I am my own fandom

I fucking love this.

Why are we like this

The stages of hunger while nd are

Multiple times every day

"How do you forget you're hungry" I'm just that powerful. My mind will omit anything including things I'm currently experiencing

Great post, OP! I just want to add a couple notes on how Pfizer and Moderna were able to develop vaccines so quickly.

Both companies had already been working on mRNA vaccines for years. The cool thing about mRNA vaccines is that you have a generic mRNA vaccine structure, and then you can add genetic material from whatever virus you want and make a vaccine for that virus. So basically they already had a vaccine backbone ready to go, something along the lines of “start-making-protein-from-((INSERT VIRAL PROTEIN SEQUENCE HERE))-okay-protein-complete-now-stop.”

Once they got the genetic sequence of the coronavirus, all they had to do was basically copy and paste in the right part of the sequence to make a protein from its outer shell. (Viral genomes are very small, and we know a lot about what each part does from previous coronaviruses like SARS, so scientists already knew which parts of genome to use) For Moderna, the entire process after they received the coronavirus genome took two days. For Pfizer, it was probably something similar.

So it’s not that the companies have been fiddling around in a lab trying to make a good vaccine for half the year, then did trials in the last few months. The vaccine development took pretty much no time, and then the companies spent ten months doing trials.

The cool thing about this is, the next time there’s a novel viral disease, scientists will be able to copy and paste a sequence from that virus into the same type of backbone and start doing vaccine trials for the new disease really quickly too.

So if mRNA vaccines are so useful, and if both companies had been working on them for a while, why haven’t we had an mRNA vaccine before? Basically, the trial process for vaccines for other diseases has been much slower. Which brings me to my next point--I want to elaborate a little on what OP said about how they were able to do the clinical trials so quickly.

Clinical trials report data when a certain number of participants have reached the endpoints determined at the beginning of a trial--often developing a disease or other adverse outcome. This can be a really slow process, especially for drugs that treat things like atherosclerosis or cancer or dementia--diseases that take years to progress. For clinical trials involving contagious diseases that cause symptoms quickly, what typically slows down the trials is how likely a person in the trial is to catch that disease. So there have been mRNA vaccines in the works for rare viral diseases like Marburg virus, but trials will be pretty slow because not that many people catch Marburg in a given year.

For Covid, on the other hand, the pandemic is wildly out of control in much of the world, so the rate at which participants were exposed and got Covid was really high. Once a certain number of participants (decided at the beginning of the trial) got Covid, the companies were then able to look at the data and see how many of the people who got Covid received the vaccine, and how many got the placebo. For Pfizer, 170 people got Covid. 162 of them had received the placebo. If Covid was more under control, it would have taken longer for 170 people to get Covid, and the trial would have been slower. (For Moderna, 95 people got Covid. 90 of them had received the placebo.)

The other thing I just want to really reiterate: the vaccine is mRNA, not DNA. It’s not modifying your DNA in any way shape or form. It’s not CRISPR or any other form of gene editing. If there are side effects, they will be normal vaccine side effects. The vaccine’s not sticking new genetic code into your DNA and maybe affecting other parts of your genome. mRNA comes into your cell, gets transcribed into protein, and then destroyed in hours to days. Your cells have different sequences of mRNA in them based on anything from how recently you’ve eaten to how stressed you are--the pool of mRNAs in a cell are constantly changing already, and this isn’t really different.

[x]

#get with the program the new humor is benevolent surrealism (x)

I always wanted to know what to call it.

This is something I’ve been meaning to talk about, and I may do a full blog post at some point, but here’s a capsule version:

The Benign Violation Theory of humor, which is probably the best one out there, suggests that something is perceived as funny when it is simultaneously perceived as violating how the world “should” work and as benign. Something like the “gun” meme, for example, is funny because it violates our sense of how a joke should progress, and at the same time it’s harmless. 

Racist/sexist/etc shock humor violates our sense of how the world work–in either a “that’s not true!” or “you’re not allowed to say that!” way–and therefore whether you find it funny is based on whether you find it benign, which is to say either you think it’s harmless or you don’t care about the people it harms. (This is the root of the punch up/kick down distinction–jokes that punch up are funnier than jokes that kick down because the people they target are less vulnerable and therefore less likely to experience harm.)

So yes, science agrees that if you think racist jokes are funny, the reason is that you don’t care about the feelings of the people the joke is about. There’s a word for that.

bisexual culture

I SMASHED REBLOG SO HARD

THIS IS FUCKING AMAZING

this bitch empty, TWEET

Have any of you heard of the Harvard MIT Pigeon Prank?

Ah yes, classical conditioning put to good use

yo is this real 

I saw this tumblr post and HAD to draw it, please accept my humble A:TLA offering.

‘enemies to lovers’ sure okay, but nothing wil ever beat THIS dynamic

9 to 5 enemies, 5 to 9 lovers

Via @sleepymccoy

Sensory overload is such a weird feeling to describe. In a nutshell, sound is attacking me.

Today an escalator was squeaking really loudly and I told my sister it was eating my teeth.