Nah, generational lead poisoning gave us the Great Regression, taking our boomers and making them the way they are instead of being their parents, who flew to the moon and made the UN as a way to foster discission before jumping into war. There was hope in humanity’s actions before lead made myopic narcissists who were okay with poisoning the world.
lead was in everything way before the boomers… pipes, cups, plates, paint… people used to bite lead fishing weights….
lead led to the downfall of rome….
the generations before the boomers were plenty good at poisoning the earth…. and many boomers did want to stop it and started the whole hippie thing, earth day, and civil right….
It was leaded gasoline that made lead ubiquitous. Previously folks could minimize the exposure with precaution but by 1930 it was inescapable. No longer limited to physical proximity, lead fumes ensured it was in the air and rain put it in the water.
Nah, everybody dies of something. It’s also never ACTUALLY “old age”. It’s either cancer, or a cascading failure of organs caused by a chronic disease, or both.
worse is pretty subjective… is brain damage worse than brain cancer?
the full effects of this aren’t understood, of course… but my money is on: very very bad.
Probably worse. There is a high risk that the microplastics will cause inflammation that will lead to cancer. Microplastics are everywhere in our bodies, which means we may develop cancers throughout our body.
Nice profile picture… Tim. Are you aware of !hellointernet? It’s not very active, but that’s sort of to be expected in the given circumstances. Just thought I’d let you know in case you missed it.
Lee’s research team “stumbled” on the discovery after investigating a “gene desert”, a stretch of DNA on chromosome 21 that does not code for proteins, which has previously been linked to IBD and other autoimmune diseases. Writing in Nature, they describe how they found a section of DNA that behaves like a volume control for nearby genes. This “enhancer” was seen only in immune cells called macrophages where it boosted a gene called ETS2 and ramped up the risk of IBD.
Sounds like more “junk” non-coding DNA turns out to be not junk after all. I wonder how much of our DNA is actually junk, and how much we just don’t know yet.
Modern scientific consensus is largely that “junk” DNA isn’t a thing. All of our DNA has purpose including and sometimes especially the non-coding(nc) parts. The ncRNAs made from ncDNA come in various flavors and are very important to a lot of gene expression control. As seen here that’s ETS2 but pretty much all known genes have ncRNA that affects expression in one way or another.
Biology at a research level has basically had to throw out the DNA->RNA->protein dogma because they all affect each other and themselves.
Well, there’s things like “jumping genes” that don’t necessarily provide anything for the organism, but that’s a bit of a nitpick, since they’re not just random codons, and some do or at least could.
theguardian.com
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