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A biotech company says it put dopamine-making cells into people’s brains
  • Sure.

    The problem is that the brain is not a squishy uniform cell mess that just reacts to some chemicals (dopamine/serotonine/...). All of those are neurotransmitters to specific classes of neurons that have a very specific topological position to perform their function.

    So if you just throwing in random neurons here and there, they won't do anything. They are not contributing to any pathways.

    Serotonin re-uptake inhibitors and dopamine generator drugs (aka opioids) make the signal send by the "correct" neurons that are there stronger, contributing to the desired effect.

    The problem with Alzheimers is the death of "correct" neurons, that occurs before Alzheimer is manifested. So just injecting new ones is unlikely to do anything.

    Moreover, the neurons don't just live outside brain. They need to be immortalized to live in a Petri dish. And to acheive it, the only way we can go now is to add factors that in the context of human organism are considered as cancerous.

    So it's a combo of "unlikely to be efficient" and "potentially likely to lead to cancer". With Parkinson the tradeoff might be acceptable, but this kind of projects is definitely that raises some red flags for me.

  • Ukraine says it has manufactured and fired a long-range missile
  • R-36 "Satan" was desinged by and manufactured at Yuzhmash, now Pivden'mash, located in Dnipro, Ukraine. More recently, Pivden'mash has been building "Zenit" rockets, that has >70 successful launches and has a 13.7 t payload to LEO.

    I think Ukraine is mostly waiting for a proper excuse rather than capabilities to send non-nucler ICBM in towards strategic locations in Russia.

  • Wagner Soldiers Send Chilling Warning After Reports of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Death
  • Russian strongmen culture does not tolerate well traitors.

    Wagner mercs saw it first hand in prisons. Russian army saw it first had during the recruits mass-rape and torture nights.

    Nobody is getting assimilated and they all know it.

  • Ukraine Just Blew Up Russia's Main Missile Base In Occupied Crimea
  • I don't think it's only a psyops.

    One think is getting hit by drones and missiles. It's a whole different level to not spot a landing squad crossing almost 100km of sea, land and blow up your critical military installation.

    They likely already did it last year, when they blew up planes on a Russian base in Crimea, but it is nice to see that they still very much can do it.

  • ‘I’ve never seen heat this bad. It’s not normal’: Italy struggles as temperature tops 40C 118f
  • No, no - it's just as scientists predicted. In the worst-case "no-mitigation" scenario and with attempts from them to explain that +2 global will likely be +10 in peak temperature increase over land (read US, Europe, Asia). As in, both mean and std will increase, but without ocean's mitigation over land.

    Fucked is not the correct word - there is a +50 predicted before the end of decade in Strasbourg, where I am from. There is not a single building built there made to resist that kind of temperatures, nor a single tree or crop that could stand that for a day.

    And it's a relatively "safe" area as far as long-term projections go...

  • Wagner Group captures headquarters of the Southern Military District and the building of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Rostov, the headquarters of Russia's base of operations for War in Ukraine
  • Generally, I don't like to gloat, but I did call that one ~ June 5th over on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/140qkwu/destructions_incursions_évacuations_dans_la/jmyndp3/?context=3; in French because it was on r/France).

    It actually is much worse than it seems - I did a write up over on Mastodon to explain why and how (https://mastodon.social/@andrei_chiffa/110599724720727202). The TLDR is that cities taken by Wagner mercs will be hard to retake without leveling, all internal protection troops are either tied or were lost in Ukraine, and mercs themselves have nothing to loose and all the revenge to take.

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