, but rather because average life expectancy was not as high.

The good news: Five-year survival rates have increased globally. Between 1970 to 2013, five-year survival rates have increased from roughly 50% to 67%, so while we still have a long way to go in mastering cancer, we're making slow but steady progress. 🎉

>"Merck is now exercising its option on mRNA-4157, a personalized cancer vaccine in a phase 2 clinical trial for skin cancer. It’s being studied in combination with Merck’s cancer treatment Keytruda, a humanized monoclonal antibody."

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>" To create each vaccine, Moderna takes a sample of a patient’s tumor. It then uses genetic sequencing technology to identify proteins in the tissue called “neoantigens.” These proteins are found only on the surface of cancer cells, and they are unique to each person’s tumor."

I hope you enjoy this post, I'm a progress studies writer and thinker, and I've genuinely appreciated being part of this subreddit. Keep being awesome team.

That's the spirit. :)

The team at Zipline, renowned for their truly astounding success in Africa (The Super-Fast Logistics of Delivering Blood By Drone), are beginning operations Salt Lake City, Utah, United States.

>"The startup is promising on-demand deliveries directly to patients’ homes in “as little as 15 minutes,” and plans to gradually e), are beginning operations in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. e years"

Zipline isn't a small-scale proof of concept, it's a game changer with enormous potential, particularly in low and middle-income countries. To date, they have flown a truly amazing 30 million miles, 48 million kilometres, flying 423,409 commercial deliveries with a reach of 25 million serviceable customers.

>"Every four minutes, ‍someone's life is made better by a Zipline delivery"

Do all countries have nuclear weapons?

>"Yesterday, six companies that build or support sophisticated mobile robots (led by Boston Dynamics) published an open letter to the robotics community and industry pledging to not weaponize their general-purpose robots. Signed by Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics, and Unitree, in addition to Boston Dynamics, the letter seeks to ensure that the companies’ robots are used safely and ethically, in a way that helps rather than harms."

Weaponizing advanced robotic systems is a little talked discussed global risk; one that increases the risk of flash points and rapid escalations. It's a risk that needs to be carefully managed to reduce a robotic military arms race, one that is already well underway.

"Antifungal compound helping disease-causing bacteria thrive may treat humans and plants, too." Cosmos, October 11th, 2022, Root Source here: New Antifungal Antibiotic

For 99% of our history as a species, we have been disproportionally outgunned in our war against the microbes, and desperately ignorant. And while we have made enormous progress in beating the microbes into submission, antibiotic resistance remains an ongoing challenge, particularly in livestock.

While it's early days for discoveries like this, some of which may take decades to reach the market, it shows that our improving mastery of genome sequencing is generating tangible innovation with future potential.