I work in clinical (and preclinical) trials. And I have celiac disease. I’m hopeful but not optimistic that I’ll be able to eat pasta within the next decade.

There are immunotherapy treatments for cancer already. Infections and cancer use the immune system the correct way: “tag” the problem cell/virus part with an antibody, make a lot more antibody and flood your body with it to clear the problem cell/virus.

This is the process a vaccine uses. The old vaccine method is to take a bunch of dead bacteria or inactivated virus and put that in your body. Your body should identify it and begin making antibodies against it. If you do get exposed to the disease, your body is full of antibodies which can immediately clear it, rather than letting the infection/cancer work for a few days without much of an immune response.

An autoimmune disease, a body “tags” its own cells. Then the immune system invades the person’s own tissue.

I have celiac disease. If I eat gluten, the enzymes I use to digest gluten become tagged. Unfortunately, humans make one gluten enzyme (TG2) that’s found everywhere in the body. A third of celiacs will have their thyroid tissue affected if they consume gluten.

One particular antibody, IgE, is known for extreme reactions to antigens. These are the ones known for the immediate and life-threatening allergies (peanuts, shellfish, bees, wheat).

This new stuff appears to be a way to tag antibodies or antigens or memory T cells (they hold the “blueprints” to make antibodies really quickly after your natural antibodies go away) and have the immune system “re-evaluate” the antigen. I’m guessing from the post above and a little of the article. I haven’t heard of this process in the body before.

Cancer itself is not autoimmune (autoimmune inflammation can make it more likely to happen, but tumors don’t form directly through autoimmune mechanisms). So the first pathway used for normal vaccination is what’s needed. The difficulty lies in knowing something in each specific cancer that would make a good antibody target. It is a person’s own cells and DNA, so a lot of care has to be taken to find an appropriate antigen. Immunotherapy treatments that exist are really specific to certain types of cancer. They have much less severe side effects than radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

We’re used to viruses that have narrow cell types they can infect. Rhinoviruses can infect mucus membranes in the head and maybe throat. Influenza can infect the same plus lung tissue.

These coronaviruses can infect so many cell types. Because it’s spread via the air, it almost always infects mucus membranes of the head first, then moves to lungs (or maybe it infects lungs first in some people). So we think of it as a respiratory virus at first.

Now we know it can infect tissues of the gut, fat, T cells, and the testes. There was a wave of orchitis/epididymitis that was discovered to be coronavirus caused. I’m not sure if it’s considered COVID, I think COVID is the respiratory disease caused by coronavirus, but not sure about other diseases. Similar to how the varicella virus causes two diseases: chicken pox and shingles.

It’s an older platform that no longer exists. You’re thinking of X. Which is newer than Mastodon but still hasn’t implemented activitypub.

Usually the speed of time is one second per second in any reference frame.

My utility company uses Twitter, and keeps it updated with better information than they do via text message alerts. I wish they would get a mastodon account. During tornado season or ice storms, it’s nice to know if power will be back on in an hour or in three days. And once the boil water notice appeared on Twitter a couple of hours before being sent out by text.

I do this on the side, buy bulk low cycle lithium ion cells, spot weld them together into banks, and make larger packs.

What is the biggest safety problem seen with these?

My packs are 64P, right now 4s but hopefully 7s soon.

My main safety features are per-cell 5A fuses, 100A fuse on each bank under the battery wrap (not removable without cutting the wrap), and keeping the cells and nickel strips under a layer of kapton tape, followed by an ABS plate I designed and printed, then all the wiring, taped to the ABS with kapton tape. Which is then inside of the battery wrap. I use a lower current circuit breaker on the whole circuit.

My layman research suggests that loose wires are the main reason for fires, so all wires are taped down, and the nickel strips are protected from stress. A cell shorting out should blow the 5A fuse. And if I’m careless and bump the two terminals to a conductor while moving it, there’s always a 100A limit. I also only use low-cycled matched cells and currently am charging to 4V and discharging to 3V.

Any other things I can do to make it safer?