Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | dav_Oz's commentslogin

To keep it simple:

For one it's just competition. If you have regular contact to a diverse set of microorganisms chances are higher that they will keep each other populations in check. The dose makes the poison applies here too in some narrow sense.

Additionally (or even mainly) our immune system always on guard (me/not me) gets to play around with the obvious stuff and not be overwhelmed or be "bored" but constantly trained/tamed. We have evolved to have constant contact to a diverse set of microorganisms which modulate our immune system e.g. through toll-like receptors.

As an extreme case some people develop some natural immunity to the tetanus toxin through regular exposure to a extreme variety of microorganisms, obviously this isn't reliable nor a gamble remotely worth the risk.

[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3980089/

[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6827147/

Edit: don't know why OP gets downvoted it's a perfectly fine entrance question/bafflement to motivate some deeper digging into microbiology/immunology.


This article is a weird mash-up of an actually very interesting paper [0] with random personal slop like i've asked my rabbi, consulted my kabbalah-initiated friends and for the fun mixed it up with some fashionable ancient text (Mahabharatha)

So maybe just stick right to the paper itself and its clearly stated motivation?

> Perhaps unusually, the authors of this paper are not convinced of the correctness of their proposed hypothesis. Were it to be true it would have profound implications and not just for astrobiology. However, most readers do not need to be told that it is always a bad idea to decide on the truth or falsity of an idea based on the consequences of it being true. While we strongly doubt that any previous industrial civilization existed before our own, asking the question in a formal way that articulates explicitly what evidence for such a civilization might look like raises its own useful questions related both to astrobiology and to Anthropocene studies. Thus, we hope that this paper will serve as motivation to improve the constraints on the hypothesis so that in future we may be better placed to answer our title question.

[0]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...


You are probably right it was timed deliberately this way, this is why the Iranians also didn't rush it ...

> Iran waited until the clock passed midnight local time to finalize the agreement, because it did not want the momentous occasion to coincide with President Trump’s birthday on Sunday, according to two Iranian officials who could not be identified because of the matter’s sensitivity. The seven-and-half-hour time difference allowed both Tehran and Washington to claim their preferred version of when the deal was finalized. President Trump had said it would be on Sunday, and Iran had said it would be on a later day.[0]

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/06/14/world/iran-war-trump...


For context the Cell paper published several weeks before [0][1] provides a more bird's eye view (multi-omics etc.) the Nature paper here is very hands on providing x-ray crystal structures etc.

So both complement each other well.

[0]https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674%2826%2900335-1

[1]https://phys.org/news/2026-04-nicotine-biosynthesis-wild-tob...


It is unfortunate that at some point in midst of numerous renaming itself after a brief stint in mass media around 2014 the programming on both side was so successful that the latin string of "isis" to this day is basically reduced in many westerners minds as a pavlovian reflex to this meaning, ironic because most arabs in egypt and elsewhere lack the association

so kudos to the article/institute, leaving as it is

great band btw

> The name ISIS is not an acronym: it refers to the Ancient Egyptian goddess and the local name for the River Thames. The name was selected for the official opening of the facility in 1985, prior to this it was known as the SNS, or Spallation Neutron Source. The name was considered appropriate as Isis was a goddess who could restore life to the dead, and ISIS made use of equipment previously constructed for the Nimrod and Nina accelerators.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISIS_neutron_source


I work there, and when we give tours and people raise the issue, I like to point out that we had the name first and so we're not changing it. Though we did once get an official reminder that, to avoid ambiguity, we had to always say 'ISIS Neutron Source' in full on immigration and customs paperwork, especially in anything that also uses the word 'nuclear'.


Thanks, the article written in 2020 (?) is essentially a 1 to 1 copy of the vox clip "How a recording-studio mishap shaped '80s music" from 2017. (If the chronology is right)

kind of useless if the well produced vid delivers all the examples you can actually listen to ...


Well, actually I suppose the hardest part is to pronounce the other consonant hispanicized as -tl at the end (a soft lisp)

[ɬ] voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [0]

in a sufficient fluent manner (except you happen to speak e.g. Welsh, there the sound is written as ll so by happenstance the "axolotl" found in Wales can be pronounced fluently by the Welsh) otherwise you are saying it half correct which is arguably worse.

So let the nahuatl speaking people have a laugh at your expense for pronouncing it the germanic way or if you want to go unnoticed do it the evolved spanish romanic way, a good middle ground I guess.

Anyway I think it is generally a lot fun to hear words pronounced "wrong" by foreigners or having trouble hearing/pronouncing it "right" respectively heavy accents are hilarious icebreakers (:

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...


You're close.

The Welsh or Icelandic "ll" is not quite the same. That's a "voiceless lateral fricative", lacking the alveolar break that earned it the "t" in "tl" for the Latinized spelling. It's much closer than most languages get, but it is a different sound.

The Nahuatl consonant is a "voiceless alveolar lateral affricate". It is a single constant represented with [tɬ] or, more correctly, with a tie bar between those two glyphs: [t͡ɬ].


