Ranajay Banerjee

Tree rings reveal how short a human life Is compared to nature’s endless timeline ⏳🌴

I don't think people understand the gravity of the situation as the UN is preparing for possible nuclear weapon use in Iran. This is a picture of Tehran. For you uneducated, untraveled, never-served, warhawks licking your chops at the thought of bombing it. It's not some low population desert. There are families, children, family pets. Regular working class people with dreams. You're sick to want war. Tehran is a city of nearly 10,000,000 people. Imagine nuking Washington, Berlin, Paris, London, or beyond, bombed with nuclear weapons. I gave up my diplomatic career to leak this information. I suspended my duties so as not to be part of or a witness to this crime against humanity, in an attempt to prevent a nuclear winter before it is too late. Yesterday, nearly ten million people protested “No Kings” in the United States. The possibility of the use of nuclear weapons must be taken very seriously. It's dangerous. Act now. Spread this message worldwide. Take the streets. Protest for our humanity and future. Only the people can stop it. History will remember us.

Laporta should double the salary of our new media team 💙❤️💙❤️💙❤️

A man in Sydney just built a personalized cancer vaccine for his dying dog. Using AI. With no background in biology. Paul Conyngham adopted Rosie, a staffy-Shar Pei cross, from a shelter in 2019. She’s been with him through some of the worst stretches of his life. “She’s my best mate,” he says. In 2024, Rosie got diagnosed with mast cell cancer, the most common skin cancer in dogs. He threw everything at it. Surgery. Chemo. Immunotherapy. The tumors slowed down but wouldn’t shrink. Vets gave her one to six months. Conyngham works in AI and data science. So he did what he knows. He opened ChatGPT and started asking it what else was possible. That conversation led him somewhere wild. He got Rosie’s tumor sequenced at UNSW’s Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, basically converting her cancer from tissue into raw data. Then he ran that data through AlphaFold, a Google AI tool that predicts the 3D shape of proteins (it won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024). He used it to pinpoint the exact mutations driving the cancer and match them to drugs. A genomics professor at UNSW was, in his own words, “gobsmacked” that a guy with zero biology training had pulled together a complete analysis. And then the really hard part started. Not the science. The paperwork. You can’t just create a vaccine and inject your dog in Australia. He spent 3 months writing a 100-page ethics application, two hours every night after work, just to get permission to treat his own pet. The red tape was harder than the actual drug design. Once he cleared that, he connected with Páll Thordarson, director of the UNSW RNA Institute, who built a custom mRNA vaccine (same tech behind the COVID shots) from Conyngham’s data. Sequencing to finished vaccine: less than two months. Conyngham drove 10 hours to the lab with Rosie for her first injection in December. Within a month, the tumor on her leg, roughly tennis ball sized, shrank by up to 75%. Her coat got glossier. She started acting like herself again. The treating vet called it “magical.” Conyngham is now sequencing a second tumor that didn’t respond to the first vaccine, trying to figure out why it’s resistant. The part that keeps rattling around in my head: Moderna and Merck are running billion-dollar Phase 3 trials on a human version of the exact same idea. Their vaccine, mRNA-4157, sequences a patient’s tumor, identifies mutations, and builds a custom vaccine to teach the immune system to attack that specific cancer. Five-year data shows it cut melanoma recurrence by 49%. Expected cost per patient when approved: $100,000–$300,000. Expected approval: around 2027. Over 120 similar trials are running worldwide right now. Conyngham did it for tens of thousands of dollars with free AI tools and university lab access. The tools to build personalized medicine already exist. The bottleneck is a regulatory system still calibrated for a world where designing a treatment took a decade, not eight weeks.

These Laporta quotes have got my head on mars. What on earth….