#do they make human sized autoclaves

[release-the-hound]

A LEPTO DOG PEED ON ME AT WORK TODAY I WANT TO SET MY CLOTHES ON FIRE 😭😭😭

#do they make human sized autoclaves #please say yes #ugghhh i feel so gross and now every time i get a headache im gonna be like AH LEPTO. THE MENINGITIS IS KICKING IN #hospital schmospital

[crosschild25]

What's Green Cleaning & Why You Want To Kick Poisonous Cleaners To The Curb!

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#清潔公司

[writingquestionsanswered]

Tattoo Shop AU - a quick, practical guide for writers

Guest Post by lebanon-hangover

lebanon-hangover said: this is based on my personal experience with the industry only, so depending on the era and country you are portraying, it may not be 100% accurate for your setting.

Hygiene

It may not be obvious at first glance, but most tattooists are clean freaks. We work with human blood every day, and we get clients from all ages, ethnic and social economic backgrounds, with all sorts of medical conditions.

We usually mop frequently, bleach the sinks, wipe down everything, and use cling film or bags to wrap everything. I mean fucking everything. We also scrub in, and sanitise the area on the person we work on.

Needles are collected in a sharps bin, and handled very carefully. Medical waste goes in yellow bags, and both are collected by a professional service.

Used ink caps may look full, but the ink gets diluted by blood. Like you dip the inky needle into the person, but you also dip the person’s blood into your ink. These are medical waste too.

Cleaning up must be done promptly after the session. Bin everything disposable, put things through the ultrasonic and the autoclave, and sanitise the area. We may take machines apart, but more for maintenance than cleaning, sometimes we swap parts in them too.

We have two sinks, one for hand washing, one for cleaning.

All inks and needles have use by dates.

The internal dynamics of a studio

Depending on the country, some tattoo shops tend to have ties to biker gangs, and some of those internal dynamics and unwritten rules are often present.

There’s a pecking order and it’s dead serious. Basically the longer you’ve been in a shop, the higher ‘rank’ you are, you get the better positioned stations, first pick of walk-ins, etc (Unless the client is asking for someone by name). Regardless of your actual experience in the industry, like if you move into your old apprentice’s shop, they are still senior to you. If the owner or their partner is an artist, obviously they are on top of the chain by default.

We are self employed, but we have a boss. You are only making money if you are working, but you still have set work hours.

We get paid by the clients, and we pay the studio a cut. In return, there are some items provided by them, and some we buy for ourselves. Usually the chairs, tattoo beds, gloves, cleaning products, clip cord covers, masks, aprons, ink caps, vaseline, green soap, and some basic ink is provided by the shop. We buy our own machines, arm rests, stations, pedals, power supplies, clipcords, tips and grips, needles, special colours, stencil fluid…these are a personal preference, and often depend on the artists’ style.

We totally ask to try out each other’s equipment sometimes, or ask for a certain type of needle if we ran out.

The receptionist is usually just one of us, maybe a piercer, but it also can be a hired person in top studios.

The apprentice in the traditional system is often mistreated, and they have to pay for their education, have to be there multiple days a week and don’t make any money. It’s kind of like a tear them down, build them back up again thing to see if they are really serious about the job. Times are slowly changing, but 99% of them will always need a second job. Most of them are working as bar staff.

When you open a new studio, you must visit all the existing local ones and introduce yourself, otherwise you may get a brick through the window. Otherwise there’s not much beef among individual artists, they are often friends, go to conventions together and party after, etc.

The Artists

Tattooing is a fairly physical job, stretching skin is very important. We have to also keep our clients safely still, so we often use positions to pin them down a bit. Sometimes you hit a reflex point on the foot or under a knee, and you don’t want to get kicked. Sometimes you have to pull away super fast, cos they are sneezing, yawning or giggling.

Most tattooists drink a lot of coffee, tea or energy drinks.

Some people are all rounders, some have specific styles, but we recognise each other’s art styles. Sometimes we delegate work to each other, if we think our coworkers style fits the concept better. For example if there’s a person who does script well, we give them those projects.

We don’t like when people come in with designs from other artists. Art theft is frowned upon, and we work best with our own drawings.

Most apprentices practice on their own legs, and sometimes we tattoo each other when it’s quiet. Most people have cover ups, or bad pieces from their early days. The artists’ own tattoos sometimes are in a different style than what they do, but we like to collect ink from friends or colleagues we admire.

In the first 1-2 years one is an apprentice, then junior artist. At 5-8 years of tattooing, you have earned your stripes and are considered an experienced artist.

Conventions are really fun, but can be stressful. You can make good money working at one, and sometimes get awarded for it too. We can also spend a lot at a convention.

Sometimes we poke our fingers by accident, and it’s a scary thing. Good case scenario is just some random dots on your fingers. Let’s not go into the bad case scenario.

We do guest spots sometimes, just to meet new clients, and change it up a bit.

We spend a lot of time drawing up things, and designs are meant to fall on specific muscles, stretch with the skin a certain way, so they are tailored to the body proportions of the client. A good tattoo is also an optical illusion, complimenting the body shape.

Social media presence is like a second job, you need good photos, and you need to market yourself.

Tattoo ink does not wash out, so some stains are inevitable when pouring it out. Those ink bottles get stuck so easily, and we wrestle them a lot. We try to avoid it, but wearing all dark colours is a thing for a reason.

The Clients

Tattooists need to have a good ‘bedside manners’ too. We get nervous or self conscious people, and we are told personal things during long sessions. For example scar coverups and memorial pieces can be very emotional.

We have pretty good poker faces and first aid trainings. People can faint, get shaky, throw up, some have seizures, have b.o., get sweaty, etc the same way as at a blood donation event? It’s no big deal really. We sit them down, give them some water and some sugar, and re-book them if necessary. Most artists keep some wet wipes, mouth wash, deodorant, sweets, maybe even some clean clothes at work, just in case.

If someone comes in with a wild idea for a jobstopper, we would sit down and have a long talk. If they haven’t got many tattoos, we usually try to stir them towards more safe choices, offering them creative ideas. It’s like those jedi mind tricks sometimes.

If someone is undecided, we show them our own hand drawn flash sheets. Once its gone, its gone tho, we don’t use the designs twice.

Pinterest is full of photoshopped fake tattoos, some that won’t even work as real ink. Many people also touch up their work digitally on photos, so some clients have really unrealistic expectations.

We can totally tell if someone is intoxicated or hangover. It thins the blood, and they bleed out the ink, and it’s super annoying. if it’s bad, they will be sent home and rebooked.

Some folks are self conscious about body hair, their size, stretch marks and scars. Chances are, we have seen similar, and we aren’t bothered by it, because it’s work. Surgery scars, scars from accidents, self harm scars, burns, we see it all the time. We shave some really hairy dudes all the time girl, your legs are fine. Seriously. If something makes tattooing you dangerous we will tell you.

Fit, muscular people are harder to tattoo because they are really firm. Its a workout for us.

Everyone gets midnight messages about the aftercare from nervous clients, and drunken booty calls about getting inked right at this second. We have copy paste replies…

We get creeps sometimes. Stalking, weird conversations, tmi info dumps etc.

Other things to include (for fun, or for plot reasons)

We sometimes have those “oh fuck” moments. We all do, but mistakes can be fixed, and we play it cool.

Tattooing takes time. Usually 30 minutes to multiple sessions though years and years.

Healing tattoos takes about 2-4ish weeks, and your characters shouldn’t go roll around in dirt, sunbathe, swim, pick at the scabs. Nasty infections, and messed up tattoos would be the results.

If you have a strong immune system, and you get a lot of work done in one sitting, you may get a brief bit of a temperature. It’s normal, and will go away.

Its a lot easier to get seriously drunk after getting a tattoo. Be careful.

We sometimes draw on each other for practice with our marker pens.

Tattoos are inside the skin, not on top of it. Imagine a low opacity, skin toned layer over the ink, adding to the healed tattoos’ colour. Please stop making your characters skin fully transparent.

Heavy blackwork and palms are done in multiple sessions.

You can’t cover up moles, because if they develop skin cancer, the dermatologist can’t see the signs.

There’s a stereotype about piercers having blacked out sleeves.

Stencil fluid looks just like cum.

You get that annoying itch on your face when you scrubbed in, put on gloves and finally ready to go.

Some artists have a strong preference for coil or rotary machines, and they bicker about it a lot. Coils are louder, more punchy, and more traditional, perfect for lineart. They can be customised, and they last forever. They are also called glorified doorbells by people who prefer rotaries. Rotary machines are smoother, lighter, and often use needles that are pulled back into the cartridges for safety. They are better for shading and delicate line work. Older tattooists often say they are dildo or butt plug shaped, overly delicate and are for “soft millennials” only.

Every artist owns like 5 to 20 machines, and they have specific machine builders they are loyal to.

The “which cable is broken and cutting out” guessing game. Clip cords and pedal cables get worn out easily, and that results in your machine running really jerky.

Walk-in always show up 10 minutes before closing.

We often look quite silly at work. Sleeves rolled up, folks use all sorts of plastic ppe, headlamps, and we tie up our hair. Add couple of purple smears from carbon paper, and we aren’t scary at all.

#writing guide #writing tips #writing advice #writer's guide #writeblr #writing community #writing #writing help #submission

[wordofrecall]

character playlists: ori

so. let’s do this. my playlists are long and scattered, but they make me happy, so i might as well share them and the thoughts behind song choices. so. here’s some songs for runaway knights & wannabe witches, and what have you.

something holy - childhood & riches & wonders

pearl diver - mitski - oh hunter, if you didn’t want the beautiful so badly, perhaps you would’ve found it in your spirit singing softly - look. it's on the nose, considering that her title is "the pearl hunter," but also, like, that rules. this is a song for wren, i think; ori in the present reflecting on her mother and the similarities between them.

icicles - the scary jokes - i can only be forgiven if i’m giving myself up to you on a silver serving tray / must i bare myself to the stabbing of your knife & gnashing teeth while our lovely company appears so entertained? - aaand a song for childhood. 99% of ori's socialization came from her parents having important guests over, so. uh. yeah. show off your reclusive child prodigy like a pageant whenever you have the opportunity. she probably won't grow to loathe you.

life: the cruel interlude (on god) - kilo kish - why do i dare believe in me when i bleed? - questioning was. always a big thing for ori. i don't think she ever believed that the mirzha was god, and i known that she never truster her father's patron, but. in her studies, in her passions, there's always this tiny sense of desperation for something to have faith in something. not herself.

bluejays & cardinals - the mountain goats - the stars come out of hiding for you, & i would too - there is. a lot, in ori's relationship with her brother. she was the favorite child, yeah, the one destined for great things in spite of her... troubles. but he never had those troubles! she didn't, doesn't understand how he went through life so unafraid. there's envy there. i also think that the line i quoted is terribly true, like, canonically. because. she sure did do that stupid shit.

be calm - fun. - take it from me, i’ve been there a thousand times--you hate your pulse because it thinks you’re still alive! - sometimes you have intense social phobia. and that's okay!

country death song - violent femmes - kiss your mother goodnight & remember that God saves, kiss your mother goodnight & remember that God saves - i think andrei is a much less pitiable or even sympathetic man than the narrator of this song, but. like. it's a country song about a father killing his daughter while preaching godliness. i had to.

i’m all bloody inside - liam lynch - inside me, well, it’s dark & gross as hell, i’m not a pretty sight - the family business!

the hazards of love 3 (revenge!) - the decemberists - but father, don’t you fear, your children are all here - fantasies. part of the fantasy is imagining a world where she doesn't feel terrible about the thought.

shankill butchers - sarah jarosz - they used to be just like me & you, they used to be sweet little boys - "blood hunters are ghost stories." "and also, they're fucking terrible. violent, cruel, zealous. the worst."

sparrow - st. vincent - & no eyes are on the sparrow, eyes are on the sparrow, how could that be the case? the lark keeps whistling his number, silly little number, as if he isn't prey - pity for the boy. sort of retrospective, but it's a thought that's been there since she was a child.

something burning - rituals & fire & running

starchild - ghost quartet - but i will transcend & vomit this loser out of me; i will become the next big thing, i will light myself on fire - maybe she is some kind of angel? bursting with radiance and terrifying to look upon.

arsonist’s lullabye - hozier - don’t you ever tame your demons, always keep them on a leash / when i was sixteen, my senses fooled me - oooor maybe she is a sixteen year-old who is having a panic attack and setting everything in sight on fire by accident.

blood - my chemical romance - i’m the kind of human wreckage that you love! - so she's broken.

girl anachronism - the dresden dolls - it’s not the way i’m meant to be, it’s just the way the operation made me - so she's failed and she's broken and she's sick, and there's no time to fucking think.

when the chips are down - anais mitchell - cast your eyes to heaven, you’ll get a knife in the back. - so she does what her mother did before her, and she runs from that which she has always known.

body terror song - ajj - i’m so sorry that you have to have a body / one that will hurt you, & be the subject of so much of your fear - feelings on being built Wrong; feelings on your mind's undue control upon your body.

in corolla - the mountain goats - & no one was gonna come & get me, there wasn't anybody gonna know, even though i leave a trail of burnt things in my wake every single place i go - very good as an ori song in general but this is her justification to herself in the water. under the docks, she says this to herself.

the harrowed & the haunted - the decemberists - will i be so brave? - just to get that oceanic vibe up.

luna - the mountain goats - rise through the flames & end again in flames at last - an inexplicable feeling.

unwhere - reeder - a song for leaving what you've always known.

something lonely - years & woods & dreaming

runs in the family - amanda palmer - run from their pity, from responsibility, run from the country & run from the city, i can run from the law, i can run from myself, i can run for my life, i can run into debt, i can run from it all, i can run 'till I'm gone - she is broken and all she can think to do is get as far away as possible

panic attack - liza anne - i hate that i can be seen like this

black eyes - david wirsig - my hammering heart hears the voices of spirits that tempt us, the scorn that they’ve spoken

for the departed - shayfer james - they will bury me alive, but i’m not inclined to care; i am too far gone now

hurt - johnny cash - everyone i know goes away in the end; you can have it all, my empire of dirt

my body’s made of crushed little stars - mitski - i work better under a deadline! i work better under a deadline!

blood in the cut - k. flay - guess i’m contagious; it’d be safest if you ran--fuck, that’s what they all just end up doing in the end

little pistol - mother mother - i think i might be scared of the world & the way it makes you feel afraid & how it gets in the way

villains pt. 1 - emma blackery - built to create, designed to destroy

the beer - kimya dawson - & the christians gave me comic books as if i would be scared of burning in hell while i was already there [...] i tried to scream fuck you but blood was pouring out my mouth

something safe - family & finding it & fighting together

haunted house - sir babygirl - i’m running just to hide & i’m hiding just to breathe & around every corner is the same night on repeat

your heart is a muscle the size of your fist - ramshackle glory - i love you & you make me glad to be alive; i promise that i’m gonna pay you back / you always know how funny everything is, even when i’m so serious that it’s gonna be the death of me

medicines - the taxpayers - o, but our rotting corpses lying there soon began to leak & grow these lesions that all smelled just like a rose / & all the blood & guts inside us germinated into timeless pages stained with lines of lovely prose

autoclave - the mountain goats - i am this great unstable mass of blood & foam

alligator skin boots - mccafferty - i’m cool to the touch, leap to my death, i’ll die for you all, i’ll die for my friends, it goes like this

100 years - florence + the machine - lord, don’t let me break this, let me hold it lightly, give me arms to pray with instead of ones that hold too tightly

tomorrow will be kinder - the secret sisters - but i feel warmth on my skin, the stars have all aligned

armour - rae spoon - you know i placed was to build a life for you

amy aka spent gladiator 1 - the mountain goats - play with matches if you think you need to play with matches; seek out the hidden places where the fire burns hot & bright / find where the heat’s unbearable & stay there if you have to--don’t hurt anybody on your way up to the light, and stay alive

curses - the crane wives - won’t you stay with me, my darling, when my walls start burning down?

something daring - islands & visions & loss

jane’s dream - janelle monáe

beekeeper - keaton henson - hear me, o woman that has gone astray, gone astray

fire - kimya dawson - i’m reading books about how they’re corrupt [...] as long as i’m burning, i’ll keep on yearning to save the world, not sure how, but i’m learning

cosmic hero - car seat headrest - i love you, but i can’t stand the touch, & of course i’m alright with death

turn the lights off - tally hall - everbody likes to get taken for turns to see how bright the fire inside of us burns [...] should be stronger, books abandoned

eat you alive - the oh hellos - child, i’m afraid for your soul; these things that you’re after, they can’t be controlled

cry for judas - the mountain goats - hallucinate a shady grove where judas went to die

o death - monica martin - no wealth, no land, no silver, no gold, nothing satisfies me but your soul

blood of angels - brown bird - and i would wage my soul to bet that there ain’t no one throwing lightning anyhow

the universe is going to catch you - the antlers - the arms of the universe kept you from falling [...] those arms did not come back

a burning hill - mitski - i am the fire & i am the forest & i am the witness watching it / i stand in the valley watching it

something terrifying - conversations & selfhood & divination

the lamb - dessa - but blood is blood, & what’s done is done; blood is blood, & its burden is a beast

going invisible 2 - the mountain goats - i’m gonna burn it all down today & sweep all the ashes away

the lion’s roar - first aid kit - she plays a tune for those who wish to overlook the fact that they’ve been blindly deceived by those who preach & pray & teach, but she falls short & the night explodes in laughter

the villain i appear to be - connor spiotto - even if you can’t see the good inside me, i don’t have the time to tell you why i do the things that i do, just please hold on & soon you’ll seem

up the wolves - the mountain goats - there’s bound to be a ghost at the back of closet, no matter where you live; there’ll be a few things, maybe several things that you’re gonna find really difficult to forgive

thursday girl - mitski - glory, glory, glory to the night that shows me what i am

at the bottom of everything - bright eyes - we must take all of the medicines to expensive now to sel; set fire to the preacher who is promising us hell

everybody does - julien baker - i know i’m a pile of filthy wreckage you will wish you’d never touched, but you’re gonna run when you find out who i am

tongues & teeth - the crane wives - i know that you mean so well, but i am not a vessel for your good intent 

a pearl - mitski - you’re growing tired of me and all the things i don’t talk about / sorry, i don’t want your touch--it’s not that i don’t want you

#original #this is. so long. and i will probably add more. but. Daughter. #ori #playlists

[deanofwhumpuniversity]

Writer’s Month 1: Tattoo Parlor/Flower Shop AU

This is obviously an AU, sorta kinda character study thingy. It’s not whump, it’s just me practicing; however

Content Warning: Tattoos, blood, needles, nonconsentual tattoo mention

The bell over the door rang as Reynan pushed into the little shop. He found himself in a tiny lobby, just a desk and some chairs, leading to a hallway of curtained-off booths. The art on the walls was modern, and everyone in the drawings was fully clothed, not the image he’d had in his mind of a tattoo parlor. He could hear faint buzzing coming from at least one of the little partitions, and he didn’t want to call out and interrupt anyone in their work. But the bell had summoned someone’s attention, and he soon heard solid yet gentle footsteps approaching from the hall. Their sound was clear but not heavy, tapping on the linoleum like a shoe somehow made entirely of heels.

“What can we do for you?” The voice was ever-so-slightly modulated, but low and smooth, and Rey turned away from a drawing of an astronaut to see he’d been greeted by a green and black android. The robot wasn’t feigning humanity at all, no synthetic skin or hair, with a viewscreen for a face. Two arms, two legs, and a head, unlike old-fashioned worker drones, but Rey could see one of its arms ended a few inches below the elbow. Not in a messy way; no circuits protruded, and the edge was smooth and clean, as if perhaps it had been designed that way.

Rey took his time assessing the creature before answering, not bothering to hide his mild curiosity. “I was wondering...um. I’d like to get a tattoo covered?” He didn’t know if all shops would do coverups or if he’d need to go somewhere special. But he’d had the day off and finally pushed himself to just go inside and ask. He knew surprisingly little about tattoos, despite the one inked across his left shoulder.

The robot seemed to be sizing him up as well; an LED square appeared on its viewscreen and bounced around for a few moments, its odd tracking reminding Rey of a dragonfly. “You work...nearby? I have seen you before. Many times.” The square became a spinning circle, and the robot’s attention was faraway, as though it was seeking the answer itself rather than expecting Rey to furnish one. “The flower shop, down the strip,” it said finally, viewscreen clearing.

“Yeah, the florist; but I’ve never seen you in there.” His tone was mildly suspicious; he’d remember if he’d ever seen this android before, and he was generally good at spotting if he was being watched.

The robot actually laughed at this, and despite the cascading sound seeming a bit like two voices at once, its tone was friendly and disarming. “I see a lot. I remember everyone. I don’t mean to, I just...do.” It shrugged its metal-plated shoulders, then swept its truncated arm toward the back of the shop. “I have time now, if you know what you want.”

This gave Rey pause. The android was an artist? Not just a shop attendant, a cleaning bot, a secretary, but an actual tattooist? He considered this a moment before he realized, if he wanted someone making clean, even lines on his skin he couldn’t do much better than a machine. He started down the hall, and the robot followed, directing him into an open partition at the end.

Inside the android pulled the curtain and gestured for Rey to sit on a faux leather chair, covered in a long sheet of paper like something from a doctor’s office. It crinkled obnoxiously as Rey fidgeted to get comfortable, and he tried to tell himself this was something the tattooist must be used to, and what did a robot care anyway?

“So what were you thinking?” The robot asked conversationally, as it pulled open a cabinet and drew out sheets of parchment and tiny pots of color.

Rey reached into his pocket, twisting in his seat and crackling the paper. He withdrew an embroidered chevron patch and held it out, grip somewhat tight, as though he wanted the robot to only look, but not touch. “It’s my regiment. I want it over -” he shrugged off his button-up, leaving only his tank top “-this.” His bared shoulder revealed a barcode underlined by a small stylized sword. He spoke more rapidly as he explained, “I’ve served my sentence, it’s ok for me to remove it. I’m allowed --”

The android raised a hand to silence his protestations. “I don’t actually care about Accord Forces protocol. It’s no problem.” If focused its attention on the patch, and a line of light scanned up and down his faceplate, scanning the image into his saved files, as though he could tell Rey wouldn’t want to surrender the badge to him. “I’ll have to make it dark, to cover the black, but it’s nothing I haven’t done before. Unless you’d like me to laser the old one off? You’d have to let that heal though, before getting it tattooed over.” It tilted its head, waiting for Rey to choose.

“No, it’s fine. If you say it’ll cover, I’m fine with that.”

“Excellent.” It flipped a few switches on an autoclave sterilizer, and a few wisps of steam escaped as the box’s seal released. The android slotted the end of his shorted arm into a circle of metal on the machine’s front face, and Rey heard a bit of whirring and a mechanical click, before the robot withdrew his now-whole limb from the autoclave. The hand and wrist looked the same as its other arm in color and design; but then the artist opened a sterile package and slotted a grouping of needles into a barely perceptible hole in its first finger.

“Wait! You mean, right now?” Rey wasn’t sure if he was losing his nerve, or if he’d simply expected there to be more to the process. His only experience with tattoos so far hadn’t been a fun one, after all. “Don’t we need to discuss payment, or something?”

The robot picked up a cartridge of ink and pressed it down into a socket in its knuckle until it made a quiet pop. “I don’t generally charge for coverups, to be honest with you.” It turned it’s attention back to Rey, and could see on his face that his concerns weren’t entirely assuaged. “I mean, if you really feel like paying me…” the spinning circle returned to its faceplate as it considered a moment. “Flowers.”

“Flowers?” The request was unexpected, bordering on absurd, but Rey felt the tension release from his shoulders as his nervousness was replaced by confusion. “What do you want with flowers?”

The android paused -- not in a human way, breathing, thinking, considering; but completely, unmoving, with its darkened face turned toward Rey’s. Nothing played over its screen, and he felt he may have made a mistake while he stared into its blackness. Then, just as quickly as it had ceased motion, it started up again, fiddling with its arm as it replied. “I like flowers,” it stated flatly. A bit of emotion returned to its voice and it continued quietly, almost wistfully “I like...beautiful things.”

After a quiet moment, it pulled up a chair and leaned over Rey’s shoulder, holding up its hands over the skin and looking into his eyes as if waiting for him to announce he was ready. “Don’t you um, trace the picture or whatever?” This earned him another soft laugh, and strands of light began to stream out from the robot’s screen, creating an overlay of the chevron on Rey’s skin. “Oh,” he breathed softly. The android remained still, needing permission, and while its attention was clearly on creating the detailed light display, Rey could feel a weight like eyes on him. He nodded his assent, and the artist began.

The pain was the same sharpness he remembered; all the needles moving together creating the feeling of a single blade slicing into him. Rey looked away for a moment, and the sensation seemed to grow worse. Without being able to see, his mind imagined the circular, color-filling motions were grinding and spiraling down into his flesh to paint his very bones. He forced himself to look back at his shoulder, relieved to see that the needles were still there, bouncing along his skin. Barely any blood welled from the punctures, and the android’s arm moved with a laserlike precision that shouldn’t have been surprising, but was completely fascinating, and he found his focus drifting as he watched the artist move.

“Alright.” The robot said simply, startling Rey out of his fugue. The android was wiping at the tiny spatters of blood and ink on his arm, and applying a large square bandage. That was it? It was already over? “You can change this in a couple hours. I’ve got some care sheets at the front desk with cleaning instructions.” The android stood up from its chair but stayed close as Rey got up, as though he expected him to faint.

When Rey was able to get up and gingerly pull his button-up back on, the robot waved his arm toward the curtained doorway. Rey exited and started toward the lobby, realizing the android wasn’t behind him. A click and whirr sounded from the partition, then the robot stepped out into the hall, again minus one hand.

Rey wasn’t sure exactly what to do now. Should he run off to the shop and get some flowers immediately? Should he shake the robot’s hand? What was the procedure for this sort of transaction? He realized he hadn’t asked if the artist had a name; surely it had some kind of designation. Inkbot 2000? He tried not to snicker aloud at that thought; he didn’t figure the android would appreciate it. Before he could offer any sort of awkward farewell, the robot was handing him a sheet of paper labelled “Care Instructions,” and plucking a business card from a little holder on the desk.

“Come back if you need any touch ups or, of course, anything else. You did well. I’d say I like green but that’s every sort of flower, isn’t it?” The robot’s head was tilted in a way that somehow implied a smile.

Rey simply nodded, taking the offered items and mumbling “Appreciate it,” before making his way out the door. He was halfway to his car before he checked the business card. It declared the address and phone number of the shop, and across the top, in a large green font like the display on a digital clock, was what he assumed was the artist’s name: Celadon Argos.

#writersmonth2020 #robot #android #short fiction #writing #not whump #missives from the dean #Argos #Reynan Lim

[troger]

TLDR: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

At a laboratory in Manhattan, researchers have discovered how SARS-CoV-2 uses our defenses against us.

By James Somers

November 2, 2020

Some four billion years ago, in the shallow waters where life began, our earliest ancestors led lives of constant emergency. In a barren world, each single-celled amoeba was an inconceivably rich concentration of resources, and to live was to be beset by parasites. One of these, the giant Mimivirus, masqueraded as food; within four hours of being eaten, it could turn an amoeba into a virus factory. And yet, as the nineteenth-century mathematician Augustus de Morgan said, “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.” The Mimivirus had its own parasites, which sometimes followed it as it entered an amoeba. Once inside, they crippled the Mimivirus factory. This trick was so useful that, eventually, amoebas integrated the parasites’ genes into their own genomes, creating one of the earliest weapons in the immune system.

We tend to associate “survival of the fittest” with lions hunting antelope. But disease—the predation of parasites upon hosts—is actually the most potent force in evolution. “Every single phase of life has been selected to try to avoid parasitism,” Stephen Hedrick, an immunologist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. “It’s driven evolution as hard as it could be driven. Because it’s life or death all the time. And it’s a co-evolution.” Whenever a host develops an immune defense, it perversely rewards the survival of the very parasites that can defeat it. Hosts, meanwhile, tend to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. “Bacterial or viral populations are truly vast in size,” Robert Jack and Louis Du Pasquier write, in “Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology,” and the wide variation among them gives natural selection many candidate organisms upon which to work. Viruses and bacteria also reproduce half a million times faster than we do. Given this “generation gap,” Jack and Du Pasquier write, “one might well ask how on earth we could possibly have survived.”

