rapchee

hahahaha

Victory is just a nickel and dime away.

machistado:

This makes me so happy. 

valkyriesvagina:

Oh god what have I done!?

Carl June and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have been making waves since they published some successes fighting leukemia with a revolutionary new method. They removed patients’ T cells and genetically modified them to target and kill the cancer. When the T cells were reintroduced into the patients’ bloodstreams, their cancer was often sent into complete remission.

Could similar modifications to the immune system’s fighter pilots provide revolutionary cures for other cancers and even other diseases?

The U. Penn researchers are applying a similar technique to that other hardest-to-treat disease, HIV/AIDS. They recently completed a Phase 1 clinical trial in which they removed HIV-positive patients’ T cells and genetically modified a portion of them to include a rare HIV-resistant genetic mutation of the CCR5 gene (called delta 32).

The trial purports to be the first genetic therapy for HIV/AIDS tested on patients.

As the HIV virus replicates in the body, it kills off T cells using the CCR5 protein on the cell as a foothold. In people who have a single copy of the mutated gene, the infection progresses more slowly; those who have the mutated gene on both chromosomes are seldom infected even when exposed.

Although the trial was designed only to prove the safety of the approach, the results hint that the treatment may work. The twelve patients in the trial, who had the mutation introduced in a portion of their T cells, saw their viral loads fall. One patient’s even became undetectable. Among the six patients who stopped taking their antiviral medications a month after the treatment, the modified T cells declined more slowly than the unaltered immune cells.

“This study shows that we can safely and effectively engineer an HIV patient’s own T cells to mimic a naturally occurring resistance to the virus, infuse those engineered cells, have them persist in the body, and potentially keep viral loads at bay without the use of drugs,” June said in a news release.

Researchers introduced the delta 32 mutation using a genetic editing tool developed by Silicon Valley genetics company Sangamo. The company sponsored the research.

It was the failure of another initially promising treatment in two patients known as “the Boston patients” that lead June and his colleagues to CCR5. After Timothy Ray Brown, also widely referred to as “the Berlin patient” cleared his HIV infection after a bone marrow transplant to treat his leukemia in which the donor who was among the 1 percent of the population with the HIV-resistant CCR5 mutation.

Two HIV-positive patients in Boston were also later given bone marrow transplants to treat blood cancers. Their donors, unlike Brown’s, did not have the genetic mutation. The patients initially seemed to clear the virus, but it returned. Researchers concluded that the virus had lurked in a reservoir where conventional testing doesn’t look, raising concerns about whether the only other cases of “functional cures” — in which infant patients were given prompt and powerful doses of anti-retroviral drugs — will be long lasting.

“The Boston cases show us that for the Berlin patient, it was not the chemotherapy or infusion of a donor’s stem cells that staved off the HIV; it was the protection of the T cells by the lack of CCR5. Those procedures couldn’t completely eliminate the reservoir of the HIV virus, and when the virus came back the T cells were susceptible to infection. The [genetic] approach protects T cells from HIV and may be able to almost completely deplete the virus, as those cells are still functional,” said Pablo Tebas, director of the AIDS Clinical Trials Unit at the Penn Center for AIDS Research and a co-author of the study.

June and another co-author, Bruce Levine, had previously introduced a different genetic mutation into T cells in an effort to combat HIV/AIDS. That method also proved safe, fueling subsequent work on T cells, but the cells modified this way were not persuasively effective against the virus.

Certainly there are still a lot of mysteries when it comes to HIV/AIDS, but it’s encouraging to see a number of potential treatments emerge to replace daily drug regiments, which are expensive, grueling and hard to implement in developing countries. And it will be fascinating to see how many other diseases souped-up T cells may combat.

Photos: University of Pennsylvania, NIAID via Flickr

If whiskey interferes with your business is a post from meh.ro

theanomalisticsavant:

No care in the world

The field in which I grow my fucks is a post from meh.ro

Well here’s a video people may not have been expecting. It’s part a send-me-money video, part behind-the-scenes of Freeman’s Mind. Either way, I tried to make it entertaining. If you’ve ever been curious about some of what’s involved in making an episode, you might enjoy watching this. The short version is this explains some of the obstacles to making the series HD and why more money will overcome them:

DONATE HERE!

Now the bad news is the next FM episode is NOT ready yet, however it is partially done. I’ll re-record it in HD and get it out ASAP if this fundraiser goes well. In all honesty, I probably would have been done with the episode by now if I never made this video, but the “why isn’t the resolution higher?” comments finally got to me, so by delaying the next episode and making this instead, it could be increasing the video quality on all future episodes.

