In defence of the black cab, if there is any sort of surge pricing in Uber, the black cab is typically cheaper if you can find one. Apps like Gett solve the ‘not knowing the price upfront’ problem, prebooking and hailing.
I think black cabs are a lot easier if you have lots of luggage, or especially if you have a pram/stroller. Rearward facing seats are safer for kids and cabs seat six comfortably. And the final big advantage: in London, black cabs get to use the bus lanes which can save inordinate amounts of time at rush hour.
I still use Uber all the time but I just thought I would add some balance!
People say this because it sounds right and dramatic, but if they knew and understood what cancer is, they'd understand why treating it is so hard.
For those unconvinced, cancer is your own bodies cells gone rogue and trying to kill you. Now, this happens all the time. Luckily, our immune system is awesome and catches it.
Cancer is when your immune system does not catch it. it's invisible, indistinguishable from your skin cells or your lung cells. Its not like the flu or pneumonia - there is no foreign body, there is no attacker. Its you.
So then treatment means we need to kill living, actively reproducing cells in the human body. Well, a fire can do that.
The trick is, how do you kill the cancer cells, which your own immune system cannot even distinguish as cancer cells, but not harm your normal cells?
Turns out that's very hard and very grueling. Chemo is very effective, but you still lose your hair and damage just about all your organs in the process.
And, for the record, we do have "one off" cures for cancer - surgery. Just cut it out. The trouble is cells are microscopic and there's billions of them. Rarely will they be so perfectly contained you can get them all in one go. No, you miss some, and they sit there, growing, until the cancer is detectable again. And they move, they use your own blood and lymphatic system as a highway.
Though this reads as though the implied message is preaching the suppressed cure conspiracy theory so I'll respond to that interpretation.
What you're missing the competitive factor of this. If your drug strings your patients along while your competitor releases an effective cure, guess who's getting all the business? Look to Sovaldi and Keytruda for recent examples.
AS01-adjuvanted shingles (herpes zoster) vaccination is associated with a lower risk of dementia, but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. In propensity-score matched cohort studies with 436,788 individuals, both the AS01-adjuvanted shingles and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines, individually or combined, were associated with reduced 18-month risk of dementia. No difference was observed between the two AS01-adjuvanted vaccines, suggesting that the AS01 adjuvant itself plays a direct role in lowering dementia risk.
This is a really interesting idea and the unit economics are great. However when I researched this (or rather Gemini 2.5 Pro researched this) the problem appears that Haber-Bosch produces ammonia, whereas Birkeland-Eyde produces nitrate, which then needs to be converted in nitric acid. Getting from nitric acid to ammonium nitrate (which dominates the fertiliser market) needs ammonia from somewhere, which destroys the economics.
However calcium nitrate, potassium nitrate production via B-E looks really interesting.
"Due to the emergence of low cost renewable electricity from solar and wind, there is renewed interest in decentralized opportunities for electricity-driven nitrogen fixation."
"This analysis shows that the energy consumption for NOX synthesis with plasma technology is almost competitive with the commercial process with its current best value of 2.4 MJ mol N−1, which is required to decrease further to about 0.7 MJ mol N−1 in order to become fully competitive"
Note that this measure of competitivity is based on energy, not cost. So the (intermittently) ultra-low cost of electrical energy generated by modern PV installations (where substantial overprovisioning is becoming normal) has not been taken into account.
An Agri-PV installation that produces all the fertilizer it needs from its own surplus electricity would be cool indeed.
Plants are happy with nitrate as the only nitrogen source.
Ammonium nitrate is preferred because it provides more nitrogen per weight, i.e. at similar transportation costs with the alternatives, and also because introducing a too great amount of metal cations together with the nitrate, e.g. potassium or calcium, can be detrimental for the soil and can make it too alkaline after the nitrate is consumed.
What we really need are low-capex thermal power plants with high efficiency so we can turn the gas or kerosene or whatever into electricity in the rare case that we need to, without losing money on having massive amounts of capital investment sitting around idle 95% of the time.
You've got to have the whole fuel production, storage and transportation system ready to go 100% of the time. Raises costs if you do it honestly, if you try to skimp it might not work when you need it.
It might be okay if production and transportation only work some of the time if you can store up enough fuel to ride out the outages. That's how it works today for fuel transportation; gas stations commonly go without deliveries for days or weeks at a time when roads are snowed out, for example, and oil tankers and LNG tankers make their deliveries even less frequently.
In particular, solar and wind won't produce any fuel at night when no wind is blowing, and may not produce enough fuel during the rainy season or winter.
Right now it is solar and wind electricity that is cheap. E-fuel [1] and other forms of chemical storage [2] are a thing but might not be so cheap. Seasonal storage might use methane and avoid the legendary boondoggle that is Fischer–Tropsch [3] but methane is itself a powerful greenhouse gas. A really good methane handling system loses much less but if you lose 1% of it you might as well be burning fossil fuels. Even hydrogen isn't completely benign [4] as it depletes those "negative ions" that were a fad in the 1970s and as a result prolongs the life of other greenhouse gases.
TCES is extremely cheap (megajoules per dollar of rechargeable capacity, compared to tens of kilojoules per dollar for batteries) and will likely be critical to the energy transition, but it won't run your servers overnight or your airplanes over the Atlantic. Things like cycle life are still an issue for TCES. And you need electric power to run your TCES system, so efficiency is still a concern.
I feel like oxidizing methane to methanol shouldn't be rocket science, especially if you have an unlimited amount of energy to use. NADPH does it at scale already. A few more cheap process steps would give you nontoxic ethanol instead.
I may be being dense, and I realise this is a meta analysis, but the abstract doesn’t explain how much fibre one needs to eat to reduce all-cause mortality by the amount they claim?
Thanks. I would still be curious to know how the strength of an artificial magnetic field at a range of say 10 km compares to the order of magnitude of local variations they are talking about in the earth’s magnetic field.
This looks like it might be in a similar vein to the navigation system discussed in a previous post about a new Royal navy test system. There are many good links in the comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36222625
Agree. My mother had a very serious form of cancer (she’s luckily responded well to treatment) but she was overwhelmed by con men promising hope. Adding legitimate research makes this mix less toxic, not more
I think black cabs are a lot easier if you have lots of luggage, or especially if you have a pram/stroller. Rearward facing seats are safer for kids and cabs seat six comfortably. And the final big advantage: in London, black cabs get to use the bus lanes which can save inordinate amounts of time at rush hour.
I still use Uber all the time but I just thought I would add some balance!