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bweasels.bsky.social
Professional biologist, amateur cryptozoologist trying to see if vampires defy the laws of physics #OTPV = On the Thermodynamic Plausibility of Vampires a.k.a a way to burn time instead of doom scrolling
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#OTPV - immortality: I kinda felt like the time till tumor formation from the previous paper felt a little bit long, so I asked around my dept. for foundational papers in this realm. One of these seemed quite elegant (www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...)

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

#OTPV - immortality: the same paper (see below) estimates 1e7 cell divisions before the background mut rate produces a cancer. Given a division time of 24 hours, our vamp would live for 27k years before getting a mutation. This means that our vamp could theoretically b immortal if they avoid damage

submitted 31 days ago • 1 comment

#OTPV - immortality: A paper estimating carcinogenesis shows that overall mutational burden is not correlated with patient age at onset of cancer - ie a vamp’s chance of cancer comes from repetitive damage (ie chewing on asbestos flakes) instead of the background rate of mistakes

submitted 31 days ago • 1 comment

#OTPV - Immortality: I was thinking about why cells can’t reproduce infinitely… except they can. Arguably the first extant cell has been dividing for millions of years (ie immortal), just not in the same highly specialized ultra low entropy way. But maybe I’m just getting too batty with it.

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

OTPV - Immortality/Why are Vampires not cancer blobs?: If there are about 100 oncogenes and each gene is 10 kbp long, then 5% of random mutations in each generation would be in an oncogene. Ofc with degenerate codons and fitness cost, the # of those mutations that do anything is much smaller

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

On the Thermodynamic Plausibility of Vampires (OTPV): The background mutation rate of the human genome is ~2.5x10^-8 mutations per nucleotide. Given two copies of the genome that’s ~150 mutations per division. Idk how many cell divisions there are per human life span… I think I need a bibliography

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

On the Thermodynamic Plausibility of Vampires: eternal life seems difficult given background mutation rate and telomere shortening… overexpression of the hTERT gene could answer one of these, but it also would protect cancer cells, and we know vampires are not all cancer riddled blobs

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments