Interesting Links for 07-10-2022

[andrewducker]

1. No, Covid infection doesn't make it easier to get future infections

(tags:Pandemic immune_system )

2. Edinburgh International Film Festival goes bust - as does the Filmhouse!

(tags:edinburgh festival cinema movies viaSwampers doom )

3. It's Americans being sensible about marijuana!

(tags:marijuana law USA democrats GoodNews drugs )

4. "I'm 3. I know everything. Ask Me Anything"

(tags:children questions funny )

5. A Frida Kahlo Drawing Was Destroyed to Make NFTs. Maybe.

(tags:art Blockchain OhForFucksSake Mexico )

Comments

[conuly]

Is it not the case that you can have tags that have spaces in them so long as "you surround them in quotes"?

[andrewducker]

I can't find anything on Dreamwidth that says either way. But Pinboard, which is where they come from, doesn't allow whitespace in tags.

[conuly]

Hm. Fortuitously, this post just popped up on my flist: https://fancake.dreamwidth.org/2116975.html

Note the spaces in the tags! I'm pretty sure that's how they do it, because that's how you get spaces in the cuts as well, if you put one in your post.

Not that it matters to me, other than that clearly the FAQ is ripe for a few targeted edits.

[andrewducker]

I wonder if + would work on pinboard.

Although after this long, it would feel weird to change my approach.

(Particularly as Dreamwidth has a maximum cap on tags, and I'm getting too near the limit for comfort)

[mellowtigger]

#1 Interesting review. I wish, though, that they weren't looking just at initial SARS-CoV-2 infection, though. It's the repercussions that has people (like me) sounding alarms. The paper doesn't mention the word lymphocytopenia at all. I want to know the CD4 T cell counts for some of these people who escaped "hospitalization or severe disease" after 12 months. Is it really as rosy as they claim? That would be great news, if so. Otherwise, we're just waiting for the clock to tick a little longer.

Another new study reviews solely the neurologic consequences of infection. It notes that brain infection does occur (which means persistent infection), but only in a subset of cases. I don't know the percentages yet, but it makes every new infection a serious risk.
https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00910-2

[mellowtigger]

It's all so confusing sometimes. This one just crossed my feeds, which sort of (?) contradicts the other one by explicitly stating that variants which include ORF8 will interfere with the immune response, thereby producing increased severity of infection.

"These findings demonstrate a new function of ORF8 and a mechanism through which SARS-CoV-2 disrupts host cell epigenetic regulation. Further, this work provides a molecular basis for the finding that SARS-CoV-2 lacking ORF8 is associated with decreased severity of COVID-19... Histone mimicry allows viruses to disrupt the host cell’s ability to regulate gene expression and respond to infection effectively. However, no validated cases of histone mimicry have previously been reported within coronaviruses. Although SARS-CoV-2 probably uses many mechanisms to interfere with host cell functions, we examined whether it uses histone mimicry to disrupt chromatin regulation and the transcriptional response to infection."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05282-z

Can we fast-forward 20 years to find out what's what? I know discoveries are happening much faster now than with HIV research back in the 1980s, but it's still painful watching news trickle in when so much is at stake.