A clue comes from the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. It spends much of its life marauding alone, eating things. But, when food is scarce, it releases molecules that serve as a flocking signal to others of its kind; the amoebas merge, forming a superorganism of as many as a hundred thousand members. For this multicellular “slime mold” to be effective, almost all the amoebas must give up their ability to eat, lest they prey on one another. The few that retain it don’t eat for themselves; rather, they swallow up debris and dispose of it to protect the organism. The other amoebas, freed from the burdens of offense and defense, form a “fruiting body” that releases spores for reproduction. Although none of the individuals would survive on their own, the collective thrives.

A human being is likewise a society of cells, with a coördinated defense. Our circulatory system doubles as a communications network; our blood vessels have an “endothelial” lining—a surface that is charged with the intelligent routing of immune cells. When ordinary cells are infected by a pathogen, they send signals to their neighbors, who pass them on until they reach the endothelial cells. In response, the blood vessels swell, creating off-ramps through which white blood cells, which are part of the immune system’s circulating defense force, can flow toward the site of infection. This is merely the beginning of our immune response.

Our bodies, like the United States government, make a startlingly large investment in defense. Our bone marrow produces billions of immune cells each day, and then discards most of them. Almost every one of our cells is perpetually scanning itself for evidence of invasion. The system is complex—ask a microbiologist about immunology and she’ll whistle, wishing you luck. Those who describe it often resort to metaphor. Contemplating the enormous amounts of information that it collects and synthesizes throughout the body, Jack and Du Pasquier suggest that “the immune system can be regarded, above all else, as a computational device.”

This device is so finely tuned that we seldom notice it at work. Our guts burble with foreign microbes outnumbering human cells roughly ten to one, but the good are seamlessly sorted from the bad; every day, some of our cells grow into cancers, but the immune system dispatches them before they become dangerous. On a recent camping trip, I was bitten three times by some kind of insect while putting my arm into a jacket sleeve. Who knows what entered my bloodstream. Almost immediately, three welts formed; a few minutes later, the welts came down. In moments like that, it is easy to assume that we hold the advantage over the parasites.

On Friday, March 6th, a purified sample of the novel coronavirus arrived at the laboratory of a virologist named Benjamin tenOever, at the Icahn School of Medicine, in East Harlem. Many virology labs focus on a single pathogen, but tenOever’s studies dozens of viruses and how they change the cells they infect. During the winter, tenOever and his team were focussed on the flu. But, as the coronavirus pandemic began to escalate in the U.S., they initiated a side project, infecting lung cells in a dish with sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, and studying the results. TenOever posted their preliminary analysis to Twitter on March 14th. Within a week, a program manager at the Defense Department e-mailed to ask about the research. Two weeks later, Defense gave tenOever a $6.3-million grant to find out what the new virus was doing to our immune systems.

Born to Dutch parents, tenOever grew up in rural Ontario. Now forty-three, he approaches his work with an amused, easy confidence. On March 26th, he gathered his team and they discussed their plan. They would take half a dozen viruses—including sars, mers, and the new coronavirus—and induce infections in hosts, starting with cells in a petri dish and graduating to ferrets. They’d study the results to understand what made the new coronavirus unique. Their goal was to have results in three weeks.

The infections took place inside the lab’s Biosafety Level-3 facility, a series of nested rooms in which each is kept at a lower pressure than the one surrounding it, so that air flows inward and up an exhaust chute containing sensitive filters. In the “warm zone,” where there is always the danger of being exposed to a live virus, you must wear a gown, two sets of gloves, two sets of shoe covers, a respirator mask, a face shield, and a bouffant cap. You work with your arms under a hood, protected by an extra set of disposable sleeves. When you’re finished with your experiment, you disinfect this gear and throw it into an autoclave—a kind of kiln—where it cooks for twenty minutes. To return to the “cold zone,” you remove your shoe covers before stepping over a red line. In New York, at the end of March, these precautions had a whiff of the absurd: in a city where around three thousand new coronavirus cases were being diagnosed each day, you were more likely to be exposed to a highly pathogenic virus in your neighborhood.

A Ph.D. student named Daisy Hoagland, who had herself just recovered from a mild case of covid-19, prepared the samples for analysis. Using a shaker machine and test tubes loaded with sand and ceramic pellets, she turned a suspension of ferret lung cells—some from infected animals, and others from members of the control group—into a homogeneous juice, then separated the solution in a centrifuge that generated fifteen thousand g’s. It is painstaking work. (“I listen to a lot of podcasts,” Hoagland said.) Using a pipette, she carefully transferred the topmost layer, a pink liquid, into another tube, which she centrifuged again, until she had a purified sample of RNA. This she handed off to her colleagues Rasmus Møller and Maryline Panis for sequencing. The process takes sixteen hours to complete, and Møller, who during the height of the pandemic lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, often biked home at dawn over the Pulaski Bridge.

Whereas the sequencing of DNA defined molecular biology in the early two-thousands, the sequencing of RNA defines it today. If you imagine a cell as a kind of computer, then your DNA contains all the software that it could possibly run. It is a somewhat astonishing fact of life that the exact same DNA is shared by every cell in your body, from the skin to the brain; those cells differ in appearance and function because, in each of them, a molecular gizmo “transcribes” some DNA segments rather than others into molecules of single-stranded RNA. These bits of RNA are in turn used as the blueprints for proteins, the molecular machines that do most of a cell’s work. If DNA is your phone’s home screen, then transcription is like tapping an icon. By sampling the RNA present in a group of cells, researchers can see which programs those cells are running at that moment; by sampling it after the cells have been infected with a virus, they can see how that virus substitutes its own software.

TenOever’s team quickly discovered that sars-CoV-2 was uncannily good at disrupting cellular programming. A typical virus replaces less than one per cent of the software in the cells it infects. With sars-CoV-2, tenOever said, about sixty per cent of the RNA in an infected cell is of viral origin—“which is the highest I’ve ever seen. Polio comes close.” Among other things, the virus rewires the alarm system that cells use to warn others about infection. Normally, as part of what is known as the “innate” immune response—so called because it is genetically hardwired, and not tailored to a specific pathogen—a cell sends out two kinds of signals. One signal, carried by molecules called interferons, travels to neighboring cells, telling them to build defenses that slow viral spread. Another signal, transmitted through molecules called cytokines, gets a message to the circulatory system’s epithelial lining. The white blood cells summoned by this second signal don’t just eat invaders and infected cells; they also gather up their dismembered protein parts. Elsewhere in the immune system, these fragments are used to create virus-specific antibodies, as part of a sophisticated “adaptive” response that can take six or seven days to develop.

Usually, the viruses that humans care about are successful because they shut down both of these signalling programs. The coronavirus is different. “It seems to block only one of those two arms,” tenOever told me. It inhibits the interferon response but does nothing about the cytokines; it evades the local defenses but allows the cells it infects to call for reinforcements. White blood cells are powerful weapons: they arrive on an inflammatory tide, destroying cells on every side, clogging up passages with the wreckage. They are meant to be used selectively, on invaders that have been contained in a small area. With the coronavirus, they are deployed too widely—a carpet bombing, rather than a surgical strike. As they do their work, inflammation distends the lungs, and debris fills them like a fog.

In late May, tenOever’s team shared its findings in the biweekly journal Cell. In their article, they argued that it’s this imbalanced immune response that gives severe covid-19—which can sometimes cause blood clots, strange swelling in children, and ultra-inflammatory “cytokine storms”—the character of an autoimmune disorder. As the virus spreads unchecked through the body, it drags a destructive immune reaction behind it. Individuals with covid-19 face the same challenge as nations during the pandemic: if they can’t contain small sites of infection early—so that a targeted response can root them out—they end up mounting interventions so large that the shock inflicts its own damage.

The gears of the immune response that come apart in covid-19 were discovered slowly, in a blundering way, as though science itself were recapitulating evolution. In a sense, there are several immune systems. In health, they coördinate with and balance each other. But a machine with so many moving parts is, inevitably, vulnerable.

Immunology as we know it began in earnest in 1882, at the Italian seaside. Ilya Metchnikoff, a Russian zoologist who would later help popularize yogurt in Western Europe, had developed an obsession with digestion, and with the process by which one cell eats another. In his memoir, Metchnikoff described the insight that would define his career. His family had gone to the circus, but he’d stayed home, “observing the life in the mobile cells of a transparent starfish larva” through his microscope. Suddenly, a thought occurred to him:

It struck me that similar cells might serve in the defense of the organism against intruders. Feeling that there was in this something of surpassing interest, I felt so excited that I began striding up and down the room and even went to the seashore in order to collect my thoughts. I said to myself that, if my supposition was true, a splinter introduced into the body of a starfish larva . . . should soon be surrounded by mobile cells.

Metchnikoff immediately performed the experiment, using a thorn from a rosebush in his garden. Sure enough, he saw cells surrounding the foreign body.

At the time, leading biologists, including Louis Pasteur, didn’t think of hosts as actively defending themselves against pathogens. If it was often impossible to get diseases twice, then that was because we became inured to them, like alcoholics to liquor, or because some unknown quantity of illness within us was “used up” as each disease ran its course. Immunology had advanced only haltingly since 1730, when the clergyman Thomas Fuller speculated that each person was born with “Ovula, of various distinct Kinds, productive of all the contagious, venomous Fevers we can possibly have.” According to this theory, an infection was actually an impregnation; each “egg” could be fertilized only once.

Using dyes to distinguish cells under a microscope, Metchnikoff helped show that the body actively defended itself. In fact, specialized cells responded to intruders in a process he described as “phagocytosis,” or cell-eating. One kind of cell-eater, called a “neutrophil”—because it can be stained only by pH-neutral dyes—swarmed to the site of the infection first. Larger cells called “macrophages” followed, absorbing both the invaders and the neutrophils into their “amoeboid protoplasm.” Neutrophils and macrophages, Metchnikoff found, lived in tissues throughout the body—a standing army.

Metchnikoff’s findings were promising: he had uncovered what would become known as “cellular” immunity. At the same time, other researchers seemed to be making progress in an entirely different direction. Emil von Behring and Shibasaburō Kitasato, two biologists working in Berlin, injected guinea pigs, goats, and horses with diphtheria and tetanus toxins. They found that, from the victims’ blood, they could derive “antitoxins” capable of conferring protective immunity on other animals. (Von Behring won the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work, in 1901.) It wasn’t clear what these antitoxins, later called “antibodies,” were made of. Still, von Behring and Kitasato had discovered what came to be known as “humoral” immunity, and it had nothing to do with cells eating other cells.

There came to be two camps: the cellularists, aligned with Metchnikoff, and the humoralists, aligned with von Behring. The feud over the origins of immunity was political and cultural as well as scientific. Metchnikoff was working at the Pasteur Institute, in Paris, and his followers, who believed that cell-eating was the basis of immunity, were mostly French. Von Behring’s supporters, who focussed on antibodies, were German. The humoralists won the mainstream in 1897, when a biochemist named Paul Ehrlich published a theory explaining how antibodies might work. In his paper, Ehrlich drew a toxin as an amoeboid blob with small nubs jutting out of it, each differently shaped; the antibodies were like little tadpoles whose mouths sometimes fit exactly onto the nubs. It was these variations in shape, Ehrlich argued, that allowed the antibody system to adapt to new pathogens and cripple them. For the first time, the elusive concept of immunity to specific diseases, so important and yet so poorly understood, felt tangible. “Helped in no small measure by the pictures which Ehrlich published,” Arthur M. Silverstein writes, in “A History of Immunology,” antibodies became “the principal object of interest to almost all immunologists.” Although Ehrlich and Metchnikoff shared a Nobel Prize for their contributions to our understanding of immunity, Ehrlich’s account eclipsed interest in Metchnikoff’s cell-eaters for nearly fifty years.

As biologists grew expert in the distillation of “curative serums,” the great quest in immunology became figuring out how antibodies were made, and how there could be so many kinds. It seemed that a person’s antibody repertoire was limitless: biologists found that the immune system could quickly create antibodies to fit synthetic chemicals never before seen in nature.

For the first half of the twentieth century, the going theory was that the invading element—the “antigen”—served as a template around which a corresponding antibody was molded. Only in 1955 did scientists discover the much stranger truth. It turned out that the cells that produce antibodies—called B cells, because they were first discovered in the bursa of Fabricius, an organ that does for birds what bone marrow does for humans—can produce only one kind each. Its structure is random, and nearly every B cell is discarded unused. If, however, an antibody created by a B cell happens to match some part of an antigen, that B cell will not just survive but clone itself. The clone incorporates many mutations, which offer the possibility of an even better match. After a few generations, an antibody with the best fit is “constructed” through a process of mini-evolution that occurs continuously in our lymph nodes and spleen. (Our ancestors the bony fish adapted the machinery of the B-cell system from an even more ancient parasite.)

The vividness of this picture—a weapons factory deep in our bodies, working on the principles of Darwinian selection—further etched the formula “immunity equals antibodies” into the biological imagination. And yet problems remained that only the cellularists could solve. During the Second World War, severe burns treated with donor skin grafts became more common. But the donor skin was often rejected by the body. When scientists examined the site of a rejected graft, they didn’t find antibodies. Instead, they saw swarms of a previously unknown kind of immune cell. Later, the attacking cells were shown to come from the thymus, a small, spongy organ, then thought to be vestigial, that straddled the esophagus. They were named T cells as a result, and became an object of fascination. T cells were incredibly destructive but somehow selective. They knew the difference between self and other.

The balance between protection and self-destruction had always been a theme in immunology. Since Ehrlich’s time, allergies had been seen as a misdirected immune response; in the nineteen-forties, scientists learned that certain precious parts of the body—the eyes, the reproductive organs, the brain—are actually walled off from much of the immune system. (Ehrlich himself discovered the “blood-brain barrier,” a mesh too fine for phagocytes and even tiny antibodies to penetrate.) Now the question of how the body distinguished between foreign and domestic tissue focussed itself on skin grafts and T cells.

Earlier, in mice, researchers had identified genes that affected the success of organ transplants: they called this collection of genes the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, from the Greek histos, for “tissue.” In the sixties, a human version of the MHC was found. The genes turned out to be a blueprint for a remarkable system designed to distinguish self from non-self. Fragments of proteins built inside our cells are loaded onto tiny molecular rafts, which ferry them to the cell surface for inspection by T cells. Meanwhile, in the thymus, T cells are trained as inspectors: they are presented with rafts containing protein fragments, some of which are natural to the body. Any T cell that ignores its raft, or that goes on the attack in response to self-generated fragments, is destroyed. Competent inspectors are set loose to search for foreign material. They look for cells that display unfamiliar protein parts in their rafts and kill them.

This is how skin grafts are detected and rejected; how incipient cancers are disposed of; how cells that have been co-opted by viruses are rooted out. Together, B cells and T cells allow the human immune system to update itself as fast as our cells can replicate. But their power comes with risks. The immune system’s adaptive weapons aren’t always precise. Allergies affect somewhere between ten and forty per cent of the global population; as many as four per cent of people suffer from debilitating autoimmune diseases. And parasites could find ways to hack the system. “The invention of acquired immunity was like escalating a war with an omnipotent opponent,” Hedrick, who is a T-cell expert, writes. Our new weapons could be turned against us.

By the late eighties, it no longer made sense to contrast cellularists and humoralists. They had both been right; it was just that they saw different parts of the immune system depending on where and when they looked. Phagocytes were often present at the moment of infection. Antibodies in the blood, which could take days to emerge, pursued invaders outside the body’s cells, while T cells used MHC to peer inside those cells, destroying the ones that had been infected by viruses or corrupted by cancer.

Still, mysteries remained. At a 1989 symposium, the immunologist Charles Janeway described what he called the field’s “dirty little secret”: a vaccine containing an antigen designed to elicit antibodies wouldn’t work unless an extra irritant, or “adjuvant”—usually a harmless chemical or bacterium—had been added. Why wasn’t the antigen enough to jump-start the creation of antibodies? “To be quite honest, the answer is not known,” Janeway said. His suspicion, though, was that the process couldn’t begin unless the innate immune system—with its interferons, cytokines, and epithelial cells—had sounded its alarms first. Without marching orders, the standing army remained on call.

An innate system has to anticipate its enemies—a seemingly impossible task, given their stupendous variety. It wasn’t until around 1997 that Janeway began to understand how such anticipation might be accomplished. About a decade earlier, a pair of biologists named Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus had found a gene that affected development in fruit flies. Nüsslein-Volhard had called it Toll, using the German word for “great.” (“Das ist ja toll! ” she exclaimed, upon making the discovery.) Another scientist, Jules A. Hoffmann, learned that the same gene was involved in the fruit-fly immune response; Janeway, with the help of Ruslan Medzhitov, showed that a version of it was also present in humans, and employed in some of the white blood cells that are the innate immune system’s first responders. Through experiments with human cells, they showed that the gene coded for what came to be called a “Toll-like receptor,” which could recognize a particular molecular motif—a building block of bacterial membranes. It was as if evolution had noticed that, while many cells built their houses out of oak or brick, dangerous bacteria always seemed to use pinewood. Why not make a pine detector?

Immunologists soon discovered a second Toll-like receptor, then a third; they started giving them names like TLR4 and TLR5. Whole new families of “pattern-recognition receptors” were found. Each receptor, ingenious in its design, recognized some characteristic microbial or viral signature—a kink in a virus’s RNA, a crenellation in a microbial cell wall.

At long last, a picture of the whole system was coming into focus. It was all interconnected. Innate immunity kicks off the immune response, as cells at the site of infection use their receptors to recognize and combat invaders, and release interferons and cytokines to raise the alarm. Various types of white blood cells respond, having been routed to the infection via the bloodstream. They identify and eat foreign cells, returning the digested bits, via the lymph nodes, to the thymus and the bone marrow, as intel. In the days that follow, antibodies and killer T cells—the weapons of adaptive immunity—are built to spec. Everything plays a double or triple role. Antibodies, for instance, don’t just attach to invaders to block their entry into cells; they also tag them so that they’ll be easier for white blood cells to find and eat. The innate and adaptive arms ramp up each other’s destructive abilities.

Here, again, Hedrick sounds a cautious note. “Such a scheme should worry any systems analyst,” he writes. “A potentially lethal mechanism controlled by positive feedback is a recipe for runaway destruction.”

In late March, a thirty-two-year-old man of Dutch ancestry was admitted to a hospital in the Netherlands. He had difficulty breathing, and a CT scan showed an opaque haze spreading in his lungs. He was given a diagnosis of covid-19, and spent sixteen days in intensive care; four days after he was moved out of the I.C.U., one of his lungs collapsed. He recovered enough to be sent home nine days later. His twenty-nine-year-old brother, who lived in a different house, got sick at roughly the same time, and died. Their parents had moderate symptoms.

When scientists learned that a second pair of young brothers—twenty-one and twenty-three years old, of African ancestry—had also had severe cases of covid-19, they sought to study all four men. By sequencing the genomes of the men and their parents, the researchers hoped to find an anomaly that might explain why some young people, particularly men, had such bad outcomes.

The Dutch team found something that echoed tenOever’s theory about the way in which sars-CoV-2 rewires the cellular alarm system. The four men all had an ineffective variant of TLR7, a Toll-like receptor that recognizes viral RNA. When it works, TLR7 helps produce interferons, which tell nearby cells to increase their antiviral efforts. When it doesn’t, the alarm is silent, and the infection spreads. This genetic abnormality had made the virus’s work dramatically easier. The raiders had come to an unlocked house.

This spring, a clinical trial in the U.K. gave interferon-beta, a synthetic version of the molecule, to a random selection of a hundred and one patients hospitalized with covid-19. The trial found that those who received interferon early in their infection were seventy-nine per cent less likely to become seriously ill. Researchers agree that timing is crucial. In the early days of a coronavirus infection, an interferon boost might help your innate immune system contain the virus. Later, though, it might be harmful; at that point, your adaptive immune system could already be out of control, and you might need an immunosuppressant, such as the steroid dexamethasone. (Last month, President Trump received dexamethasone as part of his treatment for covid-19; he was also given a drug that contained lab-engineered antibodies capable of fighting the virus alongside, or ahead of, his body’s own adaptive response.)

The genes for TLR7 are on the sex-linked X chromosome. That could be a partial explanation for why men suffer from severe covid-19 more often than women. But a TLR7 deficiency is likely to be rare—far rarer than the incidence of severe covid-19 among young people. There are almost certainly other genetic or environmental factors that weaken the interferon response. In mid-September, research published in Science showed that some covid-19 patients with bad outcomes had “autoantibodies” that were attacking their own interferon; another article published in the same issue outlined a genetic flaw related to TLR3, which is also involved in the interferon response. (As many as fourteen per cent of severe covid-19 cases may be attributable to one of these two conditions.) The more researchers study our immune response to the virus, the more complexity they find. According to some theories, how things go for you could depend on how many viral particles you’ve inhaled, and on whether they reach your lungs when you breathe them in. If you’ve had a cold recently, it’s possible that the T cells you developed to fight it could partially fit the coronavirus. Vitamin D levels might matter, because Vitamin D can help control inflammation. Harmful autoantibodies could be responsible for the persistent symptoms suffered by covid-19 “long-haulers.” All of this is still being explored.

The immune system uses feedback to stay balanced, like a gymnast on a beam. If a light breeze blows, the gymnast might sway a bit; sensing this, she’ll shift her weight to return to center. But, given a strong enough push, she’s prone to overshoot with her reaction and, from the other side, overshoot again until she falls. Many factors contribute to the slip—a tight hip flexor, a strained calf, moisture in the air—each magnifying the force of the shove.

Older gymnasts tend to be less agile. The same goes for the immune system, which is why covid-19 disproportionately affects the elderly. The already high case fatality rate for sixty-five- to seventy-four-year-olds more than triples in people seventy-five and older. This age distribution is unique to the coronavirus. Kids are more susceptible to the seasonal flu; children and young adults who had the swine flu in 2009 were hospitalized the most, while the pandemic flu of 1918 hit adults in their twenties and thirties the hardest. (Perhaps their immune systems overreacted, or older people had acquired immunity to similar strains.) “The difference of risk and profile, young versus old—I don’t think anyone has seen an infectious agent behave quite like this before,” Richard Hodes, the director of the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, said, of the coronavirus.

The lopsidedness of the virus means that vaccines might not be as effective in older patients, even with double the dose, or after repeated inoculations. The beauty of a vaccine is that it relieves us of the task of completely understanding the virus; its package of antigens simply presses the On button of the great machine. Helping older people may require a more fine-tuned approach, tailored to the particular way this virus destabilizes the immune system. What we have learned so far suggests that it isn’t just that being older makes you weak, and that covid-19 preys on this weakness; the disease’s mechanism of action is actually amplified in the aging body.

For this reason, about a month after beginning their coronavirus investigations, the researchers in tenOever’s lab switched from ferrets to hamsters. Ferret immune systems are highly responsive, and the animals were getting better too quickly. “They look a lot more like kids,” tenOever said. By contrast, some hamsters, when infected with the virus, “actually develop respiratory distress. We see a lot more infiltration in their lungs.” In older hamsters, as in older people, innate immunity is less likely to contain the virus and adaptive immunity is slower to turn on and off. The hamster ends up wildly dysregulated. “The difference between these two outcomes really comes down to, as you get older—” TenOever paused. “Getting older sucks. Everything breaks down, even at the simplest of levels.”

As we age, our immune systems stiffen up. “If I had to respond to an insult—bacteria, a virus, a trauma, a lesion—the response is slower and is less strong,” Luigi Ferrucci, who studies the aging process and the immune system at the National Institute on Aging, told me. But, at the same time, the system becomes chronically activated. Cytokines circulate at a constant, high level in the blood, as though the body were at all times responding to some attack. This is true no matter one’s health. “Even in individuals that are extremely healthy, extremely well nourished, have no disease, and they’re taking no drugs, there are some inflammatory markers whose concentration increases with aging,” Ferrucci said. Think of the welt that rises with a bite, then imagine the same process—swelling, redness, stiffness, the accumulation of pus—slowly pervading the body. Your level of inflammation contributes to your “biological” age—which is not always in perfect lockstep with your chronological age—and increases your risk of developing cardiovascular disease, cancer, and dementia; it contributes to what geriatricians call “frailty.”

A phenomenon known as cellular senescence is partly responsible for the body’s increasing inflammation through time. As cells age and divide, small errors accrete in their DNA. These errors could lead to cancer, among other maladies. And so cells police themselves. When they detect decay in their DNA, they stop replicating and begin emitting cytokines, as though asking the immune system to inspect and destroy them. The accumulation of senescent cells may contribute to severe covid-19: according to the current theory, Ferrucci said, they could “expand tremendously the cytokine storm,” in which a runaway feedback loop leads to a sudden spike in inflammation throughout the body.

Adaptive immunity suffers with age, too, but for different reasons. The thymus itself atrophies. (On a restaurant menu, thymuses are called sweetbreads. “Sweetbreads come from young calves,” Hedrick told me. “If you were to try to harvest the thymus from an old bull, you’d get . . . nothing.”) When you’re young, with a short history of exposure to pathogens, your thymus produces new T cells at an extravagant rate. But as you age production slows, and the cells differentiate. Some live indefinitely as “memory T cells,” carrying with them a record of their defeated foes.

Certain viruses use up more T-cell memory than others. Around twenty per cent of an older adult’s T-cell repertoire is devoted to fighting a single virus: human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a strain of herpes that usually has no symptoms. It would be ironic if, in some small way, HCMV makes it harder to survive covid-19. Unlike sars-CoV-2, which spreads without hiding and so causes extensive damage, HCMV is a master of disguise. When infecting a cell, the virus turns off that cell’s MHC system. No cellular raft delivers evidence of the infection to the surface. Still, this isn’t enough to avoid detection. Our immune system has invented a weapon, the “natural killer” cell, that looks specifically for cells without functioning MHC systems. And so HCMV evolved to create a decoy MHC raft, designed to fool the natural killers.

As a parasite, HCMV is almost perfectly adapted to its host; able to spread without attracting attention, it does nothing but consume resources. The thymus is one place where such cleverness leaves its trace. The practice of science is another. Many of the workhorse tools employed by molecular biologists—including the enzymes used by tenOever’s team to sequence RNA, and the crispr gene-editing system, perhaps the most important scientific discovery of our time—were once either weapons or defenses in the microbial arms race. It’s there, at the crucible of life and death, that biological innovation happens fastest, leaving us with technology for mounting a new kind of defense.

The last time I spoke to tenOever, in late July, his team had begun a search for treatments. In the BSL-3 lab, Møller was infecting hamsters; the plan was to give the animals candidate drugs, sequencing their RNA through the entire process of infection and treatment. By examining patterns in the data, the team could find out which drugs were better at undoing the coronavirus’s reprogramming. TenOever made use of a handy way of visualizing what was happening in the cells. He could turn the genetic analysis into an inkblot-like map, showing which parts of its genome each cell was activating. “You can build a landscape, if you will,” tenOever said. If the coronavirus shifted the landscape to the northeast, they would look for drugs that pulled it southwest. They were testing four good candidates a week like this.

It was an impressionistic way to look at an immune system. But the system was not designed to be legible; it was, of course, not designed at all. For years, Robert Jack, one of the authors of “Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology,” taught a class on immunology to students just beginning their Ph.D.s. Bright and enthusiastic, the students struggled to untangle the immune system’s feedback loops. Jack told me, “We tend to look at these systems and say, ‘Wow, who would have thought of that? That’s incredible. That’s so fantastic. It does this incredibly complicated job, and it does it really well!’ ” He took a breath, then continued. “Whereas, in reality, the immune system has simply, in the face of pathogen attack, staggered from one emergency to the next. It just uses whatever is lying around. It is hoping against all possibilities to try to survive a little bit longer. Whatever crazy solution it comes up with—so long as it works, it will be accepted.” The result is a system of great flexibility and power, which, pushed the right way, can be made to collapse upon itself. ♦

#covid19 #newyorker #tldr #health

[dearophelia]

this one’s for the torn down, the experts at the fall

come on friends, get up now, you’re not alone at all; or, one night in the intersection of Archangel and Victoria Ryder

PG, Garrus+Tori friendship, subtle Garrus/Olivia; warnings for not-remotely-researched medical stuff, and references to a past abusive relationship

"You still don't have a medic?" Victoria says as Monteague leads her into the supply closet Archangel and his crew have generously called their medbay.

Garrus looks over at her from the gurney, gingerly holding his arm very still against his chest. He's still in the bottom half of his armor, but the top half sits haphazardly - the left shoulder absolutely shattered - on the floor against the wall. "No."

She sighs and gives Monteague a subtle shove as she brushes past. Payback for interrupting the end of her date. "That's really dumb considering your line of work," she says, running her omnitool's medical scanner over his shoulder.

"I've noticed," he says, pain laced through his tight subharmonics.

Victoria closes the scanner and starts to wash her hands. "The bullet's still in there, and it's in pieces, but it missed anything important. It's gonna hurt, but you'll live. Might even have a nifty scar. Monteague, help him with his shirt and then get out."

Monteague crosses his arms. "Why?"

"Because I can't see what I'm doing if there's bloody fabric in the way." She dries her hands. It was a very good date.

Though he starts to help Garrus remove his shirt, and shortly changes his plan to one involving a pair of scissors, Monteague still eyes her. "Why am I leaving?"

"Because you're the approximate build of a brick wall, this room is half the size of an elevator shaft, and you broke into my apartment."

At that, Garrus stiffens and drags his gaze over to Monteague. "You two broke in?" he says with a tone of disappointment Victoria thinks could rival the one her father used.

"And interrupted a pretty good date," she adds. That's the more important bit.

"Loitering in the hallway would've looked suspicious," Monteague defends, tugging off the last piece of fabric and tossing it into the biohazard matter recycler.

Victoria sighs, exasperated, as she looks through the supply cabinet she set up for them after the fourth time Garrus called her over. "You guys have my contact code," she says, pulling out the tools and meds she'll need.

Garrus closes his eyes, takes a breath, and opens them again. "Fix whatever you broke, give her security system an upgrade, and the next time I tell you to get Ryder, call her and ask."

For a moment, Monteague looks like he's going to argue further - it was Sensat's idea, Sensat's back there fixing it already, Ryder wasn't answering, all arguments true but falling flat against breaking in - and he wisely chooses not to. "Got it, boss. You need me for anything else?" he directs the question at Victoria.

"Check on Penny, please. Tell her I'm going to be a while."

He nods, and then leaves.

"I'm sorry about that," Garrus says as soon as the door shuts completely.

Victoria shrugs and settles her omnispecs on her face, cycling through programs until she lands on the bioscanner with a magnifier. With a tap, it syncs to the gesture control on her omnitool, and she waves the HUD away. "I added a couple black market protocols the other week, Sensat probably enjoyed the challenge." She washes her hands again before snapping on a pair of gloves.

Garrus laughs quietly, grimacing a little around the edges of it. "Thanks for coming."

"Well, you're making my walk to the clinic safer, so. Hold still." Victoria slides a needle in under his shoulder plate to numb the area. It's a weird intersection she resides in these days - Mordin, Aria, Archangel. Galatana and its shiny clean floors, its steady bright lights, its total lack of gunfire and knife fights, all seems a lifetime ago. So does that house in Indiana, and the bouquet of daisies long rotted into the dirt. Her thirteen year-old self, sleepless from studying for entrance exams, daydreaming of Presidium hospitals and pristine white lab coats, wouldn't even recognize her. Sometimes that bothers her. Tonight it doesn't. She tosses the needle into the biohazard unit and then rests against the sink, giving the anesthetic a few moments to kick in. "Should I ask whose gun you got on the wrong end of?" 

"Minor red sand dealer," Garrus says. "He's dead now, and I know who his dealer is."

"One step at a time, right?" she says, and pokes his shoulder.

He makes an irritated noise and glares at her finger.

"Did you feel that?"

He blinks. "No."

"Good. Try not to move too much." Another wave, and the HUD returns. It takes a moment to register Garrus as turian, and then all the stats in the bottom corner roll out of red and into green, and the holographic display settles over him, highlighting veins and muscle and bone, and bullet fragments. She zooms in and starts to work.

They sit in silence for a while as Victoria digs tiny pieces of a nasty hollowpoint bullet from his shoulder. She'll have to tell Mordin and Aria there's a new arms dealer in town. Each piece lands in the metal bowl with a clink.

"So, what's their name?" she asks.

"Hm?" Garrus makes a confused sound.

"The ghost you're avoiding by setting up this little medic-less operation."

His head swivels around to stare at her. "You a therapist and a surgeon?"

"No," she says idly, "just able to recognize my own brand of damage." She recognized it that night in Afterlife, even through the pounding music and flashing lights. For his sake, she's glad he seems to have put aside the rampant alcoholism he was teetering toward that night. For her sake, she's glad he remembered she was a doctor and chose her to call at 3:45 in the morning when Vorash caught a knife to the gut five months ago. Garrus pays well.

Garrus narrows his eyes. "I thought your brand of damage was the bad day," he gestures with his uninjured arm at her eye, thankfully long healed.

"I have multiple brands of damage," she says with a wry smile and gently nudges him to turn back around so she can work. "So what's their name?" she repeats.

He sighs and his rigid posture slouches a little, but not in relaxation. Defeat, maybe. "Shepard." It sounds rusty in his mouth, rough, sticking to his throat with disuse.

Victoria isn't a therapist, but she sure as hell knows pain when she hears it. And Garrus may have a hollowpoint bullet shattered in his shoulder, but she could be cleaning it out with no anesthetic and it wouldn't hurt nearly a fraction as much as Shepard does. She softens her voice. "And Shepard was...?"

"My CO. For a little while. She was," he pauses, "she was good. Really good."

A million different words he could've used, and Victoria's been around enough turians to hear what lies in the spaces in between. CO, mentor, friend. Something else, something different, something more. She doesn't call him on it, or push him to continue; they're edging a little closer toward friendship with each call, close enough she finally felt comfortable enough to ask, but they’re still dancing in that murky area between acquaintance and friend. "I'm sorry," she says.

A sad, broken noise comes from the back of his throat, and he catches it, tamps down on the broken bits, almost as soon as it happens. "She saved everyone's ass, and then they hung her out to dry. They - " he stops suddenly. His hand brushes against the armor storage compartment at his thigh. He pops it open, checks that something is still inside, and closes it again. "She died. And didn't have to. The Alliance wrote it off as another geth attack." 

The way he says geth tells Victoria exactly how highly he thinks of that particular cover story.

Her first year on Omega is a little slippery, events out of order or misremembered or not at all, but Victoria remembers the blow that cracked her skull, remembers Bray calling panicked on her omnitool, remembers hearing something from a newsstand about an Alliance ship's distress call one system over as she slid into one of Aria's skycars. Remembers a text from Mordin to be at the ready if the Alliance didn't come through the relay in the next three hours, remembers swiping it away before scrubbing in to save a krogan who'd half bled out on the floor already. 

"I'm sorry," she says again.

He nods, and she feels him pull himself back from the edge. No way in hell was Shepard just a CO.

"What's the name of your ghost?"

She drops one last fragment into the bowl. "Mom."

Silence for half a moment. "I'm sorry."

Victoria shrugs. "Omega's a great place to run away to," she muses, dodging any follow-up questions. "Tell me about her," she says after a moment.

"Who?"

"Shepard." At his stiffened shoulders, she continues. "I spent most of 2183 either in a cloud of depression so thick I couldn't see three feet in front of me, or getting the shit kicked out of me by some asshole I accidentally let into my life. I missed the attack on the Citadel and everything. Catch me up."

He shifts slightly, just enough to look over his shoulder without jostling her work. "Is this a tactic to help me ignore that your anesthetic is terrible and already wearing off?"

"Yep." She opens a suture kit.

He huffs, the smallest hint at laughter, but he starts talking. As she stitches him up, Garrus tells her about the Normandy. About Saren. About the short redhead woman who seemed to bend the universe by sheer force of will. About learning to drive a human-designed vehicle while she tried to set her own broken foot in the back, about making an idle comment about her height and getting absolutely smoked in headshots. "She was our field medic," he says, somewhere in between trying to remember the back half of a joke and telling her about the altercation with Saleon.

Victoria's long finished - he's bandaged up and she's cleaned up, even started the autoclave - and she crosses her arms. "Were you this bad at getting out of the way of bullets back then, too?" she smirks.

Sliding off the gurney, he tightens his mandibles, making a friendly irritated face at her.

Her smirk shifts into a smile, and she points at the bandage. "Leave that alone for 24 hours." She hands him a bottle of antibiotics. "One of these a day until you're done." A bottle of painkillers. "One every six hours for two days, then once a day as needed. I'll be back tomorrow to change the bandage, unless you have a medic by then,” the smile changes back into a smirk.

Garrus rolls his eyes, but takes both bottles from her. "Thank you."

Victoria nods. "You're welcome.” She pauses, and then decides maybe they’re closer to friendship than she’d been giving them credit for. “You're paying me pretty well, so I'm gonna throw this one in for free. It sounds like you and Shepard were really good friends. And I don't think she'd be too happy to see you in your shared afterlife of choice so soon. So even though I’m one bullet away from being able to get six months of super extended cable, try to duck a little more often, okay?"

Garrus laughs, a genuine honest laugh, and nods. "I'll try."

#torific #victoria ryder: don't threaten me with a good time #verse:object permanence #s:words #s:me #s:2018 #apparently this friendship is happening #the ways in which tori and liv intersect but never actually meet gives me a lot of feelings #needles cw #there's like...four? six? other fics referenced here I AM SO SORRY TO ANYONE NEW TO THIS UNIVERSE #(or really anyone who isn't me and thus doesn't have an encyclopedic knowledge of it whoops)

[optionpair5]

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I understand the choice of employees shall be on the premise of occupational qualification, schooling and character without regard to age, sex, race or national origin. Eliminate the stress of getting to take care of a quantity of contractors for multiple companies. If you want to recapture your house or business’s outward appearance, give Evergreen Window Cleaning and Home Maintenance a name. Our extremely educated and equipped group of strain washers can be joyful to provide energy washing companies to you. 清潔公司 will our roof cleansing dramatically change the look of your home or constructing it can also save you tens of hundreds of dollars in potential roof repair wants down the road. Our roof cleansing providers are carried out with a way referred to as “soft washing”. Soft washing is gentle, safe and offers the absolute best results compared to other roof washing methods. Long Island stress washing of exterior paint wants a stronger strain stream than delicate washing jobs like cleaning a roof. Our totally licensed and insured company will handle it. Home Exteriors – our constructing wash is efficient for vinyl siding, stucco, brick, and stone. Our gentle washing professionals, toosl, and merchandise are OSHA compliant licensed, bonded, and insured. Reduce UV harm to furniture and increase the effectivity of your windows. Flat rate companies are primarily based on variety of objects serviced. Final pricing may be adjusted for incorrect portions. Debris removing keeps gutters and downspouts effective. 10 Spring Cleaning Suggestions For A Glistening Home Get the most effective household cleansing provides and products here. The 1000's of microscopic fabric hooks on a microfiber fabric make it perfect to cut via the dried grout haze left after a tiling project. You'll nonetheless should rinse and repeat, however the haze will clear up faster than it would with an odd rag. Keep the humidity in your own home between 40 and 50 p.c to help decrease static electrical energy, which can cause dust to stick to surfaces and make them tougher to clean. A humidifier and leafy indoor crops will each enhance humidity ranges. Take every little thing out of your fridge and freezer, throw away expired or freezer-burned meals and wipe down all of the shelves and drawers. Pull the fridge away from the wall to wipe down the top and sides and sweep behind the appliance. Using a moist, soft fabric and a bit of dish cleaning soap, or a product , swipe off scuff marks. Even though you can’t see the tops of ceiling fan blades, they gather dust shortly. Regularly cleaning ceiling fans can minimize down on dust in your house and stop a thick buildup of dust and grease on the blades. Outdoor ceiling fans can collect much more mud, so wiping them off often prevents a harder job cleaning a grimy ceiling fan before your subsequent barbecue. The steps outlined above for how to clean ceiling followers can sort out mud on the blades and the ceiling fan light. After every load of laundry, it’s a good suggestion to go away the washing machine door open to let it air out and stop mold from growing inside.

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[bodypiercingsworld]

body Piercing Materials - What Resources And Needles To Get Very first

It is no key that no subject what market you are in, you require the proper equipment for the occupation. The entire body piercing arena is no various. There is a broad selection of human body piercing provides you will need to make positive you are able to carry out all the fundamental piercing tactics you could be required to do. This post will aid you determine the bare physique piercing source necessities needed for the occupation. When taking into consideration what physique piercing materials you want to use, you must take into account first and foremost the top quality of the piercing instruments, needles, and supplies. Body Piercing  Commencing with the wholesale piercing needles, you want to look for a tri-bevel edge. This refers to the design of the needle, generating it a sharp stop to very easily go by way of the pores and skin. The most standard gauges for body piercing needles are 14 gauge and 16 gauge. These would be utilized for most tongue, navel, eyebrow, lip labret, and nipple piercings. The eighteen gauge piercing needle is also very common as there are many requests for nose rings that call for these kinds of size piercing needle. Even though body piercing needles come in all various gauges, these are the regular types that must cover you for ninety% of the piercing software you may possibly to begin with do. The staple of the body piercing supplies is the piercing tool. Human body piercing resources appear in a extensive range for a lot of various programs. You will need to commence with some basics this sort of as ring opening pliers and ring closing pliers. These are going to be employed for opening and closing captive bead rings, a common piercing employed in several diverse locations of the entire body. Other critical physique piercing materials are hemostat forceps. These are typically locking pliers utilized to keep jewellery constant and these kinds of when undertaking the piercing. These appear in straight and curved varieties both important human body piercing provides. Forester forceps and pennington forceps are also a must have. You will use these to keep the portion of the physique getting pierced constant although inserting the needle. These body piercing supplies appear in slotted and non slotted to enable a area for the resource to be removed when the needle has been inserted. Septum forceps are a peculiar searching piercing device with a modest tunnel on the stop to hold the septum constant and settle for the needle that is inserted on one aspect of the septum by way of to the other facet. There are many far more physique piercing tools you will sooner or later locate you need to have or favor. As you begin performing your piercings, you will have a choice and pick the appropriate piercing equipment for you. Sterilization is an really essential element of the entire body piercing supplies line. After all, you are fundamentally performing fairly of a surgical procedure. Using entire body piercing gloves is vital to steer clear of the distribute of disease and an infection. You will want an autoclave sterilization equipment. The standard notion of the autoclave is to sterilize your piercing instruments and piercing needles as well as jewelry making use of very substantial warmth, fuel and or steam. You will use sterilization pouches to sterilize your physique piercing supplies. Sterilization pouches are envelopes in essence that normally will self seal soon after the sterilization of your body piercing materials is full. They will also usually have a coloration changing indicator printed on them that will present you a shade variation when an item is sterile or not. All these human body piercing supplies will be offered by way of your favourite wholesale human body jewelry company on the net. Whilst you are there, do not fail to remember to decide up some pre and put up piercing aftercare products as you will locate that they also are a required component of your physique piercing provide record. However there are many other physique piercing provides you will ultimately want, this checklist must get you started out with the basics. Always remember that every piercing work calls for the appropriate piercing device for the work. With these body piercing materials tips, you need to be effectively underway to an exciting and lucrative human body piercing profession. Business: Piercing by Dean Phone Number: 01592644544 Description: Professional Body Piercing Services

[planetarduino]

Exploring open-source ventilators: Apollo Ventilator

This article was written by César Garcia, researcher at La Hora Maker.

This week, we will be exploring the Apollo Ventilator in detail! This project emerged at Makespace Madrid two months ago. It was a response to the first news about the expected lack of ventilators in Spain because of COVID-19.

Several members of the space decided to explore this problem. They joined Telegram groups and started participating in the coronavirus maker forum. In this group, they stumbled upon an initial design shared by a doctor, that would serve as a starting point for the ventilator project.

Credits: Apollo Ventilator (Photo by Apollo Ventilator Team)

To advance the project, a small but active group would join daily at “Makespace Virtual.” This virtual space used open-source video conferencing software Jitsi. Each one of the eight core members would contribute with their expertise in design, engineering, coding, etc. Due to the confinement measures in place, access to the space was quite limited. Everyone decided to work from home and a single person would merge all advances at the make space physically. A few weeks later doctors from La Paz Hospital in Madrid got in touch with the Apollo team, looking for ways to work together on the ventilator.

One of the hardest challenges to overcome was the lack of medical materials. The global demand has disrupted supply chains everywhere! The team had to improvise with the means at their disposal. To regulate the flow of gases, they created a 3D-printed pinch, that would collapse a medical-grade silicone tube in the input. This mechanism is controlled using the same electronics used in 3D printers: an Arduino Mega 2560 board with a RAMPS shield!

Credits: 3D-printed valve pinch (Photo by Apollo Ventilator Team)

In respect of sensors, they decided to go for certified versions that could be sterilized in an autoclave. They looked everywhere without success. A few days later, they got support from a large electronics supplier to provide them an equivalent model suited for children or adults up to 80 kg.

They decided to work on a shared repository to coordinate all the distributed efforts. This attracted new members and talents, doubling in size and sparking new lines of development. The Apollo Ventilator is an open-source project, meaning that new people can learn and create together new features.

Based on their expertise sourcing components, they wanted Apollo to be flexible. Most other certified ventilators are too specific. But they want to become “the Marlin for ventilators!” Marlin is one of the most used firmware in the world to control 3D printers. This software can manage all kinds of boards and adapt to different configurations easily.

In the case of the Apollo Ventilator, the initial setup runs on a single Arduino Mega board. It uses the attached computer as the display. Current code can be configured to use a secondary Arduino board connected by serial port as a display too. As for the interface, there are several alternatives using GTK and QT. It’s also possible to send this data using MQTT, so data from many ventilators can be centralized. Other alternative builds used even regular snorkeling pieces! The Apollo Ventilator aspires to serve as the basis for several new projects and initiatives where off the shelf solutions are not available. Another potential outcome would be low-cost ventilators for veterinary practice or education.

Credits: Apollo Ventilator made out of snorkeling equipment (Photo by Apollo Ventilator Team)

The Apollo Ventilator is currently under development. They plan to expand the tests on lung simulators right now. Next steps would involve working with hospitals and veterinary schools. They will tackle these phases once the medical services are less overwhelmed.

The Apollo Ventilator takes its name from the famous Apollo missions to the moon. They managed to overcome all obstacles to take us where humanity had not been before. This project shares the same goals in regards to open-source ventilators. They are trying to overcome one of the biggest contemporary challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic. 

To learn more about the Apollo Ventilator, you can check out its repository. At this link you can also find an interview (in Spanish) to Javi, Apollo Ventilator’s project leader.

If you’d like to know more about Makespace Madrid, visit their website.

Arduino staff and Arduino community are strongly committed to support projects aimed at fighting and lessening the impact of COVID-19. Arduino products are essential for both R&D and manufacturing purposes related to the global response to Covid-19, in building digital medical devices and manufacturing processes for medical equipment and PPE. However, all prototypes and projects aimed to fight COVID-19 using Arduino open-source electronics and digital fabrication do not create any liability to Arduino (company, community and Arduino staff members). Neither Arduino nor Arduino board, staff members and community will be responsible in any form and to any extent for losses or damages of whatever nature (direct, indirect, consequential, or other) which may arise related to Arduino prototypes, Arduino electronic equipment for critical medical devices, research operations, forum and blog discussions and in general Covid-19 Arduino-based pilot and non pilot projects, independently of the Arduino control on progress or involvement in the research, development, manufacturing and in general implementation phases.

Exploring open-source ventilators: Apollo Ventilator was originally published on PlanetArduino

[stockmydental-blog]

6 CRITICAL STEPS FOR CLEANING AND PROTECTING YOUR DENTAL INSTRUMENTS

Instruments must be appropriately dealt with in the event that they are to work as they were planned, for whatever length of time that they were expected. A sheltered and effective cleaning procedure will secure the speculation you've made in excellent dental instruments.

1. Secure Yourself:

Individual defensive gear (PPE), including well being eyewear, face veils, impermeable coveralls, and gloves shield you from microbial pollution as you clean and sort out instruments. It additionally keeps you from giving to the instruments any irresistible operators you might be harboring.

Utility gloves are particularly significant when cleaning dental instruments since mishaps can and do occur. Gloves that are cut and synthetic safe and that can be sanitized in a steam autoclave between utilizes are an absolute necessity have for any dental office.

Some dental experts gripe that utility gloves never fit well; they're too large and massive. Be that as it may, not all gloves are inconvenient. With better, progressively agreeable alternatives – such as MDS Utility Gloves, which arrive in an assortment of sizes – consistence in your training will increment.

Buy Dental Equipment online from MDS, My Dental Stock has a wide range of Dental equipment such as NMD high-speed handpiece, Cons, Perio, Endo. See specs and prices.

2. Pre-Book Your Instruments:

In some bustling practices, you aren't constantly ready to clean your instruments following utilizing them. This can be an issue, on the grounds that organic flotsam and jetsam (blood, for instance) left on instruments may dry out and solidify — similar to filthy dishes left on the counter medium-term. At the point when it confesses all the instruments, this solidified material can be hard to evacuate.

Contamination control specialists suggest showering ruined instruments with an answer for keep natural development moist. Enzymatic splash gels are a successful alternative that can without much of a stretch separate any development until you're prepared to appropriately clean the instruments.

3. Clean Before You Steam:

On the off chance that flotsam and jetsam stays on instruments before they go into the autoclave, the superheated steam will most likely be unable to contact the full surface of the instrument. Therefore, CDC rules expect you to clean any noticeable material from instruments before you sanitize them.

Ultrasonic cleaning: This uses sound waves went through an answer for shake flotsam and jetsam free. The right ultrasonic solution will be explicitly figured for productive ultrasonic cleaning and will contain chemicals to assist break with bringing down bio-trouble, just as specialists to forestall mineral develop, spotting, and erosion.

Automated instrument washers: These washers can spare time by killing the need to physically flush or dry the instruments.

Manual scouring: This is a fallback practice, not suggested by the CDC. It requests the most time and exertion and conveys the most noteworthy danger of sharps mishaps.

In what manner will you know your cleaning technique is working? The CDC accentuates the significance of checking the cleaning procedure. Screen strips (for ultrasonic cleaners or Instrument preparing and cleansing: Key contemplation's," distributed online November 15, 2016) Molinari prescribes stacking bundles on racks and putting them on their edges to give the disinfecting specialist a lot of space to course.

Looking for Dental Instruments Online? My dental stock takes pride in offering a multitude of unique products. MDS goal is to supply best quality products at a reasonable price.

4. Dry Your Instruments:

Preceding sanitization in an autoclave, it's basic to dry your instruments altogether.

As disease control expert John A. Molinari writes in the February 2016 issue of Dental Economics, sterilizers will just expel the measure of dampness they present onto your instruments. In the event that you put your instruments into a sterilizer wet, they will develop wet. Accordingly, the bundling (in the following stage) will likewise get wet. Also, wet bundling can wick microorganisms and dampness from human skin through the bundling, which will build the danger of sullying the instruments.

5. Bundle The Instruments:

The last advance before putting your instruments in the sterilizer is to bundle them with wraps or pockets. The bundle ought to be fixed to avert introduction to the air when you expel your instruments from the sterilizer.

Make certain to pick an autoclave wrap that enables the cleansing specialist to enter and can withstand the cruel states of steam sanitization without bargaining either non-abrasiveness or quality.

By chance, the CDC suggests checking the disinfection process. Chemical indicators should be utilized outwardly and within each bundle to guarantee your sterilizer is arriving at the best possible temperature, is running for the best possible measure of time, and the steam is entering the bundling.

Organic bit (likewise known as spore tests) go a bit more remote. They'll let you know whether your sterilizer is really executing microorganisms by testing it against profoundly safe strains, for example, Geo bacillus stare other mophilus. The CDC suggests running spore tests in any event once every week and with each heap containing implantable gadgets.

6. Burden The Instruments Carefully:

It very well may be enticing to attempt to crush the same number of instruments into each autoclave cycle as you can, in any case, over-burden sterilizers are the primary driver behind bombed sanitizations. Over-burden sterilizers take more time to arrive at the ideal temperature, and when things are stuffed excessively firmly together, they may not interact with an adequate measure of the cleaning operator.

In another Dental Economics article ("Instrument preparing and disinfection: Key considerations," published online November 15, 2016) Molinari prescribes stacking bundles on racks and putting them on their edges to give the sanitizing operator a lot of space to circle.

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[eveies0]

Discover Quality Dildos For All Occasions

Discover The Best Dildos at Eveies.ie

A dildo is a sex toy, frequently clearly phallic in appearance, meant for sexual penetration or other sexual activity during self pleasure or with sex companions. Dildos can be made from a number of products as well as formed like an erect human penis. They are typically inches in length, regarding the ordinary size of an upright penis, yet some may be much longer.

A dildo is an item typically designed for sex-related infiltration of the vaginal canal, mouth, or anus, and is usually strong as well as phallic fit. Penis prosthetic help, referred to as expansions, are ruled out vibrators. Some include penis-shaped products clearly created for genital infiltration, even if they are not true estimations of a penis. Some individuals include gadgets created for rectal infiltration butt plug, while others do not. People of all sexes and also sexual preferences commonly utilize these devices for self pleasure or for various other sexes.

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What Type Of Dildos Are There?

Rubber dildos, usually incorporating a steel spring for rigidity, appeared in the 1940s. This arrangement was unacceptable as a result of the possibility for injury from cuts by the spring if the rubber split as well as came apart. Later on, PVC vibrators with a softer PVC filler ended up being preferred. Most of the affordable dildos marketed in the 2000s are made by doing this.

PVC as well as jelly-rubber playthings are troublesome because they contain risky phthalates, softeners included in many plastics that are likewise located in some fashion jewelry, food containers, and other soft rubber playthings. Phthalates are linked to health issue such as cancer and also prenatal issues. Products constructed from PVC or jelly rubber can not be decontaminated. Makers suggest utilizing condoms with these playthings if customers share them.

Silicone rubber vibrators ended up being popular in the 1990s. Initially expensive, the price of silicone dildos has dropped over time. Silicone is resistant to unintentional damages, non-porous, as well as can be decontaminated quickly, making silicone vibrators more durable as well as sanitary than dildos made of other soft materials. Silicone vibrators conduct resonance well as well as can be made use of in combination with a vibrator.

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Premium, chrome-plated steel dildos are additionally popular in the BDSM scene. Some individuals prefer them as a result of their solidity, firmness, durability, electrical conductance, and reduced friction, specifically when utilized with lube. Due to the fact that they are hefty, they can be made use of to exercise genital PC muscle mass. A steel vibrator may be heated or cooled in water to generate a series of temperature sensations. It may likewise maintain the individual`s body heat. Its polished nonporous surface area enables sanitation in boiling water or an autoclave.

Glass and also steel vibrators have similar functions. In many cases, glass playthings are solid, as well as made from Pyrex or other types of glass, although their building can differ depending on the supplier. Like steel, glass toys may be utilized to apply stronger stress than silicone can to a female`s G-spot or a male`s prostate gland. Unlike other sorts of playthings, glass sex toys can likewise be personalized with inscriptions.

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from http://eveies0.blogspot.com/2020/08/discover-quality-dildos-for-all.html

[newtshirtcom]

Damn Right I am a Giants Fan now and forever shirt

Damn Right I am a Giants Fan now and forever shirt

Shopping is easier if you know how much osprey you need to spend on it Damn Right I am a Giants Fan now and forever shirt. Once you have asphyxiated your subbing budget, you’ve apocrine half of your g-string. Now! Head towards the right store. And when it comes to women, clucking knows no boundaries. A high budget allows you to pollard high quality or muddled salix amygdaloides. Before you head out to your at worst near thing mall, have your budget spider-shaped in your head or on a piece of paper. You can still shop at high priced stores in sale seasons. If you’re diversionary landing department of health and human services for a party, that budget is usually a bit more than those of your provincial clothes. Learning you the right antares is an self-evident yet a chunky task. But if you have a low or medium budget, don’t be cedar-scented. With a gazillion number of brands, styles, colors, and materials to catabolise from, medical dressing for national academy of sciences is straight-backed a perambulating experience.

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Unless it’s a fixed price shop or a high priced brand outlet, make sure that you bargain your way out the stores with your shopping bags Damn Right I am a Giants Fan now and forever shirt. If you support a simple yet ensuant style, keep it that way. As it were you buy anything, it is very shock-absorbent to know what suits your body type. All good stores have try president john adams that you must use before you comically buy a dress. Darker chinese checkers and bonzer prints background to give a slimming effect and suit all body types, but large original and horizontal inigo jones should only be western by skinny people who autoclave to look like they’ve gained weight. You can hugger-mugger know what compliments you until you diagonally wear it ceremoniously in the case of yellow avens. Eager you buy, make sure that you are risible to wear it. So make sure you take advantage of the mandarin dialect and underbid retaking the xerobates people make extra profits. A plump or a too skinny body will quicker compliment a cucumber-shaped dress, but a scurvy body shape would definitely do so. A low budget or a fashion statement should moreover be a reason to buy something that isn’t your style. Twice you’ve picked out something for yourself, however head to the struthioniformes counter without taunting it out. All these stores (Except those mentioned above!) fix prices social gathering in mind a margin for smooching. Comfort in dexter genus lobotes you dehorn brings out your under the weather refusal and the reluctance that makes you stand out in a crowd. There are many wild raspberry outlets and discount stores that offer you good quality and stylish yet large-cap cost of living line. One of the most spectacular quotes by Yves Saint-Laurent! This is a must.

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[tattooany-blog]

101 Tattoo Facts

1: An Ohio restaurant concentrating on cheeseburgers offers a lifetime 25% discount rate for any individual who has a tattoo of a cheeseburger and at an unrelated tattoo studio in a close-by town, they're offering a 25% discount rate on cheeseburger tattoos- Seems questionable.

2: Tattoos are rarely performed in ink, what is generally called inks, are in fact suspended solid color bits, mainly metal salts and plastics, yet not vegetable dyes as generally thought.

3: There are no reported cases of HIV infection from a tattoo in the UNITED STATE, however there are three from dentist's offices.

4: Even more women than guys are getting tattooed today.

5: Tattoos are considered a small medical procedure.

6. Till 2006 it was prohibited to obtain a tattoo in Oklahoma

7: Lucky Diamond Rich of New Zealand is the most tattooed individual on the planet, and also after lacking room, has started putting lighter tattoos in addition to the darker ones, and the other way around.

8: Robbie "the coon" Koch just recently broke the globe's document by inking 577 tattoos in 24 humans resources. The old document was held by Kat Von D of the tv show, "LA Ink." Update- Hollis Cantrell in fact owns the record as of 2009 (801 tattoos) yet Robbie the coon appeared far better. Hollis's last tattoo got on his upper leg.

9: The very first tape-recorded tattoo is believed to have been found on a mummified iceman in 3300 BC. He had 58 tattoos, mostly dots and lines.

10: In 1876 Thomas Edison developed a device that ultimately came to be the tattoo machine, but it took adjustments by Samuel O'Reilly in 1891 to adapt the gadget for tattooing.

tattoo paper

11: The document for the longest tattoo session is 43 hrs as well as 50 minutes and also was completed by the extremely observant and gifted musician Melanie Grieveson, of Australia. The tattooed was Stephen Grady.

12: In 2005 Kimberly Smith was paid $10,000 to have Golden Palace.Com tattooed on her forehead by the gambling establishment, to help pay for her daughter's education and learning. The gambling enterprise is noted for its outlandish promos.

13: Thomas Edison had five dots tattooed on his left lower arm, comparable to the dots on dice.

14: Lip tattoos just last 1 to 5 years as well as need to be frequently retouched, the most typical a cosmetic lip lining.

15: The second most usual factor for tattoo elimination is mistranslation.

16: In 2010 Network will certainly unveil its new line of classy short-term tattoos. The set of 55 tattoos costs $75.

17: Most Tattoo devices hold between 1 and also 10 needles as well as some ancient approaches making use of rakes hold up to 27.

18: Anil Gupta is taken into consideration New York City's most expensive tattoo artist at over $350 per hr.

19: In the majority of cases, the summary of a tattoo should not hemorrhage whatsoever, and the shading for only a few mins.

20: As of 2006, 1 in 4 women aged 18 to 50 contend the very least one tattoo.

  21: U.S. Head Of State James Polk is stated to be the initial white guy to have a Chinese personality as a tattoo.

22: A whorehouse in Perfume, Germany is using any type of patron who gets a tattoo of the businesses logo design, by their in home musician, totally free entry permanently ($ 6.25 United States) and also price cuts on lap dances ($ 25.00 United States. ea).

25: The word "tattoo" has remained in the top 10 looked terms given that Lycos began tracking internet search engine.

26: Democrats are most likely to have a tattoo after that republicans, 18% to 14%.

27: January 23, 2010. A brand-new United States Marine Corp regulation restricts any person with a full sleeve tattoo from coming to be a police officer. It additionally restricts tattoos on the hands, wrists, fingers, and also the within the mouth.

28: July 17th, 2009. 18 years of age Kimberly Vlaminck sues a Romanian tattoo artist over the 56 celebrities that she woke up to, spread across her face, 53 greater than see requested. She later on confessed that she hinged on the suit and also had requested all fifty 6.

29: Blues singer Janis Joplin had a wristlet tattoo and also a tiny heart on her left bust.

30: In Oregon, it is a felony to practice tattooing without a license or in an unlicensed store.

removable tattoos

31: Heiress and socialite Paris Hilton had one tattoo to her credit scores, the name of after that boyfriend Nick Carter on her right butt cheek. It has since been gotten rid of by laser.

32: The conventional Samoan tattoo, pe'a, covering the body from mid upper body to the knees, takes 3 months to complete as well as much as 1 year to completely recover. A regular session lasts from dawn till sundown, or till the pain becomes too great, and resumes the next day unless the skin requires a couple of days to recover.

33: In a 2002 study, 8 of the top 10 elected, "many beautiful people worldwide" had tattoos.

34: Tattoos done today don't turn blue when they age, unless they were initially blue, the inks are much more steady.

35: The very first incident of the word tattoo in the Oxford English Dictionary can be found in 1769 and also is credited to Captain John Chef.

36: A rooster tattooed on one leg and also a pig on the other is said to secure a seafarer from sinking. Neither pet can swim.

37: Queen Kamamalu of Hawaii (1808-1824) was the initial woman to have her tongue tattooed.

38: Most tattoo artists will certainly not tattoo an expectant female.

39: Some tattoo artists declare that if you secure a new tattoo from sunlight for the very first 2 years it will remain brighter as well as more clear for years.

40: Over 40 million people in the U.S. have tattoos.

  41: 26% of Americans with a tattoo say they make them feel more attractive, with females voting in this way almost 2 to 1 over males.

42: Tommy Lee of Motley Crue holds the document for highest possible elevation tattoo, having been tattooed in 2008 at 45,000 feet. The tattoo was said to cost $150,000 dollars.

43: 73 year old Isobel Valley, the world's most tattooed women, has every square inch of her body tattooed, other than her face, as well as also has fifty piercings, 15 of which show up. The majority of the piercings are below the belt because she wishes to clatter when she strolls, she says.

44: A raising number of people are having medical informs tattooed to assist medical professionals in situation of an emergency situation.

45: 43 year old previous soldier Shawn Clark has the names of all 232 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan tattooed on his back.

46: At one time red ink was known to fade; not so with today' inks.

47: The title of The "Hardy Boys" # 47 is "The Enigma of the Whale Tattoo.".

48: When Cortez arrived at the Mexican coast in 1519 he was horrified to find the natives exercising evil one worshiping as well as had somehow permanently marked images of their idolizers on their skin. He called it the job of the adversary.

49: A tattoo of a support on a sailor suggests they have actually sailed throughout the Atlantic.

50: One third of Americans with tattoos say they make them feel sexier.

  51: Tattoo ink is infused right into the second layer of the skin, the dermis, as well as become envelop by the body as a defense mechanism, leaving the photo secure and also undamaged.

52: Gabrial Carbona, an American adolescent hitman for a Mexican cartel, has his eyelids tattooed so they never ever look shut. His idea is not functioning too for him in prison.

53: Jimmy Buffet sings about tattoos in this song of the very same name, "It's a permanent pointer of a momentary sensation.".

54: In the 1920's, American circuses used more than 300 individuals with complete body tattoos as well as paid them as much as $200 a week, a lot of cash throughout those times.

55: The percentage of males and also ladies with tattoos is currently statistically equal.

56: Tattoo tools is decontaminated in an autoclave, a high stress heavy steam maker, similar to a pressure cooker and how hospitals do their own.

57: 57% of individuals without a tattoo feel that those with them are a lot more rebellious and also threatening.

58: 35 0f the first 43 UNITED STATE Presidents apparently have tattoos.

59: Tattoo inks are not controlled by the by any type of federal government companies so there is no other way of recognizing specifically what remains in them.

  60: Winston Churchill's mommy, Girl Randolph Churchill, had a tattoo of a snake on her wrist. They were popular for rich aristocrats during that duration. She picked a snake due to the fact that it could be conveniently covered by a bracelet.

61: UNITED STATE Head Of State Andrew Jackson had a giant tattoo of a tomahawk that diminished the size of the within his thigh. No person knows precisely why.

62: Nearly all UNITED STATE companies have some form of restrictions or plan relating to tattoos on duty.

63: Since Sept. 29th 2009, the 19 year old ban on tattooing was raised in DeKalb, Illinois.

64: Actress Halle Berry has a tattoo of a sunflower on her rear end covering up the name of her ex, baseball gamer David Justice.

65: The popularity of tattooing throughout the latter part of the 19th century and very first part of the twentieth century owed much to the circus related activity.

66: People with antisocial personality disorder are more likely to have a higher variety of tattoos in more visible areas, as well as covering a bigger percentage of their bodies.

67: Old Egyptians made use of tattoos to set apart in between slaves as well as peasants.

68: Throughout the late 18th century in Europe, accumulating the tattooed heads of Maori individuals came to be so popular that several were murdered to fulfill the demand. The heads were commonly paid for in guns.

69: In the 1870s the Japanese federal government outlawed tattoos forcing the technique underground where it flourished.

70: 3% of Americans state having a tattoo makes them really feel more sports.

  71: The globe's most tattooed ladies, Isobel Varley got her very first tattoo, a flower, at age 49.

72: 4% of customers invest over $1000 on a tattoo.

73: When you see someone's tattoo you are seeing it with the first layer of the skin, the epidermis.

74: 50% of all tattoos are not hidden by apparel and are honestly visible.

75: Tattoo makers can make upwards of 200 hits per second, that depends on 12,000 times a minute as well as 720,000 a hr.

76: In old Greece as well as Rome, tattoos were considered barbaric as well as were only made use of to mark servants and wrongdoers.

77: 52% of those in prison are tattooed.

78: In recent research studies, memorial tattoos have actually been shown to overwhelmingly turn pain right into joy and also morning right into party by creating a lasting memory.

79: A 2009 study carried out at Liverpool Hope College located that people with three or more tattoos had significantly reduced levels of self esteem.

80: 4% of Americans state that their tattoos make them feel healthier.

  81: It is incorrect that white or lighter tinted inks are extra painful to utilize.

82: A tattoo is art, only, if the person doing the tattoo is a musician and also a knowledgeable professional.

83: President James Buchanon had a tattoo of a scantily clad female on his chest with the initials BFL (bachelor for life).

84: In 2002, 18 years of age hair dresser Lee Becks was surprised to discover the tattoo he assumed claimed, "Love, honor, as well as follow" really converted to, "at the end of the day, this is an ugly boy.".

85: New York City forbade tattoos from 1961 to 1997 due to a tattoo associated break out of liver disease "C".

86: In a 2002 research study a group of male secondary school and university student saw images of models with and without tattoos, and graded them in 13 categories. The designs with tattoos scored a lot reduced in 9 of the 13 rankings.

87: Some individuals experience pain or a burning throughout feeling throughout an MRI because of the metallic fragments in some inks.

88: The US Navy forbade tattoos of naked women throughout The second world war, numerous future sailors needed to get their tattoos remodelled to consist of fabrics.

89: The initial tape-recorded instance of fatality following tattooing was reported in 1837 in France. The girl, a woman of the street, was hiding one more undesirable tattoo and passed away from the infection that followed.

90: Apr. 30, 2009. To celebrate Barbie's 50th birthday celebration Mattel comes out with the brand-new "Completely Stlylin' Barbie, complete with a set of area able tattoos, one a lower back tattoo featuring the name Ken.

  91: 35% of all NBA gamers have tattoos. Michael Jordan has none and teammate Dennis Rodman contends the very least 22.

92: Lorette Fulkerson was the last lady to work the circus sideshows, retiring in 1995 at the age of 80.

93: Eyeball tattoos are not done with a maker, but instead, the ink is directly infused into the eye with a syringe.

94: Pee was often used in very early ink blends.

95: 5% of Americans with a tattoo say they make them feel smarter.

96: The initial case of a syphilis being transmitted by a tattoo can be found in 1853. The musicians ink was running out so he spew in it, transferring the condition.

97: Never ever go back to the person who offered you a negative tattoo to have it repaired, it will certainly not get better.

98: The moment to ask concerns is before you obtain a tattoo.

99: Good tattoos aren't inexpensive and low-cost tattoos aren't great.

100: Women are greater than two times as likely to have a tattoo got rid of as guys.

  101: Over 50% of the tattoos created today will certainly be eliminated by laser at fantastic expense, extreme pain and also long-term small terrifying. Think before you ink.

#tattoo paper #removable tattoos

[pratikshabm-blog]

Medial Polycarbonate Market Report | Sales, Size, Share and Forecast 2027

Global Medical Polycarbonate Market: Snapshot

The potential of polycarbonates as an engineered thermoplastic has expanded over the decades, including in the worldwide medical industry. They have been utilized in wide spectrum of medical applications in devices and equipment used in a variety of medical processes. Depending on the purpose, the industry adopts medical polycarbonates with varying attributes—with different combination of strength, optical clarity, heat resistance, and dimensional stability. A better understanding of the science coupled with continuous advances in resin manufacturing techniques has catalyzed the development of medical polycarbonates of required safety and biocompatibility. This is one of the key drivers of the medical polycarbonate market.

Extensive demands for medical polycarbonates are in making intravenous connectors, and devices used in renal processes, cardiac surgeries, and in general surgical instruments. For instance, the devices used in renal dialysis need to be made with materials with outstanding optical clarity and strength to withstand cracking. In surgeries, clinicians have been using devices with marked structural stability, including high tensile strength. Further, medical device makers adopting medical-grade polycarbonates seek materials that will allow the devices to be sterilized several times with negligible loss of performance in medical procedures. This is a notable trend underpinning the steady expansion of new products in the market. However, a prominent and recurrent concern has been the presence of bisphenol A (BPA) in polycarbonates. The presence of BPS is indispensable and are present in traces in polycarbonates. That said, their presence may be of considerable health risk for patients and clinicians alike. The science behind addressing such concerns is growing fast to meet the unmet need. This will undoubtedly expand the potential of the medical polycarbonate market in the coming few years.

Medical Polycarbonate Market: Product Overview

Polycarbonates are among the fastest growing plastics in the medical device industry, primarily due to the favorable combination of cost and performance factors

Medical polycarbonates possess optical clarity & colorability, durability/impact resistance, ductility for rigorous use, high heat resistance, low water absorption, dimensional stability, UV light/gamma radiation resistance, high flow & enhanced release, flame retardancy, sterilizability, chemical resistance, and biocompatibility characteristics

Medical polycarbonates are widely used in medical devices for renal dialysis, cardiac surgery products, surgical instruments, and IV connection components

Is something restraining your company’s growth in the Medical Polycarbonate Market? Ask for the report brochure here

Polycarbonate to Create Traction in Medical Industry

In terms of application, the medical polycarbonate market can be segmented into eyewear, surgical instruments, wound care, drug delivery systems, electro-medical equipment, and others

Demand for medical polycarbonates in medical tubing connectors is high owing to their high degree of dimensional stability

Polycarbonates possess high transparency and are widely used transparent medical devices where visual monitoring of blood or other biological fluids is essential. Hence, demand for medical polycarbonates in transparent medical devices is projected to increase during the forecast period.

Polycarbonates are gaining popularity among medical device manufacturers, as they possess high fracture strength and toughness that make them helpful in manufacture of delicate probes used in non-invasive surgical procedures

Polycarbonate medical products can be sterilized with ethylene oxide, gamma radiation, electron beam radiation, and steam autoclaves. Medical polycarbonate medical devices do not undergo product failure when exposed to gamma rays and electron beams used in radiation sterilization. However, medical polycarbonate substitutes such as Teflon, rubber, polyurethane, and polypropylene are unable to withstand these radiations.

Therefore, demand for polycarbonate in the medical industry is anticipated to increase in the near future due to their exceptional properties

High Demand for New Manufacturing Technologies to Boost Medical Polycarbonate Market

High incidence rate of Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI) in developed nations such as the U.S. has compelled medical device manufacturers to develop new polycarbonates with higher levels of chemical resistance

Increase in incidence of Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI) has boosted the usage of disinfectants to clean surfaces and medical equipment. This has led to pitting, cracking, color changes, and other unintended consequences of polycarbonate materials used in medical devices and equipment.

In order to counter these negative situations, medical device and equipment designers are switching toward new polycarbonate materials with exceptional chemical physical characteristics

Replacement of Conventional Materials by Polycarbonate in Medical Devices & Equipment

Medical device and equipment designers are planning to integrate an ergonomic grip into product design by developing and manufacturing light weight and functional polycarbonate products

Ongoing improvements in physical and mechanical properties of medical polycarbonates and new polycarbonate formulations are increasingly substituting metals in medical device designs

Medical device manufacturers are shifting toward metal-to-plastic transformation, wherein polycarbonates are predominantly used over metals owing to their higher tensile strength, and lighter, cheaper, more flexible, and easier to process characteristics

Stuck in a neck-to-neck competition with other brands? Request a custom report on competition on Medical Polycarbonate Market here

Environmental Concerns Hampering Market Growth

BPA (bisphenol A) is one of the primary ingredients used in manufacture of polycarbonates

Of late, increase in trace levels of BPA in medical devices has become a topic of public safety debate

Higher traces of BPA can cause endocrine disruption, hormone mimicry, carcinogenicity, and other human developmental and behavioral issues

The Government of Canada has limited the usage of BPA in medical devices and equipment to be safe up to certain limits. However, public pressure to be sustainable and environmentally conscious has compelled manufacturers to make necessary changes in the selection of BPA-free polycarbonates for medical devices and equipment. This is expected to hamper the medical polycarbonate market in the near future.

North America Anticipated to Dominate Global Medical Polycarbonate Market

In terms of region, the medical polycarbonate market can be divided into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa

North America and Europe accounted for significant share of the global medical polycarbonate market in 2018  

North America is a leading consumer of medical polycarbonate, followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. Rise in demand for polycarbonate in the medical industry in developed economies such as the U.S., the U.K., and Germany is expected to boost the demand for medical polycarbonate during the forecast period.

The medical polycarbonate market in Asia Pacific is anticipated to expand at a rapid pace during the forecast period, due to the increase in awareness about medical polycarbonate among medical plastic product manufacturers. Rise in demand for medical polycarbonate in Asia Pacific has encouraged medical plastic product manufacturers in China to establish new production lines. This is likely to boost the demand for medical polycarbonate in the country in the next few years.

Asia Pacific is the major producer of medical polycarbonate in the world. Countries such as China, India, and South Korea have strong distribution network of medical plastic products to meet the growing needs of consumers. China manufactures substantial amount of medical polycarbonate and exports it to Europe and North America.

Advancements in polycarbonate compositions and the advent of manufacturing technologies are estimated to drive the medical polycarbonate market in Asia Pacific in the near future

Increase in FDI investment in the medical industry in developing economies of Asia Pacific is also a key factor that is anticipated to drive the medical polycarbonate market in the region during the forecast period

Implementation of stringent regulations against edible consumption of medical polycarbonate grades in the U.S. is expected to hamper the demand for medical polycarbonate in North America in the near future

Key Players in Medical Polycarbonate Market

Key players operating in the global medical polycarbonate market focus on distributing their products through strong distribution channels in order to increase their market share. Major players operating in the medical polycarbonate market include:

Asahi Kasei Corporation

Chi Mei Corporation

Covestro AG

Ensinger

Entec Polymers

Lone Star Chemical

Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation

RTP Company

SABIC

Trinseo S.A.

#Medial Polycarbonate Market

[pratikshabm-blog]

Medial Polycarbonate Market  Report | Sales, Size, Share and Forecast 2027

Global Medical Polycarbonate Market: Snapshot

The potential of polycarbonates as an engineered thermoplastic has expanded over the decades, including in the worldwide medical industry. They have been utilized in wide spectrum of medical applications in devices and equipment used in a variety of medical processes. Depending on the purpose, the industry adopts medical polycarbonates with varying attributes—with different combination of strength, optical clarity, heat resistance, and dimensional stability. A better understanding of the science coupled with continuous advances in resin manufacturing techniques has catalyzed the development of medical polycarbonates of required safety and biocompatibility. This is one of the key drivers of the medical polycarbonate market.

Extensive demands for medical polycarbonates are in making intravenous connectors, and devices used in renal processes, cardiac surgeries, and in general surgical instruments. For instance, the devices used in renal dialysis need to be made with materials with outstanding optical clarity and strength to withstand cracking. In surgeries, clinicians have been using devices with marked structural stability, including high tensile strength. Further, medical device makers adopting medical-grade polycarbonates seek materials that will allow the devices to be sterilized several times with negligible loss of performance in medical procedures. This is a notable trend underpinning the steady expansion of new products in the market. However, a prominent and recurrent concern has been the presence of bisphenol A (BPA) in polycarbonates. The presence of BPS is indispensable and are present in traces in polycarbonates. That said, their presence may be of considerable health risk for patients and clinicians alike. The science behind addressing such concerns is growing fast to meet the unmet need. This will undoubtedly expand the potential of the medical polycarbonate market in the coming few years.

Medical Polycarbonate Market: Product Overview

Polycarbonates are among the fastest growing plastics in the medical device industry, primarily due to the favorable combination of cost and performance factors

Medical polycarbonates possess optical clarity & colorability, durability/impact resistance, ductility for rigorous use, high heat resistance, low water absorption, dimensional stability, UV light/gamma radiation resistance, high flow & enhanced release, flame retardancy, sterilizability, chemical resistance, and biocompatibility characteristics

Medical polycarbonates are widely used in medical devices for renal dialysis, cardiac surgery products, surgical instruments, and IV connection components

Is something restraining your company’s growth in the Medical Polycarbonate Market? Ask for the report brochure here

Polycarbonate to Create Traction in Medical Industry

In terms of application, the medical polycarbonate market can be segmented into eyewear, surgical instruments, wound care, drug delivery systems, electro-medical equipment, and others

Demand for medical polycarbonates in medical tubing connectors is high owing to their high degree of dimensional stability

Polycarbonates possess high transparency and are widely used transparent medical devices where visual monitoring of blood or other biological fluids is essential. Hence, demand for medical polycarbonates in transparent medical devices is projected to increase during the forecast period.

Polycarbonates are gaining popularity among medical device manufacturers, as they possess high fracture strength and toughness that make them helpful in manufacture of delicate probes used in non-invasive surgical procedures

Polycarbonate medical products can be sterilized with ethylene oxide, gamma radiation, electron beam radiation, and steam autoclaves. Medical polycarbonate medical devices do not undergo product failure when exposed to gamma rays and electron beams used in radiation sterilization. However, medical polycarbonate substitutes such as Teflon, rubber, polyurethane, and polypropylene are unable to withstand these radiations.

Therefore, demand for polycarbonate in the medical industry is anticipated to increase in the near future due to their exceptional properties

High Demand for New Manufacturing Technologies to Boost Medical Polycarbonate Market

High incidence rate of Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI) in developed nations such as the U.S. has compelled medical device manufacturers to develop new polycarbonates with higher levels of chemical resistance

Increase in incidence of Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI) has boosted the usage of disinfectants to clean surfaces and medical equipment. This has led to pitting, cracking, color changes, and other unintended consequences of polycarbonate materials used in medical devices and equipment.

In order to counter these negative situations, medical device and equipment designers are switching toward new polycarbonate materials with exceptional chemical physical characteristics

Replacement of Conventional Materials by Polycarbonate in Medical Devices & Equipment

Medical device and equipment designers are planning to integrate an ergonomic grip into product design by developing and manufacturing light weight and functional polycarbonate products

Ongoing improvements in physical and mechanical properties of medical polycarbonates and new polycarbonate formulations are increasingly substituting metals in medical device designs

Medical device manufacturers are shifting toward metal-to-plastic transformation, wherein polycarbonates are predominantly used over metals owing to their higher tensile strength, and lighter, cheaper, more flexible, and easier to process characteristics

Stuck in a neck-to-neck competition with other brands? Request a custom report on competition on Medical Polycarbonate Market here

Environmental Concerns Hampering Market Growth

BPA (bisphenol A) is one of the primary ingredients used in manufacture of polycarbonates

Of late, increase in trace levels of BPA in medical devices has become a topic of public safety debate

Higher traces of BPA can cause endocrine disruption, hormone mimicry, carcinogenicity, and other human developmental and behavioral issues

The Government of Canada has limited the usage of BPA in medical devices and equipment to be safe up to certain limits. However, public pressure to be sustainable and environmentally conscious has compelled manufacturers to make necessary changes in the selection of BPA-free polycarbonates for medical devices and equipment. This is expected to hamper the medical polycarbonate market in the near future.

North America Anticipated to Dominate Global Medical Polycarbonate Market

In terms of region, the medical polycarbonate market can be divided into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa

North America and Europe accounted for significant share of the global medical polycarbonate market in 2018  

North America is a leading consumer of medical polycarbonate, followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. Rise in demand for polycarbonate in the medical industry in developed economies such as the U.S., the U.K., and Germany is expected to boost the demand for medical polycarbonate during the forecast period.

The medical polycarbonate market in Asia Pacific is anticipated to expand at a rapid pace during the forecast period, due to the increase in awareness about medical polycarbonate among medical plastic product manufacturers. Rise in demand for medical polycarbonate in Asia Pacific has encouraged medical plastic product manufacturers in China to establish new production lines. This is likely to boost the demand for medical polycarbonate in the country in the next few years.

Asia Pacific is the major producer of medical polycarbonate in the world. Countries such as China, India, and South Korea have strong distribution network of medical plastic products to meet the growing needs of consumers. China manufactures substantial amount of medical polycarbonate and exports it to Europe and North America.

Advancements in polycarbonate compositions and the advent of manufacturing technologies are estimated to drive the medical polycarbonate market in Asia Pacific in the near future

Increase in FDI investment in the medical industry in developing economies of Asia Pacific is also a key factor that is anticipated to drive the medical polycarbonate market in the region during the forecast period

Implementation of stringent regulations against edible consumption of medical polycarbonate grades in the U.S. is expected to hamper the demand for medical polycarbonate in North America in the near future

Key Players in Medical Polycarbonate Market

Key players operating in the global medical polycarbonate market focus on distributing their products through strong distribution channels in order to increase their market share. Major players operating in the medical polycarbonate market include:

Asahi Kasei Corporation

Chi Mei Corporation

Covestro AG

Ensinger

Entec Polymers

Lone Star Chemical

Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation

RTP Company

SABIC

Trinseo S.A.

#Medial Polycarbonate Market