> One particular take away for me was his finding that when the body enters a ketogenic state due to fasting the body produces defences that eat up cancer cells
“We did indeed see that the ketogenic diet suppressed tumor growth — but we also saw, surprisingly, that it promoted tumor metastasis,” says Gu. “That was really a shock to us.”
I think there's a misunderstanding here, my fault for not being clearer. I think I should have used the phrase 'when the body enters a state of ketosis' i.e. the state you get to when fasting when your body starts burning core fat. I believe the word ketogenic refers to the type of meat heavy diet. Thanks for those links, the fact that eating a lot of meat can promote tumor metastasis does not surprise me.
Ketosis occurs when your body switches from consuming glucose as its primary fuel source to consuming ketones which are generated from the breakdown of fatty acids, either from the diet or endogenous.
Almost all body tissue can run on ketones instead of on glucose, except for certain important tissues like red blood cells, 30% of the brain, retina, some kidney tissue, etc.
For the rest, your body synthesizes the glucose it needs via gluconeogenesis from some protein substrates and from glycerol backbodes from triglycerides. These inputs can be either from the diet or from your fat stores.
Fasting for a few days causes your body to enter authophagy through the inhibition of mTOR in addition to ketosis, so that could account for some of the difference.
Can you comment on the efficacy of intermittent fasting (IF) to get into ketosis? Does fasting have to be undertaken in the order of days in order to be any effective, as opposed to 16 or 18 hours per day by way of IF.
For context, I've been following IF for a couple of years. I can definitely see myself losing my resident body fat, which is encouraging. I had tried keto diet before that - I found it very difficult to sustain, especially when you're away from home or are at work. So, part of my motivation to do IF instead of keto is, well, that I can achieve some level of ketosis via IF, and without following a strict keto diet.
You can get into ketosis on any kind of diet or eating schedule, it mostly relies on avoiding dietary carbohydrates. If you're curious you can get ketone urine sticks, ketone breath tests and even a non-FDA-approved continuous ketone monitor (SiBio). IF can help because it gives you a long period without carbs so you're naturally getting less of them in a given period, unless you then load up on like white bread.
It's mostly a function of what you eat when you do eat.
Dr Thomas Seyfried, the guy in the Diary of a CEO interview, stated that intermittent fasting is beneficial and achieves the desired 'cell repair' effects.
There are plenty of vegetarian ketogenic diets. A ketogenic diet is one that contains very few, or no carbohydrates to maintain the ketosis - just high in fats and medium in proteins. Meat is a convenient form of food with those properties, so often people maintaining such a diet eat a lot of meat.
Just as an aside, as a complete rat lover and obsessed fancy rat freak, I always find it somewhat sad we could probably come up with some great drugs for them (they notoriously die very easily), just, well, who cares about rats???
Soviet coins (at least post 1961) were designed explicitly with this application in mind.
1, 2, 3, and 5 kopeck coins weighed their value in grams. They could also be used to estimate lengths; 1 kopeck was 15 mm in diameter and 5 kopeck was 25 mm.
That's a very cool intentionally usefully design. What's the rationale behind a 3-kopeck coin though? I don't think I've seen a '3' denomination in any other currency.
So I never looked into it closely, but I knew that the 3 and 15 kopeck coins had names of their own of Tatar origin, so it had to have had a long history.
According to wikipedia [1,2,3], as a physical coin it was minted periodically throughout Russian history. The Tatar origin of its informal historical name is either 'gold'[4] or 'six'[5].
It was last introduced in 1839-1841 and persisted into Soviet period, until 1991 when it was discontinued by the newly independent Russia. The 1/2/3/5 weight system had to be of the Soviet design, since the metric system was adopted following the Bolshevik revolution, but the weights and dimensions haven't changed since 1926 [6].
I don't feel like doing a formal proof, but it looks like it should be a direct consequence of the pumping lemma:
"Informally, it says that all sufficiently long strings in a regular language may be pumped—that is, have a middle section of the string repeated an arbitrary number of times—to produce a new string that is also part of the language." [1]
Needless to say, this exercise would be trivial if you just covered the pumping lemma and its applications in class, and next to impossible if you never heard of it.
PS. I took 15-251 back when it was 15-299: a brand new class without a regular number assignment. Honestly, I would have enjoyed it a lot more now than I did back then. But several assignments still stand out for me, in particular "Building from scratch" [2]. Trying to get some of that feeling now, working through Turing Complete[3] with my daughter.
The Autonomous Site Preparation: Excavation, Compaction, and Testing (ASPECT) Project will develop tools and methods to clear, level, and compact the lunar surface. ASPECT is a fully autonomous rover with equipment for regolith excavation, boulder moving, and surface compaction.
I'm disappointed the article neglects to mention the use of actual coal in Kingsford briquettes. I imagine charcoal alone would not be energy-rich enough to get the temperatures.
For example, one can learn that their VOC emissions are in excess of 100 tons/year or that they can use 80,000 tons of coal per year. I guess folks that are willing to saturate their food in vapors of lighting fluid wouldn't care about a little bit of coal...
Not an expert here, but I imagine they shove a bunch of wood briquettes into a barrel and seal it shut and then put it in a coal-fired furnace. The wood smolders but there’s no oxygen so charcoal is formed. No coal or coal vapors going in here. Thoughts?
I’ll add - you don’t need fluid! Newspaper or shopping bags and some canola oil works every time.
No, the briquettes have actual coal in them. I was surprised too. I’m switching to lump charcoal when my kingsford runs out.
“That char is then mixed with ground coal and other ingredients to make a charcoal briquette.” [1]
“Technically, charcoal briquettes aren't actual charcoal, but a combination of charcoal and other ingredients molded into easy-to-light lumps. Kingsford Charcoal, for example, by far the most popular brand in the US, is made up of bits of charcoal, coal, starch (as a binder), sawdust, and sodium nitrate (to make it burn better). For the same reason that SPAM is cheaper than a whole ham, briquettes are cheaper to make than all-wood charcoal.” [2]
The comment for that particular problem also caught my eye. There's absolutely no need to remember radicals to solve it; just square both sides and compare.
Then I separated the large sheet into strips and gave them out as souvenirs to friends.
This is what a complete sheet folded up looked like: https://imgur.com/a/uCS5930