Basically use dirty water, finely filter it, such that only things as big as phages remain. Put that liquid in a solution of bacteria you want to treat. Filter it again, repeat... In the end you should end up with some phage solution which specifically attacks the bacteria. If these phages don't work anymore, find new ones.
George Eliava Institute in Tbilisi is where you could get such a treatment. In the West you might be able to source it from food production related suppliers: https://phageguard.com. I guess an open wound where treatment with antibiotics fails and loosing your foot etc. is on the table, this might be an option of last resort.
The whole procedure of selecting a phage personalized for the patient and then growing it into a treatment is so slow the patient may die before it's ready. Works for chonic infections but not much else.
There are probably phage treatments that are not personalized: test susceptibility and then mail-order the treatment. That treatment:
- Would be very expensive to *produce* compared to most antibiotics. I emphasize *produce* because the price of antibiotics rarely reflect how much it costs to produce them. Compared to antibiotics, phage treatments have very low margins.
- Would work for a very limited percentage of patients (probably less than 10%). There are hundreds of phages for each bacteria species (yes, they're species-specific and sub-species-specific).
- Have a very *very* short shelf life, possibly a couple of days. So, no pharmacy or hospital can keep a sufficiently diverse supply of phages in store to treat most patients, possibly not even whole countries.
BTW, species specificity and shelf life applies to the susceptibility test kits too.
Well Phage guard and similar products using a replacement schedule and many phages in one cocktail. But this does not mean that page guard like products would not be successfully as medicine, but as a medicine this is not possible as it is non-stable and containing live viruses. At best, you would need to get a new approvable every time the cocktail changes.
> the western process of developing and releasing new medicine is ill-suited for phage treatment
…as evidenced by the booming phage industry somewhere in the east?
(The weird thing is this railing against western medicine or whatnot is usually a dead ringer for pseudoscience. Yet phages are a scientifically valid thereaupeutic route [1].)
I don't understand your point? The only thing I said that the process of developing new medicine is ill-suited for phage treatment. This due the fact bacteria and phages are coevolving, hence any phage treatment is highly specific and hence not worth of developing. It needs new ideas to standardize the process and to make this process a legal treatment option.
1) Phages are specific for each bacteria species or sub-species. Can't treat E.coli and Klebsiella with the same phages like we do with antibiotics. Not even the test kits are the same. There are hundreds of phages for each bacteria species and only a few of them would work for each patient.
2) Phages are live organisms (as much as you can call a virus "alive"). The shelf life is very very short. A couple of days probably.
1 + 2 => A hospital would have to store thousands of different phages to be able to treat most of it's patients and it would have to replace those stores twice a week.
> hospital would have to store thousands of different phages to be able to treat most of it's patients and it would have to replace those stores twice a week
Couldn’t you create a few compound batches that treat sets of bacteria, balancing distribution cost and side effects?
Do that a little, remove phages that don’t work better than antibiotics, tailor for local conditions and I doubt you’re adding more than a few dozen medicines to the hospital’s inventory.
> shelf life is very very short. A couple of days probably
Much slower, we are still using 100 year old antibiotics. Money one phage is going to make is much smaller. This is not cost effective to go through the whole process.
It's amazing how many "little" things there are like this. Like I honestly can't remember the last time I filled out a form which required something like my country and I didn't have to scroll to find it. All the information's there to make a good guess. But this is just one example of a million. There's just too many papercuts.
Modern life is full of these tiny inconveniences. It usually involves some sort of "smart" devices, like light switches, stoves, elevator buttons, etc. Each one of which could be forgivable, but in sum it's like death by a thousand paper cuts.
User hostile UI in the name of security is particularly bad: we are supposed to type unique and complicated passwords in text fields without being able to see what we type, and if we get it wrong, we are put in timeout for two seconds. Citrix Netscaler nowadays apparently wants to be extra secure and shows you the most generic error message if you have a typo in either your password or user name and just tells you to "try again later", so you do until you lock yourself out. It's madness.
The other day I wanted to send someone proof that a transaction has gone through. A screenshot would have been the obvious choice, but of course, my banking app wouldn't let me do it.
A screenshot would also be trivial to counterfeit. That being said, I am not aware of any banks that provide any actually tamper-proof, shareable transaction confirmations.
I don't know about your bank/countries, but all of the banking apps in my country I've seen have 1. a "share account details" button that lets you easily paste your IBAN and other details in text form and 2. a "transaction receipt" button that saves a .pdf with the relevant details, that can be sent to the other part (although I agree with the other comment, this .pdf just like a screenshot can be easily spoofed)
Perhaps true, but some modern OSes (like macOS and iOS) allow you to copy text from screenshots. And since the text quality of screenshots is typically good, it works well.
And PDF documents in image form. Usually scans of printed copies.
It is fine for historical documents, but doing today means you really want to piss people off. And by the way, PDF files support signatures, both handwritten and digital. There are ways other than printing a 100+ page document and scanning it just so that your signature shows up on a single one of these pages.
During the past 25 years there were projects aiming at building industrial nuclear reactors. They all ended badly (canceled, way over budget or delay...).
And that's the complete answer: we know how to build nuclear reactors quickly and cheaply.
Building only very few of different novel designs while slowly (or quickly) losing the industrial base to do so, for example by making it illegal to build more (or at all) is exactly how you don't do it.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
But nuclear is fast to build, if we ignore all modern western examples!
Just because in Germany the bill was footed by the consumer and geopolitical dependcies (Russia) does not make its CO2 free electricity cheaper. It also still lacks behind France in CO2 emission.
This argument is like nuclear power was a waste for France in the 1980s because they weren't done removing all oil from their grid.
As per recent French nuclear construction they are on a path of replacing it with renewables because it is horrifically expensive and they are unable to finance new construction.
My argument is that german electricity is way more expensive then the french. But you are right npp is overregulated and should be build in convoys to manage cost.
> South Korean company build a NPP in 7 years in Saudi Arabia.
Barakah (delivered March 2024) was late (by about 3 years?), undersold (KEPCO hadn't any other ongoing project and the Korean government at the time wanted a nuclear phase-out) and various tricks are now known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
By death per km France, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia are more dangerous then Germany or Switzerland. German Autobahn is crazy and non-pleasant if you drive slow, but in Switzerland everyone follows the speed limit so it is quite relaxing. Also, you seem to struggle with mountainous roads, which depends on the topography and not the country.
Agree, though an intensive one (8500km in 6 weeks) that is just subjective experience, which is why I caveated it mentioning that it was our own family personal experience.
I lived in a mountainous area of Italy (very narrow roads, full of ups and downs) so I am a fairly confident driver (probably why I was not too stressed driving in Italy) and drove in countries like India and Iran in the past (so very familiar and happy with slow, but very crowded and unpredictable traffic).
To clarify, the anxiety we had on Autobahn and Swiss' highways was not a reflection on the quality of the roads, and more a reflection on the driving 'style' combined with the speed that those roads allow. The style was quite aggressive, very fast in every lane, loads of overtakes (car constantly zig-zagging), people coming from the back _FAST_ and staying there, people switching lanes immediately after signalling rather than giving some time for people to notice. Overall, that combination made for a very stressful experience which we have agreed (as family) not to repeat in the future.
Not complaining about not having yet another car on the roads here, but your conclusion goes directly against experience of literally every single person living here in Europe for their whole lives that I know. Especially Switzerland, apart from italian-speaking part of Ticino (which is more Italy than Switzerland), people drive well and way above Europe's average. Also Switzerland has 120kmh speed limit, making roads quite a bit safer also due to very frequent stationary radar placements.
But then again we have 0.1% of information to make a good picture of your situation, driving skills and habits, vehicle you moved around and so on. But there is for sure a good reason for such discrepancy, ie driving caravan super slow or similar tiny little detail.
Also you magically skipped few (pretty horrible to drive) countries if you had a road trip that covered Greece.
Have agreed in previous comments that this was subjective (as a family but also as a driver) experience.
Maybe one thing that amplified the effect was the high expectations we had for those highways, and maybe that's what made it more shocking for us.
Again, I consider myself a 'decently skilled' driver, having driven in many countries over the course of the years, and easily adapting to driving styles (US/Italy/France/Iran/UK/India/etc). Some of these styles are indeed chaotic, but they (generally) operate at slower speed, which allow for corrections and precautions. The thing that threw us off is the combination I have mentioned before:
> [...] the speed that those roads allow. The style was quite aggressive, very fast in every lane, loads of overtakes (car constantly zig-zagging), people coming from the back _FAST_ and staying there, people switching lanes immediately after signalling rather than giving some time for people to notice. Overall, that combination made for a very stressful experience which we have agreed (as family) not to repeat in the future.
>German Autobahn is crazy and non-pleasant if you drive slow, but in Switzerland everyone follows the speed limit so it is quite relaxing
The German situation seems vastly superior on the basis that whoever is the "odd one out" or violating the norms should be the one having a bad time. Basically incentivizing homogenous and/or predictable traffic flow, which is safer.
There is more than enough uranium on the planet. This is more of a pork cycle problem. If there is a clear path towards an SMR industry supply will be there.
