6 ms·
How to survive boiling water
- cratermoon 3mo agoThis almost throwaway line from the article struck me as an example of what we can do with technology, if we choose to put our billions of dollars towards it: "I downloaded the BC30 genome".
- creaktive 2mo agoWhat’s even more shocking to me: one can “3D-print” downloaded genome, too! What a time to be alive.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- roughly 2mo agoIt's a shame it became such a weird political football, because the story of the mRNA COVID vaccine is absolutely in the "we are as gods" pantheon - the virus was sequenced, and 3 days later two separate labs had sequences for the vaccine. Phase 1 trials began within 3 months. To go from "weird novel pathogen" to "enough engineered vaccine candidate to start Phase 1 trials" is some legitimate sci-fi shit.
- Schiendelman 2mo agoThankfully the political football is simmering down - I think we have mRNA flu vaccines in progress now, and attempts to stop that failed.
- neonstatic 2mo agoI was a conscious adult when all that was going down, so I can remind you, that on top of standard lunacy, there were legitimate concerns about safety of injecting something novel and untested to large parts of the population, genuine collusion to get as many people as possible injected, harassment that went both ways, and last but not least, there were many people who took one of the many vaccines and had life crushing, incurable side effects, not even mentioning the ones who died. So the "political football" characterization is itself very political.
- Eisenstein 2mo ago> So the "political football" characterization is itself very political. According to your description it sounds completely accurate.
- Schiendelman 2mo agoI've heard a lot of arguments that sounded, at first glance, like legitimate concerns. But I haven't seen any that weren't rooted in "People are telling me to be scared so my concern must be legitimate," or "I don't know how this works and it sounds new so I'm worried." I think people with followings online got a ton of economic benefit from scaring people, the same as the rest of the news industry. Remember Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." The ONE thing I know of that survived study was the higher incidence of myocarditis in young men with Moderna, and provider guidance lists it as a potential side effect. However, the Novavax vaccine had the same myocarditis outcome without being mRNA, and the Pfizer mRNA didn't have that outcome. It's very unlikely clinical trials would have exposed that issue, so even in hindsight, none of the concerns seem to have been legitimate.
- neonstatic 2mo ago> I think people with followings online got a ton of economic benefit from scaring people Yes, it was very upsetting at the time and unfortunately remains a constant. I guess one has to go through that at least once to recognize a grifter. > so even in hindsight, none of the concerns seem to have been legitimate. The point was not only that the vaccines were rushed, it was also that there was a tremendous amount of coercion to force people into taking them. There are a few countries that didn't do that (Sweden comes to mind) and they ended up not having a much worse outcome than anyone else. I think it was a very telling moment in modern history, because it exposed a lot of myths, e.g. the American myth of gun ownership to stand up to a tyrannical government was totally shredded. The government turned tyrannical re: vaccines and mandates, did the guns help?
- lesuorac 2mo ago
- onraglanroad 2mo agoWhat felt Sci-Fi to me was when I saw this Stack Exchange question about what the A's at the end of the COVID virus sequence meant: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/90607/does-the-genetic-sequence-of-sars-cov-2-end-with-33-as https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/90607/does-the-g... Edit: I found the wrong one; I think the one I remember was https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/questions/11227/why-does-the-sars-cov2-coronavirus-genome-end-in-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/questions/11227/why...
- Terr_ 2mo agoYou might enjoy: "Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine" (2020) Being much smaller than a whole organism genome, the base-pairs are literally published in a WHO Word-document. :p https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- inigyou 2mo agoI boiled water today and survived.
- creaktive 2mo agoInteresting… did you boil the water with you inside of it?
- nrclark 2mo agoCooked.
- Aachen 2mo agoNon-native speaker here. I hadn't noticed there are two words for what seems like the same thing. Is there a difference between a water boiler and a water cooker?
- nrclark 2mo agooh, no that wasn't a correction - it was a pun because "cooked" in American slang means "broken / destroyed / over". In parent's context, "boiling" is correct. "Boiling" does have a few meanings in English. As a verb, it can either mean "cook in boiling liquid", or it can mean "heat a liquid to its boiling-point". As an adjective, it means "heated to boiling-point". Also "boiling angry" means very, very angry.
- Aachen 2mo agoOoh I see, thanks for the explanation and sorry for destroying your pun! ^^'
- OnACoffeeBreak 2mo agoCool story with an interesting ending (to me at least). Just a tiny nit... Should "Brewed as directed for 4 minutes in boiling water." be "Brewed as directed for 4 minutes in boiled water." Was the tea sitting in water that was boiling or placed in water that just boiled? The later is how I brew my teas.
- gblargg 2mo agoIsn't boiled water what goes up into the air?
- nwatson 2mo agoThe boiled water (assuming even heating throughout) is what reaches boiling temperature, 100°C, which is the entire pot. Additional energy applied to the pot/water after that point turns at some rate the already-at-100°C-boiled-water into water vapor/gas/steam. If you stop heating before all the already-at-100°C-boiled-water disappear, you have left what is or will have been "boiled water".
- decimalenough 2mo agoLeft in previously boiled water for 4 min. We can deduce this from the second sample, which simulates forgetting your tea bag in the mug for 15 min.
- TremendousJudge 2mo agoI think GP meant in the tea instructions
- peterabbitcook 2mo agoSo under most brewing conditions a nonzero amount of this microbe survive, but that count is 3 orders of magnitude lower what might be termed a “therapeutic dose?” What even is a good experimental design for probiotic tea? Brew -> agitate in hydrochloric acid & digestive enzymes for X minutes -> mix with billions of existing gut microbes (that may kill this microbe or out-compete it for resources) and incubate at body temperature -> count the number of new colonies of this particular microbe?
- zbentley 2mo agoThe author does mention that a synthetic digestive system was used in another experiment, so you may be correct!
- odyssey7 2mo agoAnother organism that survives pasteurization is paratuberculosis, in milk. It is commonly found in commercial dairy herds. In my opinion, this is alarming. Many consider it to be a candidate for the cause of Crohn’s disease. Johne’s disease, which occurs in a subset of cattle infected by paratuberculosis, bears many similarities to Crohn’s disease. When Crohn’s disease was first described, it was believed to be an intestinal tuberculosis, though tests seemed to counter this idea; to this day, it remains difficult to test humans for paratuberculosis infections. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S074000201730936X?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07400... [1] https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(19)30845-8/fulltext https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(19)...
- singpolyma3 2mo agoMore good reasons to avoid the expensive poison water called milk
- GJim 2mo agoAs if millions of mammals suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
- advisedwang 2mo agoTo be fair, this was a comment about commercially produced cows milk.
- donkeyboy 2mo agoThat was a fun read. The author has a really good storytelling style. I dont understand why the cold brew test had fewer bacteria than the steeped teas. If the bacteria are shielded in spores, shouldnt it be expected that they have the same amount of bacteria?
- Otterly99 2mo agoThey could have some coating that make them stick to the content of the tea bag, basically affecting their solubility.
- brabel 2mo agoI think it’s just that the bacteria in the hotter container woke up to a warmer, nicer environment. Warm temperatures are much better for bacterial growth. While it was too hot they didn’t seem to care at all since their spores protect them completely from damage.
- nchmy 2mo agoAgreed - I really enjoyed the writing. I'd have normally skimmed for the conclusion but ended up reading it all. Shame that that's so rare these days.
- advisedwang 2mo agoPerhaps just random variation? They only did one plate, after all.
- joveian 2mo ago15 minutes is just not very long at all when cold brewing even at room temperature. And this was refrigerated (4C) so I'm sure the flavor would be minimal. You would normally cold brew for at least 8 hours at that temperature. So much less of the tea is ending up in the tested water. If you look at the pictures of the plates the one with cold brew and where the full tea bag is added to the plate seems to have a good bit more growth than the others (there is a larger image of this one). So it doesn't seem like the spores are necessarily unaffected by the boiling just that some survive (or maybe they all survive but only some decide to start growing?). The thing I find strange is that the tea bag that was directly added without any brewing doesn't seem to have much growth at all. Actually, also that in the one with the tea bag added after cold brewing that has extra robust growth much of that growth seems to happen away from the visible pieces of tea. I agree that the author has great style and I find it interesting to think about where and how bacteria (and fungi) like to grow.
- cainxinth 2mo agoLearning that MIT has an ancient bottle of rotting milk reminded me of my 9th grade science teacher. He had been teaching for decades and had a tremendously messy little office attached to his classroom. The pièce de résistance of his menagerie of scientific oddities was a large fish tank filled with many strata of mottled goos. I asked what it was and he said it used to be an ordinary aquarium, filled with fish and water, and he just left it alone for 20 years.
- tippa123 2mo agoA great read from the author. It reminded me of my previous life as a bioprocess engineer, where I led investigations into biologically contaminated batches in biotech. It was fun stuff and I still remember some of the best advice I received from an Executive Vice President to never underestimate a microbe. On this subject, I once led an investigation in which Bacillus cereus somehow survived in situ media sterilisation for 30 minutes and >121.1°C, despite there being no cold spots. At the end we realised it was the bioburden load of a media component and water temperature used during compounding.
- fnands 2mo ago> it was the bioburden load of a media component and water temperature used during compounding. In English, please ;-)
- weinzierl 2mo agoI put it in AI and even that couldn't fix the sentence sufficiently for me to understand it completely. "So, in ordinary language:" "One dirty raw ingredient introduced far more spores than expected, and the way it was mixed into the water made the sterilization cycle less effective against them. The autoclave itself was probably not broken." "The exact relationship to water temperature remains somewhat ambiguous because the HN commenter did not provide the detailed investigation findings."
- tippa123 2mo agoTo be fair I omitted some key information. The 'dirty raw ingredient' mixed in room-temperature purified water wasn't sterilisable. The same process but mixed in 60°C purified water was sterilisable.
- dotancohen 2mo agoIt actually took me a minute to decide whether or not to upvote the AI-content post. But it was informative, you were forthcoming on the origin, and the GP has yet to elaborate. Thank you for posting that.
- carschno 2mo agoPeople interested in this: if you are ever in Amsterdam, I recommend to visit the Micropia museum: https://www.artis.nl/en/artis-micropia https://www.artis.nl/en/artis-micropia Among many stunning things, they have a shelf full of foods and drinks (behind glasses) with age labels, ranging from days to years. It is fascinating to see how they evolve over time.
- cambriacommons 2mo agothanks for this
- jzelinskie 2mo agoLove this museum! It's child and adult friendly. They also have the best souvenir: a collab with a local brewery for wild ales (sour beer)!
- thih9 2mo agoIn case anyone else is curious about the current status: > The Milk was declared missing on August 20th, 2022. > The dorm’s extended mailing list of over 300 current students, alumni, and other assorted Random-adjacent humans was contacted, twice. > In the end, no Milk. https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/guest-post-the-random-hall-milk-gone-but-not-forgotten/ https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/guest-post-the-random-...
- incanus77 2mo agoDid they ever put its photo on the side of a milk carton?
- vitorfblima 2mo agoHumans should wear shirts with a missing milk photo on it.
- drabbiticus 2mo agoJust imagine a "Missing Milk" [1] on the side of a milk carton campaign. I'd be so confused haha. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing-children_milk_carton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing-children_milk_carton
- weberer 2mo agoSpore forming bacterium are notoriously resistant to most ways of killing them. There's even a species that can resist radiation amounts that are 1000x the dose needed to kill a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
- tippa123 2mo ago> Clues for future search of extremophile microbial life on Mars That paragraph is pretty extraordinary with what is being claimed. Crazy to think that anything could survive 25 kGy.
- k1ko 2mo ago25 kgy, not great, not terrible.
- tippa123 2mo agoWhat would you consider as great?
- platybubsy 2mo agoWAOW I understood that reference! Hahaha that is a REFERENCE that I UNDERSTAND funny lmao
- cobbzilla 2mo agoI want this mutation. You have little nano-crawlers going up and down your DNA strands fixing problems. It’s like ECC RAM for the essence of YOU. And you’re basically immune to cancer.
- triceratops 2mo agoFascinating post. Why did the author steep the tea at home? "It was at this point I realized I needed a sterile-ish way to transport the steeped tea and tea bags from my house to the lab." Was steeping the tea at home somehow relevant to the experiment?
- gtowey 2mo agoIf I had to guess, it would be because that's exactly the environment and process that consumers will use, so it would capture variables such as "what if the probiotic was out-competed by a bacteria living on your mug?" And then I would assume the sterile transfer was to preserve this state of the tea as-made without changing it on the way to the lab.
- triceratops 2mo agoSo bring mugs to the lab? Make the tea in a kitchen at the lab?
- Eisenstein 2mo agoProbably frowned on to bring in food stuff and make it in a bio lab.
- andrewflnr 2mo agoThis makes sense. Even if you're not going to drink the tea in the office, even the appearance of making food in a lab space might well be enough hassle that it's easier to just bring sampling equipment home.
- triceratops 2mo agoTesting foodstuffs can't be all that unusual in a biolab.
- triceratops 2mo agoMost workplaces have a space to make tea or coffee.
- kevinwang 2mo agoVery, very well written and enjoyable to read!
- nekusar 2mo agoThis is kinda disgusting but I think applies to this discussion. Blue cheese. Its living mold. I think it tastes good. BUT.. when I eat it, I notice a few days later that my excrement smells more like blue cheese as well. My guess is that I'm inoculating my own digestive tract with blue cheese molds. Another mishap happened with my cat too. I gave her some beef from our supper. Some of the gorgonzola blue cheese sauce got on it, but I thought I cut and kept the blue cheese off. Nope, I didnt, not enough. She had diarrhea for the next 2 days cause it wrecked with her digestive tract. Maybe this will help a microbiologist.
- NopIdoN 2mo agothanks now I'm imagining you farting spore clouds
- lostlogin 2mo agoKopi Luwak is coffee that’s been digested by a cat, and it’s very valuable. You might be onto something, have you considered trying the cat blue cheese? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_luwak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_luwak
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- scythe 2mo ago>This is one of the most polarizing choices one can make as a biomedical research scientist. The alternative to the hockey stick is to use glass beads that you autoclave then sprinkle on the plate and roll around. People are very passionate about their chosen method and will attempt to convert you. It turns out vim vs emacs is a universal phenomenon.
- pazimzadeh 2mo agospores are the reasons that labs use autoclaves instead of boiling to sterilize things. autoclaves are pressurized so can reach much higher temperatures
- Aachen 2mo agoI didn't know pressure is used in sterilisation. Trying to look up why that helps, the Wikipedia article on autoclaves does not explain why but says it uses 1 bar, which would be equivalent to ambient pressure (atmosphere at sea level is ~1.01 bar). Does it maybe mean an additional bar, so twice atmospheric pressure? Wikipedia also says it uses steam, not just hot air, and again doesn't say anything as to why Do you know why pressure and steam help? Edit: I may have found it while looking at what I thought was an unrelated part of the rabbit hole. Gravity displacement sounds like antigravity technology but it's apparently the cheapest autoclave type and means "displace using gravity" (by letting gravity do its thing; not adding in a vacuum pump). What it's displacing is air. This matters because > Steam at 134 °C can achieve a desired level of sterility in three minutes, while achieving the same level of sterility in hot air requires two hours at 160 °C. (—Wikipedia) I'm now assuming that pressure must help push the air out, and steam is used for having better heat conductivity. Neither is quite spelled out but that's my best guess currently
- Eisenstein 2mo agoI'm pretty sure it is because when there is high pressure the boiling point of water is higher.
- Aachen 2mo agoHow would that help? It never says water, always steam, and it needs to get in all crevices evenly which afaik is easier with a gas than a liquid. If the steam condenses to water (for example due to raising its boiling point above the autoclave's temperature of ~125°C) that'd probably be bad Apparently at 2 bars, water boils at 120°C. The first temperature mentioned on Wikipedia is 121°C. That's awfully close; but elsewhere the article is quite clear about using higher-than-atmospheric atmospheric pressure. I don't see an explanation that fits all the mentioned facts
- Aachen 2mo ago> about 7 out of 10 people in the U.S. were prescribed antibiotics in 2024 according to <CDC data>. This blew my mind so I double checked the source. It links to https://www.cdc.gov/antibiotic-use/hcp/data-research/antibiotic-prescribing.html https://www.cdc.gov/antibiotic-use/hcp/data-research/antibio... which contains some numbers but not the claim. It links to various reports, the latest one (2024 at the time of writing) https://www.cdc.gov/antibiotic-use/media/pdfs/2024-Annual-Report-508.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/antibiotic-use/media/pdfs/2024-Annual-Re... says at the top of page 2 that the prescription rate is 679 and 775 doses per 1000 people in 2024, depending on the gender. That matches the 7-in-10 number so I'm guessing this is where the statistic comes from Doesn't that reflect how many prescriptions there were rather than what number of people got it prescribed? See also page 3 where Mississippi has 1167 doses per 1000 persons. Either the number of people is wrong (if the prescription given to a tourist and counted towards this statistic, the tourist should also be counted as person, but the CDC says they take the population count from a census) or it's about doses and not about what part of the population got an antibiotic in the last year. In both of these cases, you can't conclude 116.7% of people got antibiotics prescribed. The claim in the article based on that CDC data sounds to me like saying 520% of the people drink alcohol when, in reality, 10% drinks a bottle a week and the rest nil I'm probably misunderstanding the CDC report but I'm not sure how I should be able to tell that
- lithocarpus 2mo agoThere's no way 7 in 10 people were prescribed antibiotics in 2024. This looks like a simple and egregious misinterpretation of the data, which seem to be all too common. I could believe there were 700 prescriptions given in the US per 1000 people in the US population. But many of those would be repeats to the same smaller number of people. I still would say there's way too much antiobiotic use - every time doctors have wanted to give me antiobiotics it wasn't necessary.
- horsawlarway 2mo agoThis would be my read. Hell - my children just this year would have counted for 10+ doses (my daughter 6 all by herself for a series of severe ear infections).
- shepherdjerred 2mo agoI loved this! The article was written in such an approachable way for someone less familiar with microbiology
- invictati 2mo agoHockey stick? Glass beads? What happened to the good old inoculating loop?
- evolarjun 2mo agoLoops are good for streaking. It's hard to get even coverage with a loop, so loops would make it hard to get accurate CFU/ml counts. Loops are more likely to get you single colonies even if you're inoculating from a high density culture, so loops are usually used when picking single colonies is the goal. Sterilized cheap flat toothpicks work pretty well for streaking too.
- underlipton 2mo ago> While unhappy microbiomes can be unhappy in their own way, we do not have a consensus on what a “healthy” gut microbiome looks like, either. In collaboration with a continent-wide consortium in Africa, our lab helped catalogue the species found in healthy adult women across the continent. We found over 1,000 new species relative to what had been previously described in studies focused on Western countries. >Companies trying to introduce targeted combinations of microbes into the gut are thus forever shooting at a moving target. IIRC, the only semi-reliable way to "adjust" one's microbiome is to find someone who is healthy (and preferably your target body composition/energy levels/psychological profile; and, even more preferably - and possibly paradoxically - who is as close to "you", genetically and physiologically, as possible), harvest and freeze their feces, and take a daily, months-long course of the resulting poop pills, hoping that their gut microbes colonize your own digestive system.
- srtghfsghsdf 2mo ago[dead]
- fastbones 2mo agoLoved the writing style, kudos!