On a personal note, ever since Machinima.com prevented me from releasing videos for months at the same time my pay dropped over 80%, this past year or so has been like a marathon for me trying to get my income stable again. I’m still crawling my way back towards sustainability and have been involved with a LOT of different projects to earn more income. I’m doing everything I possibly can to try and stabilize things and hope to do so sometime this year, but any extra money you donate will be GREATLY appreciated. A big part of the reason I haven’t bought this part myself is I’ve never been able to justify it; all donation money over the past year has gone directly to food and rent. By making this video, it FORCES me to buy the part and increase the resolution to the show. Anyway, because a lot of my time is divided up these days, I can say that for now, more money likely WILL increase the release rate of both Freeman’s Mind and RGD since it will free up time I would be spending working on other things.

As an extra “thank you”, I’ve also updated all the downloadable copies for Freeman’s Mind, and I’m going to try my best to reply to all the emails I’ve received over the past months, something I’ve been neglecting a lot (again). If you haven’t gotten a reply from me, it’s very likely you will over the next week. And if you don’t donate, I’m still glad to have you all as fans and will keep making more videos no matter what.

I throw out a lot of information in this video, so I can only imagine the comments I’ll get from people telling me I’m wrong about everything, but here are some questions / comments I’m anticipating:

Q: Why aren’t you using Kickstarter or Indiegogo?
A: Those fundraisers typically require many prize levels that would take a lot of time to fulfill. It’s not that I don’t want to give people prizes, but I’d rather not spend weeks mailing things when I could be making more videos instead.

Q: Are there any prizes?
A: Maybe! I will send an email of thanks to everyone who donates. Also I’m willing to give any prizes that don’t require me to act like a business and take tons of time to deliver. I am willing to record a line for anyone who’s donated $10 or more, just email me about it. Also, I was considering releasing all the isolated voice files for all the Freeman’s Mind episodes if people are interested in that. If you have ideas about something else you’d like to see, let me know.

Q: You don’t need a SSD! You need a capture card or use Shadowplay then play back the demos in slow motion!
A: For adding in motion blur, that wouldn’t actually help save me any time, plus it would still be susceptible to potential dropped frames if there was some sort of hard drive stutter.

Q: You don’t need a SSD! Your CPU is too slow!
A: While a faster CPU would speed up the motion blur processing some, none of the cores ever get maxed during recording, there’s plenty of overhead. The hard drive speed is the bottleneck.

Q: Will you be updating all the old episodes to HD?
A: Unfortunately, no. I no longer have the old demos and project files necessary to do so. I never would have gotten rid of them if I expected FM to be as popular as it became.

Q: What about the Game Dungeon?
A: Due to voting results, I plan to focus mostly on FM for the near future, but I have a LOT of RGD episodes planned. This part will remove all barriers for recording in RGD also, so I’ll be able to cover potentially any game after this, not just older ones (though I still plan to keep doing those too).

Q: Do you eat only beans?
A: No, but beans + onions have a good cost-to-flavor / nutrition ratio.

- – -

ADHD version: Send money to Ross if you want to see Freeman’s Mind in HD! Or send money because you can, Ross can use it! New FM coming this month, maybe in HD!

LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

you-would-make-a-good-timelord:

zzzzokellyjaneo:

smokinshield:

moonblossom:

This makes me vaguely uncomfortable.

The resemblance is uncanny.

This might be the tallest yet.

Hyperkinetic rabbity things are the cruelest animal.

Can you guess the game?

This print is for sale on my web shop.

brilliances:

puddlejumpingchampion:

lutefisktacoandbeer:

funnywildlife:

cognitivedissonance:

clubpunk:

kittymudface:

It gets better—the guy is deaf, and he taught his cat the sign for “food.” So the cat’s not just saying “put that in my mouth,” it’s actually signing

Best thing I have ever seen I love cats so much omg

Your cute cat of the day

Blimey! Speechless!

Not only that, but if you notice at the beginning, the cat *gets the man’s attention* as any person who wanted to talk to a deaf/hoh individual would (well, and vice versa IME). I’ve done sign since I was 5, and generally, w/o eye contact initially, you wave a hand or lightly touch the arm (if that’s ok with the person you’re trying to converse with, of course). 
Generally, adult cats meow mostly to humans, but this cat has figured out that’s not going to work and has adapted. Animal companions! They are INCREDIBLE.

What a smart, sweet kitty!

this is the cutest thing ever omg

I’ll take that, thank you!

tawnks:

vilehumanity:

cassjaytuck:

have you ever seen a numbat’s tonguenow you’ve seen a numbat’s tongue

now i’ve seen a numbat

aaa pbtttt

4gifs:

[video]

When it Feels like the Universe is Against you