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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • OED:

    1. totally or partially resistant to a particular infectious disease or pathogen.
    2. protected or exempt, especially from an obligation or the effects of something.

    Merriam Webster

    1. : not susceptible or responsive

      especially: having a high degree of resistance to a disease

    2. a: produced by, involved in, or concerned with immunity or an immune response

      b: having or producing antibodies or lymphocytes capable of reacting with a specific antigen

    3. a: marked by protection

      b: free, exempt

    So unless you pretend that MW’s 2b sense is the only valid one, the immunity is immunity.

    If you have a sample of HIV at 37°C in blood, but with all the immune cells removed, it’ll still all become inert after around a week simply due to chemical reactions with other components of blood etc… It’s pretty comparable to a population of animals - if you take away their ability to reproduce, they’ll die of old age when left for long enough even if you’re not actively killing them.

    Edit: fat-fingered the save button while previewing the formatting


    • this is a shitpost community, not a biotech publication, so immune here means the dictionary definition, not any domain-specific technical jargon, otherwise people can’t make shitposts about diplomatic immunity
    • lacking the receptor that HIV uses to hijack the regular immune response in order to reproduce means the regular immune response destroys it
    • even in a normal person, after exposure, a lot of HIV gets destroyed by other parts of the immune system, often enough to eliminate it before an infection gains a foothold. Once an infection takes hold, it outbreeds the immune response as it’s the part best equipped to deal with a large viral load that it interferes with.
    • if you’ve got the virus in your body, but due to the lack of the receptor, it can’t reproduce, then it doesn’t remain viable for very long as each viron accumulates damage over time, and ceases to function once it’s too badly damaged. People carrying a disease have enough viral reproduction going on to balance out the virus being destroyed.

  • Even if you ignore that there’s an entirely valid sense of the word immune that has nothing do do with biology (i.e. the one in phrases like diplomatic immunity), my original comment is entirely consistent with the dictionary definition of the biological sense of the word. There are probably sub-fields of biology where immunity is used as jargon for something much more specific than the dictionary definition, but this is lemmyshitpost, not a peer-reviewed domain-specific publication.


  • When a normal person is exposed to HIV, it reproduces inside of them, so can then go on to expose more people, and if there’s enough of it, infect them in turn (if there’s a smaller amount, their immune system will normally be able to clean it up before it gets enough of a foothold). If someone’s lacking the receptor, then no matter how much they were exposed to, their immune system will eventually manage to remove it all without becoming infected because it can’t reproduce. If they had a ludicrously large viral load, then there’s a possibility that it could be passed on before it was destroyed, but most of the ways people get exposed to HIV aren’t enough to infect someone who’s vulnerable, let alone infect someone else via secondary exposure if there’s not been time for the infection to grow.




  • If he got incredibly lucky, they’re immune to AIDS. It’s much more likely that they’re not and will develop symptoms of new and exciting genetic disorders never seen before.

    The biggest problem was that the technique used is really unreliable, so you’d expect off-target edits to be more common than on-target ones for a human-sized genome. For bacteria, you can get around it by letting the modified bacteria reproduce for a few generations, then testing most of them. If they’re all good, then it worked, and if any aren’t, you need to make a new batch. Testing DNA destroys the cells you’re testing, so if you test enough cells in a human embryo to be sure that the edits worked, it dies. You can’t just start when the embryo is a single cell to ensure that the whole thing’s been edited in the same way as you need to test something pre-edit to be able to detect off-target edits.



  • I’ve found this is really dependent on placement. If I put my libre a couple of centimeters away from the region I usually use, it’ll read low all night, but as long as I stick to the zone I’ve determined to be fine, it’ll agree with a blood test even if I’ve had pressure on it for ages. Also, the 3 is more forgiving than the 1 or 2 because it’s smaller than the older models, so affects how much the skin bends and squishes less.



  • It’s rare that English children who learn Spanish as the first foreign language that they’re exposed to. If their parents are immigrants, then it’ll likely be their parents’ mother tongue(s), and if they’re not, they’ll likely be taught some French before any Spanish. That can then lead to a habit of saying any foreign word with a French accent.

    Also, England has strong regional variations in accent, so you might be hearing people say exactly the same vowel sounds as they’d use when speaking English, but those vowel sounds might be totally different to how you’re expecting that they’d speak English.



  • I think you might have misjudged when LCDs became common as by the end of 2004, when Halo 2 released, LCD TVs were already a reasonable fraction of new TV sales, and in parts of the world, it was only a few months later that LCD TVs became the majority. For PC monitors, the switch came earlier, so it was clear CRTs were on the way out while the game was being developed. If they hadn’t expected a significant number of players to use an LCD and tweaked the game as much as necessary to ensure that was fine, it would have been foolish



  • In a lot of the world they’re regulated as novelty items, so free from the regulation that stops harmful chemicals being in things like kitchen utensils and childrens’ toys, despite many of the same potential risks being present. You don’t need to use a corner-cutting regulation-ignoring retailer like Wish to get your fix of toxic plasticisers etc…