I stand corrected you are right there is no isolated use of [ɬ] in nahuatl as a phoneme it is used only in the context of an affricative /t͡ɬ/ I got ahead of myself in trying to isolate the sound [ɬ] for untrained ears.

To get back to the original point though if I'm not mistaken again in standard mexican spanish /ʃ/ as a phoneme is lost entirely and only appears in the affricative /t͡ʃ/? So in all likelihood the original /ʃ/ in axolotl would be pronounced by way of habit as [t͡ʃ] (unless again you have say a argentinian dialect where e.g. "ll" (/ʝ/) in llamar is pronounced as [ʃ]) if you try to "correct" mexican spanish speakers.


Ironically the "drama" narrative which was constructed much later making for a good story to tell could have been avoided right from the start.

Just three weeks after the publications in Nature (April 1953), a Time journalist Joan Bruce was made aware of the hottest story in science and described the discovery in her nearly publication-ready article (professional photoshoots of Watson/Crick were already taken, yes one of those pictures [0] was consequently prominently featured in The Double Helix 15 years (!) later) as a joint effort of two teams (Wilkins/Franklin & Watson/Crick) but the story was killed because apparently among other consulted scientists Franklin herself found the science lacking, it wasn't revised and subsequently no article was published at the time. No pun intended.

> Three weeks after the three DNA papers were published in Nature, Bragg gave a lecture on the discovery at Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London, which was reported on the front page of the British News Chronicle daily newspaper. This drew the attention of Joan Bruce, a London journalist working for Time. Although Bruce’s article has never been published — or described by historians, until now — it is notable for its novel take on the discovery of the double helix.

Bruce portrayed the work as being done by “two teams”: one, consisting of Wilkins and Franklin, gathering experimental evidence using X-ray analysis; “the other” comprising Watson and Crick, working on theory. To a certain extent, wrote Bruce, the teams worked independently, although “they linked up, confirming each other’s work from time to time, or wrestling over a common problem”. For example, Watson and Crick had “started to work on the double helix theory as a result of Wilkins’ X-rays”. Conversely, she wrote, Franklin was “checking the Cavendish model against her own X-rays, not always confirming the Cavendish structural theory”. It has not escaped our notice that both examples render Franklin in a position of strength, every bit a peer of Wilkins, Crick and Watson.

Unfortunately, Bruce was not so strong on the science. Her article got far enough for Time to send a Cambridge photographer, Anthony Barrington Brown, to shoot portraits of Watson and Crick, and for Watson to tell his friends to watch for it. But it never appeared, perhaps because Franklin told Bruce that it needed an awful lot of work to get the science straight. Bruce’s take on the discovery was buried, and Barrington Brown’s compelling images disappeared until Watson resurrected the best of them 15 years later, for The Double Helix.

It is tantalizing to think how people might remember the double-helix story had Bruce’s article been published, suitably scientifically corrected. From the outset, Franklin would have been represented as an equal member of a quartet who solved the double helix, one half of the team that articulated the scientific question, took important early steps towards a solution, provided crucial data and verified the result. Indeed, one of the first public displays of the double helix, at the Royal Society Conversazione in June 1953, was signed by the authors of all three Nature papers. In this early incarnation, the discovery of the structure of DNA was not seen as a race won by Watson and Crick, but as the outcome of a joint effort.

According to journalist Horace Freeland Judson and Franklin’s biographer, Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin has been reduced to the “wronged heroine” of the double helix. She deserves to be remembered not as the victim of the double helix, but as an equal contributor to the solution of the structure.[1][2]

[0]https://wellcomecollection.org/works/s9z3dhkn/items

[1]https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01313-5

[2]https://x.com/matthewcobb/status/1650877656445988864


While at some point in the optimization game Goodhart’s Law will also apply here, before that happens I thoroughly enjoyed the insights from reading it and will try implementing some version of it to gauge my productivity before jumping to another metric always aware of the abyss, the ultimate procrastination: being unproductive by trying too hard to optimize productivity.

Unproductivity is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my unproductivity. I will let it pass through me. When it is gone, only action will remain.

Jump!


Definitely agree with your assessment. That’s the feeling I wanted to convey at the end. The goal is to make people aware it’s not their fault but they have some things they can try to make things better for them.


>>> While at some point in the optimization game Goodhart’s Law will also apply here...

The tools for surveilling and enforcing "collaboration" can probably be reprogrammed to measure "flow."


What would the people who sealed the grave do when they accidentally unearthed a sophisticated burial site from the middle bronze age? Leave it alone? Maybe. I'm not sure, humans are curious.

Well the effort and care put into the grave made us - 2000 years later in cyberspace - in a sense remember the person. Who was this young woman? They even gave us hints/rewards. Made us curious.

So maybe they prepared her for an afterlife ... of continued memory and presence among the living, which they with their technological limitations succeeded in, we are talking about her, now.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: