is there public mastodon modlog?

no crying in the casino

Fair, preclinical drug candidate more like

“hey what if we tried to make cancer grow faster” is not a great pitch

they got funding because it wasn’t what they were trying to do, but it did ended up being the case, but it worked anyway so, so far, all is good. but don’t expect that it will become a new drug, because 90% of clinical trials fail, and here maybe there is some other less malformed cancer line that will grow faster after administration of that drug, which is sort of what was could be expected now that we know mechanism

cells have different enzymes, enzymes do different things, to keep everything in order you need some way to control these enzymes. there are many, many ways in nature to do this, but the one relevant here is that some enzymes have tyrosine residue sticking out in a specific way. when phosphate is attached to them, extra charge appears, which can bend enzyme out of or into shape, switching it on or off or changing something about the way it works.

the job of flipping these switches belongs to tyrosine kinases, and in many cancers something is wrong about these. the ones relevant here are from RAS/MAPK pathway and PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway, and these are involved in many things, but among them is cell growth and division. blocking one or other tyrosine kinase from working is something that many of anticancer drugs do, and it works pretty well, because overactive (for whatever reason) or mutated tyrosine kinase is often present. in many cancer cells, if for some reason MAPK is made to be more active, cancer cells might grow faster.

now the thing is, there is something peculiar about the specific way in which RAS/MAPK cascade is broken in that cancer type, that when it’s cranked up cells stop spreading and break apart. this is something that this new drug seems to be doing (through a couple of layers of other enzymes), and it’s weird, and unexpected, and in no way you’d get funding for that, but it works apparently

just give your cancer cancer ez gg

not what i have expected tbh

just yesterday i’ve fixed a blown smd fuse, these are also a thing (fortunately easy to diagnose)

some components fail more often than others, like caps or batteries, or are designed to, like fuses. sometimes it’s obvious after looking even without measuring

it’s kinda dogshit but for this application it (cmos version) would be good enough. or better than that, there are dedicated pwm signal generators. i meant this thing in terms of complexity needed

i think you can get away with resistors when you can work with 5V, up to 1.5A. lithium batteries need current limiter in series with voltage limiter, and this alone can be made in a very simple way, unless you want to know when battery is charged, or if you want extra efficiency that smps gives you, but this only makes sense for larger batteries (phone-sized and up) or when you want to handle everything to charger and connect battery to charger directly. then i think you need controller

my guess would be it’s a parts commonality thing, it’s not hard to make it the old way, there are datasheets for it too. sure you could probably make tiny and cheaper (30x10mm? maybe smaller) analog board with two chips and mosfet working as pwm controller and current limiter, but it’ll have different passives for different battery sizes and heater powers. or you could make one design with optional usb port that you might just not solder on, and depending on model you just put different firmware inside

then you have to interface with charger anyway so ig this makes some more sophisticated chip make sense

yeah it’s more efficient this way but all you need is ne555 + mosfet tho? still no need for it to be turing complete

all of these, and gas turbines too, are synchronous. some wind turbines are almost-synchronous and some use giant inverters which is probably one of bigger mass uses of power electronics today

it’s not all steam

ok fine i’d put there a current limiter which you can make with 2 transistors and a diode. no need for an entire microcontroller. it’s often included with batteries these days anyway

why does a glorified heater connected to a battery need any silicon attached to it?

they kinda do, it’s called forklift

well otherwise they could just wait it out