Interesting Links for 21-12-2011

[andrewducker]

• A petition to support a constitutional amendment to stop corporations contributing to political campaigns
  (tags: democracy usa money politics )
• The best sparkling wine is supplied by...Sainsburies.
  (tags: champagne alcohol wine )
• Is a cure for the common cold on the way?
  (tags: virus medicine )
• Awesome photos of dogs diving for balls
  (tags: dogs photography water )
• Canadian university's AIDS vaccine wins approval | Canada | News | Toronto Sun
  (tags: aids canada research vaccination )

Comments

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Nothing to do with this post, but did you change your settings or something?

I was just rechecking yesterday's post about porn, romantic comedies and disney films and realized none of the comments are threaded anymore (though they were yesterday) - this isn't the case on anyone else's blog on my friends list, so I suspect it's just a setting error, or some random LJ glitch, but I figured I'd point it out FWIW.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

LJ appear to be rolling out New! Comment! Code! Which looks jolly swish but probably contains corners that will need to be smoothed off as time goes on.

[andrewducker]

Jesus, that's awful. Not sure what's going on, but have logged a support request.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

My journal still looks exactly the same as before but other people on my flist now have the new system, which seems to be much wider so maybe doesn't interact well with your columns style. It's jolly annoying either way, I hope they fix it soon!

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

It's weird. Andrew's commenting system is the same as it was yesterday, even though the comments don't have threads. But on my blog, even though I still have threads it's a completely different commenting system.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Yep, I get the old system to comment here and the new on the 2 other journals I've commented on today. Some sort of incomplete roll out nonsense is going on :( I wish they would just leave things alone, what was wrong with the commenting system anyway? *Sigh*

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

Awesome photos of dogs diving for balls

Those dogs are terrifying! The teeth! They're like fluffy alligators!

[andrewducker]

Awww, fluffy alligators!

Test Comment

[andrewducker]

Test!

[anef.livejournal.com]

I hope the editor of the Independent is deeply embarrassed by an article using "palette" instead of "palate" throughout. But I suspect he doesn't care.

[soon_lee]

Not to mention inaccuracies: the New Zealand sparkling is described as carbonated when it is in fact made using the traditional champagne method.

It's an old article BTW, from 2006, so isn't exactly news. This sort of thing shouldn't come as a surprise anyway given the number of blind-tasting results that have shown that some of the cheaper bubbles get rated more highly than the fancied Champagnes.

Wine is not just about flavour (which is subjective anyway); we're also buying the brand & that affects how we perceive flavour. We are predisposed to enjoy it more if we know it costs more.

[andrewducker]

That's awesome!

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Classic!

[autopope.livejournal.com]

FYI, DRACO isn't going to be wasted on the common cold, whatever the idiots writing up the science column for the BBC think. It's horrifically expensive to produce at present, and antiviral resistance is a nightmare scenario -- so this stuff is basically going to be rationed out in intensive care units or during lethal flu epidemics, not sold over the counter for minor infections.

[andrewducker]

Does it look like something that viruses could develop a defence against?

I'm sure it's horribly expensive right now - but I wonder how long that will last for.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Does it look like something that viruses could develop a defence against?

Yes.

It won't happen easily, mind you. DRACO is a broad-spectrum antiviral that targets a bunch of viral mechanisms in parallel. But there are billions of humans who suffer multiple viral infections every year. Multiply by decades, and if it's used indiscriminately eventually one in a trillion viruses in one in a hundred billion infections will mis-assemble by accident in a viable form that by-passes enough of the antiviral mechanisms to be able to replicate. And then it will have a clear field.

It took about sixty years for gram-negative bacteria to play out from the introduction of Penicillin-V through to the evolution of NDM-1 resistance. But if you'd told Michael Crichton about it in 1966 he could have used it as a plausible explanation for the Andromeda Strain.

[khoth.livejournal.com]

If the cost comes down, I'm not convinced that it won't be used for everything. People tend not to be that great at comparing "concrete benefit to me now" and "possible disadvantage to (almost certainly) other people some time later that can't be traced to me". Even if the medical system in this country doesn't spray it everywhere, what about countries where they're more willing to hand out what people ask for, and/or where most people don't even believe in the mechanism that causes drug resistance.

And if it turns out that putting this stuff in pig's food makes them 1% fatter, god help us...

[autopope.livejournal.com]

It's not going to go in pig feed.

In its simplest form, a DRACO is a chimeric protein with one domain that binds to viral dsRNA and a second domain (e.g., a procaspase-binding domain or a procaspase) that induces apoptosis when two or more DRACOs crosslink on the same dsRNA. If viral dsRNA is present inside a cell, DRACOs will bind to the dsRNA and induce apoptosis of that cell. If viral dsRNA is not present inside the cell, DRACOs will not crosslink and apoptosis will not occur.

For delivery into cells in vitro or in vivo, DRACOs can be fused with proven protein transduction tags, including a sequence from the HIV TAT protein [28], the related protein transduction domain 4 (PTD) [29], and polyarginine (ARG) [30]. These tags have been shown to carry large cargo molecules into both the cytoplasm and the nucleus of all cell types in vitro and in vivo, even across the blood-brain barrier.

From the PLoS One paper introducing DRACOs.

These are large molecules -- complex synthetic peptides. Getting them intact across the gut wall or a mucus membrane is a nightmare in terms of pharmaceutics; the easy option is to inject them. At that, you have to watch out for nasty possibilities such as immunological responses (random foreign proteins in blood stream = shortcut to anaphylactic shock).

Put it another way: it works on cells in a petri dish. This is good. But it's a very long way from working on a living organism, and this sort of drug is likely to remain expensive to manufacture and requiring delivery via intravenous infusion with medical monitoring for quite a long time.