Seriously, you are concerned small nuclear reactors left behind? The main idea is, that you will be able to load them onto a truck and ship them back to the factory. So the chance of anything left behind is very small.
Why would the risk be small? I've seen pretty expensive machinery been left behind. I destroyed such machinery to take out the copper wires from its transformars to make a net.
What makes you think that this can't happen? It can happen in so many ways, i.e. the owner is criminal and runs away or fucks up and loses everything and the court takes years to decide who gets what from the factories, the new owners put it on sale it takes another 10 years to sell because the repair costs incurred are massive and equipment is getting obsolete therefore you can't find a buyer. People get old, move on and all that decays for 50 years until the land becomes valuable enough for someone to buy it with all that obsolete garbage.
I think you underestimate the amount of mismanagement and human error that happens every day. May I remind you of the Goiânia accident? Additionally, Wikipedia has a seriously long list of “orphan source incidents”.
I think with enough renewable in the grid, there will always be times when the costs are 0 or negative, so you can help stabilize the grid by consuming.
Are there downsides to "just" sending all of the extra energy to ground? I've often wondered why overpowering the grid has been talked about as this huge unsolvable problem.
I understand it's wasteful, of course, but waste in a ecosystem of vast abundance seems like a feature, not a bug.
Solar and wind can be trivially turned down when not required. They are much, much better at it than traditional sources.
So easy that one of the actual problems we face is that by default grids will generally prefer to turn off the clean renewables and let the difficult to modulate fossil fuels run.
This is why negative prices are a good thing, financially incentivizing fossil producers to plan for flexibility and fining them when they fail to do so.
> but waste in a ecosystem of vast abundance seems like a feature, not a bug.
The problem is that it's not a ecosystem of vast abundance, just occasional abundance. Literally no-one in the world right now is sitting on a constant supply of TWs of excess electrical power and saying "golly gee what are we going to do with all this". Perhaps France got closest in history and their prices still aren't "too cheap to meter".
You can "waste" the power (either by actually "burning" it to heat and dumping it, or just disconnecting the solar panels), but then you'll be short of power later and need to fall back on something expensive or with high externalities. It's also bad in terms of the capex for the solar panels (assuming solar), as you can't use your expensive plant as much as you want. If you can you'd rather use "$10" of energy that you can't sell to store and sell it later, even as heat, at any price than just lose it all.
Even if you massively, massively overbuilt solar and wind so that you were in a "vast abundance" scenario on average, you still have to store some of it for night and/or winter.
As I understand it, you need to limit the current flow to ground to not create a fault that burns out the whole setup. The most practical way to do that is with a bank of resistors. At that point, the resistors are doing the work and you're just using the ground as a return path, which isn't necessary.
To clarify, the current flow never goes to ground; it goes back to where it started, which is why we call it a "circuit". When you do it without routing it through a load like a bank of resistors, it's called a "short circuit". Electromechanical generators will generally tend to catch on fire if you short-circuit them.
Solar panels have no problem with being short circuited; the amount of heat they produce in that state is the same as any other black object in sunlight.
Windmills are like any other electromechanical generator in this sense. You have to stop them with a brake. But that is totally a thing you can do, and quickly, and every mainstream windmill does it regularly (if only to handle overspeed winds safely), although, when this system fails, you get spectacular viral video content.
In the usual case where it works, though, you don't need a load bank either.
Load banks come into play when conventional inflexible baseload generators can't ramp down fast enough or when perverse market incentives pay renewables operators to pump power into the grid when it's not being demanded.
> Solar panels have no problem with being short circuited; the amount of heat they produce in that state is the same as any other black object in sunlight.
Internet akchually: a small amount of the heat will be dropped in the wiring that forms the short circuit rather than in the internal resistance. So the panel will be slightly cooler than you'd expect for an object of that colour even in short circuit. They're the same temperature in open circuit, though. When operating normally, they can be quite a lot cooler and in fact you can detect non-functional panels by looking for hot ones with thermal cameras.
Yes, agreed, especially if you're "short-circuiting" them with MOSFETs or TRIACs or something instead of relays.
I did know that normally-operating panels were significantly cooler (23% efficiency means 23% less heat than a regular black body) but I had no idea that people used this feature to detect broken panels with thermal cameras. I'd only seen people forward-biasing the panels from an external source to stimulate NIR light emission and using NIR cameras.
Basically use dirty water, finely filter it, such that only things as big as phages remain. Put that liquid in a solution of bacteria you want to treat. Filter it again, repeat... In the end you should end up with some phage solution which specifically attacks the bacteria. If these phages don't work anymore, find new ones.