1 August 2024

Hawaiian Electric warns of possible rolling blackouts as a power station went down unexpectedly. The grid is pretty fragile if you ask me.

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CRISPR technology may provide an inexpensive antidote to cobra venom. Cobra venom binds to heparan and heparin, which depletes tissues of anticoagulant, and so tissue thrombosis ensues. The drug works be flooding the circulation with decoy molecules designed to bind to and soak up venom, thereby avoid clotting and tissue necrosis. Heparin and heparan are inexpensive, and modifying these is also not expensive. Unlike cobra antivenom.

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Nifty. First time use of a titanium Maglev mechanical heart.

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Websites are being pestered by AI scrapers, who don't respect robots.txt. The inventors of the Web never figured that there would be problem of people wanted to avoid certain visitors to come to their site. Everything was supposed to be open and connected. We were so innocent back then.

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Yawn. COVID infections are rising again. And OHA is still pushing the vax. Give it up, guys. It's not working. Let people get natural immunity. 

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Oregon is one of the most expensive states to be driving.  That's maintenance, insurance and gas prices.

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Portland is a poor city. So much of the city is below the poverty line.  Man...

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Scammers are using Proofpoint to send realistic scam spoofed emails to people.  You can't tell them apart from a real company-issued email. Many companies got burned when they used Crowdstrike for security. I think these companies are going to get burned from using Proofpoint to route their emails.

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Telehealth is hurting rural hospitals. Telehealth visits only made sense for major urban hospitals. For rural hospitals, there was no real need to implement them. So they didn't. And now they aren't getting the business that customers prefer.

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Lilly's Zepbound (tirzepatide) decreases congestive heart failure risk by 38%. Coupled with weight loss, diabetes control, decrease in addictive behavior and now decreased congestive heart failure risk, it sounds like a winner.

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Uruguayans are upset because Google's planned datacenter is going to suck a lot of water and spew lots of toxins and CO2.  Plus it will probably raise energy prices, since there will be increased demand.

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Outpace is a Seattle biotech company that will synthesize proteins that can be used as targets for T cell therapy. This is the kind of research that should have come from OHSU.  Phil Knight's money was supposed to make stuff like this happen locally. The Knight Cancer Institute has been quiet lately.

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